The Belgian railway operator Infrabel has shown the perfect example of quick and flexible business thinking, full commitment on customer service… and utter and blatant stupidity.

In response the earlier problems with train tardiness and customer complaints about lack of information, the company has released -a mere few weeks later- a new website. Railtime.be allows travellers to quickly lookup expected arrival times of trains and informs the customer about issues and calamities on the railway infrastructure.

Sounds great, and it would be, if the website were at all usable on a mobile device! With powerful smartphones and high speed mobile networks, I can understand that Infrabel hasn’t developed a separate website for mobile phones, but the least they could do is check compatibility with some of the most common devices. The issue is the neat-o Javascript textfield that helps web-users find the right train station through autocomplete. This textbox doesn’t work on my HTC (Windows Mobile 6), nor on my girlfriend’s Blackberry…

So, the key takeaways for Infrabel (and others): 1. Ask yourself: who are your customers? 2. Where and when are they using your service? 3. Build solution. 4. Check that solution meets criteria 1 and 2!
(unless of course, your just aiming for a publicity stunt and not really trying to help customers…)

Tags: fail mobile infrabel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 18:10 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Written by: Koen Pellegrims