Member Offer: My Esso Card

Beats me how new orders are being placed for essocards. This is what you get when you click the link under members offers on the club site ... 

Having been there, your team quickly become embroiled on the inward facing activities and forget the outward facing. 

One of the organisations I worked at had a well documented and well rehearsed major incident plan, which included external communications - but I suspect that PK are too new and too inexperienced, and are simply drowning in the day-to-day issues.

One the URL issue, I notice that if I type in myessocard.com it goes to a dead end, but if I type in www.myessocard.com it redirects - that looks like they've only got a pretty inexperienced person doing the URL config work.

I suspect that there is some legal discussion going on between PK and Esso.  I suspect that PK have agreed to cease the myessocard website temporarily, but are hopeful of getting it back up again - it is a valuable part of their business offer (making them seem bigger/better connected - just look at the number of people in this discussion who think they are dealing with Esso) so they would be reluctant to abandon it.  The web redirect would be fine - if they'd configured it completely.

One would have hoped that when it was realised thwt call handlers couldn't handle and that many complaints were similar that a better effort to get info out would have been made

Oh I completely agree.  But many technical and admin people tend to overlook the need - instead they get fixated on "it'll be be fine if we fix this one thing". 

On major rollouts I would have a communications team on standby - but hope I didn't need them.

There is also of course the not so minor thing of an apparent change in the T&C's without informing anyone. Surely something like that should be addressed as a priority.

I suppose whether that is a significant issue depends on whether those previously signed up are still covered by the previous T&Cs. But yes, given the lack of apparent communications changed T&Cs may well have been applied without agreement to those signed up. Time may tell.

It is the lack of comunications from any  organistion  that causes more bad publicity, than normally anything else even on minor problems 

Not to mention the double payment issue. Surely that is paramount?

Who cares, really, about how the whole program should have been handled. It’s the here and now and the future that matters for the unfortunate folk affected and speculation by some isn’t going to achieve anything. 

 PS. Don't forget that social media creates echo chambers of opinion.  For example, there are a number of people on here who have been double charged.  We don't know if that's 0.01% of cards, or 10%.

As outsiders it is hard to work out if the service is fundamentally sound, but having some teething issues.  Or whether its unstable with software that will never be reliable.  It can even be hard to work that out when you're in the centre of it too.  Lots of internal people will have agendas and opinions.  You have to try to prioritise fixing the issues, looking at the bigger picture, bringing in temp staff to help, getting extra telephone lines if necessary, communicating etc.

See my previous post, WDB. The whys and wherefores matter not. It’s what happens now that counts.