How not to do pay-by-mobile: a rant

With apologies to those seeking analysis or a product review (what are you reading my rubbish for anyway?), this week’s piece is a self-indulgent rant about a mobile payment service gone wrong… a ‘how not-to’ guide if you like. My interest in the matter? An £80 ( $160) ‘penalty charge’ notice sitting on the table in front of me for just over 2 hours of parking that I paid for in full.

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Let me explain…

Central London is a place where, frankly, you need to have suffered a serious head-injury before driving around it seems like a good idea. However, in December it was unavoidable and I found myself crawling through the West End traffic, the streets thronged with Christmas shoppers. Having taken several hours to make only a few miles progress we decided to drive directly to our destination rather than parking at the hotel as planned.

Unusually quickly we located a road-side parking space close-by and I braced myself for the cost… £12 ($24) for the 3 hours we needed. My heart sank – we had enough money with us, but not in the coins usually required for on-street parking. Good news – this street was within the area where Westminster Council had replaced traditional parking meters with a ‘pay by phone’ system. This, surely, was a genius idea… and where it all went wrong.

Problem 1 – Register by text: The nearby signage presented two options… pay by call or text. However, paying by text required sending a message including the full credit-card details and car registration. I decided against this, unhappy with the security implications. It was also disappointing I needed to use a credit-card at all – why couldn’t I pay by ‘premium text’ like I do for other services? I rang the number instead.

Problem 2 – The call’s not free: I’m about to pay out for parking that’s about the most expensive I’ve ever seen, but to register for it or speak to customer services an ‘0870‘ number is provided – that is a number that is charged at a premium by most network operators (20p a minute by O2) and cannot be taken from bundled allowance of minutes.

Problem 3 – “Press 2, then 4, then 3, then something else”: I navigated through the interactive system’s voice menus in the usual fashion. It was slow, but not the worst I’d used. Then came the worse bit:

“Enter credit card number” tap tap tap… [16 digits]

“Is that correct?” [1 digit]

“Enter expiry date” [4 digits]

“Is that correct?” [1 digit]

“Enter the car registration plate.  For A to C press 1.  For A press 1, for B press 2… etc” [14 digits]

“Is that correct?” [1 digit]

“Enter the location code” [4 digits]

“Is that correct?” [1 digit]

42 key presses, just for the basic information for the transaction! With only one correction for a typo, I’d now been on the phone for just over 10 minutes listening to prompts and entering information.

Problem 4 – You’re charging me for a receipt!!?!: The next question surprised me. Did I want to pay for a text confirmation? Well, no, I didn’t want to pay, but I certainly wanted to be sure the transaction had completed so I opted to pay 10p each for a confirmation and a warning towards the end of the paid period. Not much I agree, but I’m not in the habit of paying for a receipt from any other organisation! Oh and the call’s cost me almost £3 by now too…

Problem 4 – It needs to be simple, dummy: So having paid my 3 hours, spent what felt like a good portion of that time negotiating the payment system and been charged premium calling cost we headed off, my iPhone buzzing in my pocket as the confirmation came through. When we returned to the car I was surprised to see it had been ticketed… It turns out the location code to be entered is quite specific to the group of spaces it is posted by and in this case is only on one sign. I’d not seen it (8 feet in the air and facing away from the pavement) and misread a second sign entering the example location details in error. The system accepted this without any apparent validation and so I paid for a space that doesn’t exist. Excellent… and I’m not the only one.

In summary: A mobile transaction should be quicker, more simple and cheaper than a cash-based system. This wasn’t and hasn’t paid much (any?) attention to the user experience. It’s likely much of this may sound familiar to people far away from London too – the suppliers of this system appear to operate similar services around the world and although I’m not sure I can blame them for any / all of this, it is a stand-out case of how not to provide a mobile service. Westminster Council’s press information bangs on about ‘ease of use’ and ‘encouraging e-government’ but in one go it’s put me off using mobile payments for anything (financially) important in the future. Note the numbers here: over 200,000 people use this system and over a third of those surveyed were not satisfied or did not find it easy to use.

I have, of course, lodged an appeal, but 2 months of letter writing and form filling wasn’t what I anticipated when I decided to ‘quickly pay by phone’.