Few weeks ago, Istanbul hosted One Love Music Festival, featuring some artists that I love such as Royksopp and Tricky. Just in case the tickets may run out, I decided to buy them in advance. It turns out that I have do this through Biletix, a ticketmaster company which handles ticketing for almost all prominent Turkish entertainment events.

After spending 2 hours at the Biletix box office and on the phone with their call center, I came home without any tickets. It turns out that “the smart ones” who designed the CRM systems of Biletix made it so that one can’t buy a ticket using a credit card that lacks a “smart-chip”!?!?

Biletix call center claims that all credit cards must have these smart-chips – they claim there’s a Turkish legislation about it. I explained that I recently moved back to Turkey from US, and there is no such legislation in USA — perhaps in many other countries, too. Being a company that controls ticket sales for all prominent events in Istanbul, do you have the luxury to deny selling tickets to foreigners?

Everyone makes mistakes. No system can be perfect. Thus, when you’re building a system, you build convenient feedback mechanisms for users, so that you can continually improve the system. Furthermore, you encourage users to provide feedback (i.e. Tell us about your experience to win X). But it seems that those who created the systems of Biletix left no room for feedback.

You cannot talk to a “supervisor” on the call center. Agents claim that there is no supervisor. Also, the only way to file a complaint is writing an email to them. Bottom line —why should I bother to write a lenghty email when doing so will do me no good??

During my calls to Biletix, I experienced 3 dropped calls. Researching the company online, I found out that this is very common, in addition to frequent downtimes on their website. On eksisozluk and sikayetvar, two popular websites where Turks commonly talk about their negative customer experiences, I found hundreths of pages of complaints about Biletix: Agents hanging up on customers, uninformed customers about changed event times, not returning fees for the cancelled events… You name it!

Especially, sikayetvar.com is a formal venue to file product complaints and it lets companies to publicly respond to and address the complaints. Being a company that highly (!) values the feedback and satisfaction of their customers, Biletix customer service seemed to either ignore the complaints, or respond with a standard message that states the “customer has been informed with a letter”. I hope those letters included the good news of the complaint resolution!

So, how not to manage customer relationships? While designing your CRM software, come up with stupid requirements (i.e. smart-chips needed to process CC). Disregard peak-times while determining your hardware capacity. Create no means of feedback at the call center. When the customers reach out to you with feedback, don’t listen. Good job Biletix, apperently you have everything in action! (Ah, by the way, eventually a friend had bought the tickets for me! )