It’s 8 in the morning and I need to book a tatkal ticket. I have my computer connected to a 4 mbps connection and the minute it shows 8 in my clock, I fire up the browser and hit the irctc url. The page loads up, I enter my password and hit enter. After an agonising wait, the home screen loads up. I have done my homework well and have noted down the train number and the station code so that I do not have to search for the these using the crappy irctc interface. The left hand sidebar has an option for quick book. I hit the quick book option as I have always done in the past. But what do I see? Instead of the quick book form coming up, I get an error screen telling me that quick book has been disabled for the 0800 – 0900 hours time interval! WTH!
When you make excuses like millions of people trying to access a page at the same time being the reason for the service to be slow, it is understandable and bearable. But when policy changes such as these are made, one can only look at the screen in exasperation and wonder what survey led to such a policy proposal. How dumb must have the people been who allowed the change to happen. Let me try and explain why I am so pissed off at irctc.
Booking a tatkal ticket is like going to war. If you fail to complete the transaction by 0810, there’s a very good chance that all the tickets have already been booked. So I use the quick book for that. There is no need to search for the train. You can do it earlier and make a note of the train number and station code. In the quick book for, just enter these in the respective forms, fill up passenger information and you are good to go. Enter the card details and ticket has been booked. The only problem in the whole process is that of the server being overloaded due to which pages fail to load sometimes.
Now what irctc has done is to disable the quick book option during the first hour of tatkal booking. So now I have to waste my time searching for the train whose number I already know, get the availability information which I did not want to in the first, and only then proceed with passenger information. I now have to do 2 extra post queries and wait for the responses from the server which takes an eternity.
I have been taught to always optimize the process, reduce the number of steps required to get any work done and minimize the inconvenience caused to customers. Perhaps the clever busy bodies at irctc have been taught another definition of customer experience and satisfaction. I seriously hope they be able to think like normal intelligent human beings.
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