Fandango – wasting the opportunity

I love Fandango’s core service. Buying tickets is simple, elegant and most importantly it works.

But Fandango probably realized recently that it has all this wonderful data that it could use. For example, it shows me all the films I’ve ever watched. Great — that plus Netflix would be a good encapsulation of most everything I watch.

More recently though, Fandango has discovered “community”. Why shouldn’t Fandango have ratings and reviews? It’s all the rage and everyone is doing it. No reason at all. Except they have no clue how to do it.

Recently I watched Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday. I bought the tickets on Fandango and watched the movie on February 12th. I got this email on the 13th from Fandango asking me to review the film.
email

Great, I thought. How prompt. Let me go review it. I click on the link and log in. This is what I get:
Error page

Hmm. Fine then, I won’t review it, but why waste my time guys? Oh, but it gets worse.

I get another email on February 15th telling me it is my “Last Chance”. I ignore it. Last chance? I wish. I get yet another email on February 17th with a different title (asking me to tell the community about myself), but with the same request to review Black Friday. Okay, I will give it one last try. Alas, I get the same message again.

Don’t you think if you send me THREE emails asking me to do something that I should be able to actually perform the action? Getting the basics right is important if you want to build community. Either fix the issue or stop emailing me. I’d have been equally fine with either option.

Fandango, please get the basics right.

Originally posted on Tatvam

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Comments

  • Fandango maven
    I'll forward your comment to them....
  • Shripriya
    Hey Fandango Maven, thanks for the comment. I am glad that the system is working again. One recommendation - for your customer service follow-up page, please allow urls to be provided. I wanted to send the CS people a link to this page and couldn't do it.

    That said, I will definitely continue using Fandango's core service and will try out the reviews one more time before I make up my mind :)

    Appreciate your following up here.
  • Fandango maven
    I actually do work at Fandango, and don't know what the technical problem was in your particular case, but we do our own ratings / reviews and have generally had good feedback...in just a few months we many thousands of ratings on current movies. Sorry if there was a technical glitch on that one movie, hopefully it won't happen againn. We do appreciate the feedback!
  • Shripriya
    First an update - today, the link is live - amazing!

    @ Jeffrey - I bet you are right. The service provider finally got their act together.

    @ Aditya - Great point. I did let them know. The process of filing a complaint was incredibly painful. They asked for more information and I tried to post the link (to the page and to the image) in the form, but it would not accept a URL. Aargh... They should stick to what they do best...

    @ Vi - Yes, the core service works well, I've found. I'll plan on just sticking to that.
  • Guest
    I've never really used Fandango to buy movie tickets--the theaters around my area generally have automated machines to purchase the tickets, and I avoid going at crowded/peak times. Their accurate listing of show times is convenient, though.
  • just curious if you actually let fandango have piece of your mind! considering it probably took you about 10-12 minutes for a blog post about this - perhaps a minute to let them know that they are screwing up would be in order, and even more important - that they could lose your business over this!

    maybe they will offer you the 100$ reward as compensation - and you won't even have to bother writing the review :)
  • Bet you anything they tried to do this on the cheap by outsourcing it to some other service and that other service is now down.
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