I tried to buy my ticket back home this morning on Malaysia Airlines, to no avail.
The reason was as I proceeded to the payment process, the website suddenly encountered an error.
"Please contact web administrator," said the notice.
How on earth(internet) am I supposed to contact the web administrator. I know that error has been well used for a long time, but maybe perhaps they can change it into something more informative?
Such as, "there is an error no 99XXX, please email support at info@mas.com" or something to that extent.
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| 5 Stars don't translate into profit if customers can't buy ticket, right? |
I vented my frustration on twitter, where a conversation ensued with a friend of mine. I compared my experience booking with MAS to buying tickets with Emirates. We agreed that Emirates has a better web service, 'smooth experience' as according to my friend.
MAS has improved its marketing but that itself is not enough. In the era of online shopping - cewaaah...but no seriously, people rarely buy offline this days- MAS should step up and improve their websites. It is not enough that it is working, if possible people should be amazed at the website design. An analogy would be if you were to renovate your shop, you would probably paint your front new.
MAS should redesign its archaic website.
One would then dismiss, "Malaysia memang macam tu.." or something along the line, but afterwards I wanted to give review on Ebay to a seller whom was very pleasant to deal with. He had mistakenly sent a false set of items(I bought a deck of cards). I emailed him and he said that he'll send the correct item and I can keep the old one. In short, I got a free item. Although it's only €2, the kind gesture appeased me.
So I decided to write a positive review.
Now, if you ever read review's of seller on Ebay, they are normally short and formulaic. Most are copied paste.
I wanted to write a long and positive one, describing my situation above but then I discovered and was reminded that the review can only contain 80 characters. What can you exactly write in 80 characters? Even twitter has 160+ characters. Therefore I had to write a very simple and short review.
"Nette kontak, gerne wieder"- Good communication, love to do business again.
Which is a rubbish review and not at all helpful.
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80
characters is too short to write anything useful beside saying this is rubbis
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A seller once wrote in his/her description that positive reviews on Ebay are hardly true, the negative reviews are mostly exaggarated.
I agree.
My point I bring this up is to show that even a website that is widely used such as Ebay has its similarity with MAS' website. Both have archaic part on them, that is hardly useful but people simply used because of 'tradition'.
And the reason I blog about this is in all of us, there are parts where we are archaic and habitual, where we do stuffs that is hardly beneficial but we do them simply because we have been doing them for years. Programmers: clearly, you must design better website.
User: you, and me, not so clear but we should redesign some parts of our life.
Thank you for reading.


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