Practise What You Preach

I'm (still) studying for my CIMA exams. Many of the course modules deal with communication, systems and process management, e-commerce and the importance of looking after your customers.

Ruffles used to work at CIMA, and has many stories regarding the organisations lack of organisation. Most revolve around being unable to meet the expectations and requirements of their customers. Or to smoothly perform those fundamental tasks that are CIMA's bread and butter. For example, at exam entry time CIMA would be so overwhelmed by the weight of entries that the exam entry department would recruit everyone from all the other departments to process the things. John Smith, chef from the CIMA staff canteen, was likely to make errors when processing exam forms -- errors that could have costly implications and inconvenience for CIMA students.

In an attempt to improve the exam entry process -- and cut costs -- CIMA has now gone to a process of on-line exam entry. Great if you have access to a PC, not so great if you don't. To facilitate the process they sent out a log in Contact ID to all students through the post, and a secret password via email, to all students.

Except they didn't.

I got my password, but not my Contact ID. Lynn here at work got neither. And we weren't the only ones.

So when I try to log in on the site, it throws me off -- my Contact ID (I guess that is must be my Student Number) is invalid.

So I click the "mail to" link -- for help with on-line exam entry -- and send them an email requesting my ID.

I don't get an immediate "thank you for your query... it will be dealt with asap" automated response. Three days later I do get a "the postmaster says this email account is a dud" one.

So Lynn phones them up using the dedicated on-line exam entry help line. She is on hold for 15 minutes, then transfers the call to me. I am on hold for a further 15 minutes before CIMA hang up on us.

So I track down the correct email address and send them a new email.

No response.

Eventually we get through on the phone and get our IDs and passwords.

I log on to discover the site is complete shite. It should be a simple case of click on the exam hall you want to sit at, click on the exam papers you want to sit, close shopping basket, click on the payment method, complete transaction, bingo.

Except the pages kept failing to load properly, the user-friendliness was very poor, options to undo any errors were non-existent and updating your personal details and payment methods took forever. A complete mess.

But we managed to fight through the systems and book our exam papers. I even printed out the receipt showing my hall, papers and payment.

Yesterday Lynn and I both received requests for payment for our exams through the post, with the threat that unless we pay up by the 30th of September, we'll be dumped by CIMA and charge £50 in administration fees.

But I've already paid you stupid time-wasting idiots!

Not only that but my (increased) fees have gone to pay for all these extra bills, postal charges, customer helpline man-hours, website development and computer server capacity.

A piece of advice: Read your own course notes and stop wasting my time and money, because at the moment you'd make a great case study of now not to conduct e-commerce or customer-facing business.

The whole thing completely undermines the faith CIMA students have in their qualification's award body. No doubt we'll get an apology [cough].