SneakyTrader

Reminds me of a boss I had years ago at the supermarket - he loved the title and pay that came with being a department manager but avoided making decisions like the plague - why? because making decisions means having to stand by and defend the decision at a later date - if he didn't make a decision then he had nothing to defend. I can almost guarantee that what will happen is that there will be 'audit' and those in charge will use the expensive consultants as cover for their decisions by claiming that they 'got the best advice' and thus be merry go round of mediocrity will continue. Reminds me of the Air New Zealand buying out Ansett fiasco and yet some how the members of that board got to keep their lucrative board of director jobs at the various companies they work for. Thank you I just hope that we (staff and customers) get through this in one piece because when I have to ring up the call centre they're stressed and worn out so at some point something will have to give. I used to work in a call centre years ago but being in an office all day does my head in - I've got to be on my feet or otherwise I get irritable lol. Ah, I got confused with a post further up about finding a lost ticket claim. If I were the CEO I would ruffle some feathers like actually mixing with the employees at work, turning up to events and talk to the public, maybe have a blog to and a podcast so there is direct communication - bringing the enthusiast community in to hear their feedback as well by bringing them into the fold so that the racing industry can use those enthusiast boots on the ground to evangelise and make racing something that people my age are interested in. It'll be interesting to see what happens with the Messara report; the question is whether there is a willingness to do the necessary investments to make horse racing sexy, glamorous and something that young people should get into, whether there is a willingness at the club level for change (consolidation etc) but equally whether there is a willingness to change in how things are done as a business - is it really necessary for the TAB to have six offices in New Zealand? can it be done more efficiently? What amazes me is the varied quality of service - I have to wonder whether there is any focus on ensuring that pub tabs lift their quality because when I was working in the fast-food industry we used to have spot inspections from head office with real consequences if the place wasn't up to standard and yet some how when pub tabs half-ass it (as you noted) there are no consequences but then again I guess part of that is about raising the TAB brand so that it becomes a desirable brand to want to be associated with and thus the threat to take a TAB installation from a pub results in "we'll promise to lift out game" rather than than the current situation of pub owners shrugging their shoulders and going "meh, one less thing I have to worry about".

Racing -> Futures and Challenges On that page there will be the drivers, jockeys and rugs challenges. Unfortunately I don't see things changing - having seen how the recruitment process occurs in many businesses it appears that unfortunately that many who get through do so not on what they can actually deliver but their ability to dazzle the interviewers whilst ensuring that they don't rock the boat and the re-enforce status quo. In many organisations there is a tendency for 'establishment' to protect itself by ensuring that those who have any new ideas are never promoted but those who seek to re-enforce the status quo without question are advanced forward. Can 'change agents' make their way through? sure but that is more by accident rather than by design. I'm not worried about them 'finding me' given that I work at a retail outlet so it would be like finding a needle in a haystack - "who is the one that has been whining on line" and every persons hand at the site I work at would pop up in unison. I have a feeling that it was probably a matter of 'what I should say' vs. 'what I'd like to say but I want to keep my job'. I had to get the call centre to forward a copy to the site because we didn't have one in the store; you'd think that they would do away with all that and simply create a form that I can fill out for the customer in the store on the computer rather than printing one out, filling it out then sending it back in again via email.

I agree - there is a lot of good will out there for TAB in much the same way that people have good will towards NZ Post or Air New Zealand but eventually that 'good will' will eventually run out when customers face the sisyphean task of trying to do a password reset.

Yeah, I see customers in the store get frustrated when they're on the phone to the call centre. Then there are new policies introduced that failed to take into account what happens in the real world such as when a house bound Granddad wants to top up their account but cannot because it would involve giving their carer the PIN number to their account to make the deposit - something that I'm sure most people would not be comfortable with. I was told the requirement for pin entry would stop operators from making the mistake of putting it in the wrong account but alas as I've seen with my work mates it hasn't fixed the problem. I feel for the folks at the call centre because generally when I'm serving the customer over the counter they're more well behaved than when I over hear them on the phone. Oh, and from what I heard regarding the password, some of the passwords weren't migrated across resulting in customers being locked out plus other issues. As I heard from one customer, "why not just keep the old system running and launch the new one so then at least people can keep betting on the old one, experiment and provide feedback on the new one so when they can migrate to the new system once it is mature and ready for prime time.

Here is the funny thing - in OpenBet itself there are numbers that are still used as references so it isn't as though the numbers are no longer used in the actual system itself. Sure, the numbers used in the OpenBet system are longer than 3 or 4 numbers but they certainly exist in the system with the racing being generated each day then exported to the JetBet system so that it can be accessed from the terminals in the store. The self service terminals software could have been at least upgraded to talk directly to OpenBet and the store terminals replaced with NCR touch screens (the kind used in fast-food outlets) where both the self service and manned terminals could share a basic interface with slight differences based on what device it is running on (the presence of an EFTPOS machine on a manned terminal vs. a self service terminal that redeems/creates vouchers/tickets and accepts cash being fed into it). In the case of OpenBet I can understand the reasoning for going with them given that some of the biggest bookmakers use the platform so for those making the decision it sounded like a 'obvious thing to do', a bit like the old saying 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM'. What I'm shocked about is why TAB insist on using a rinky-dinky datacenter outfit up in Auckland instead of just running OpenBet on the Google Cloud platform and pay for the extra capacity when needed (which would deal with the Cloudfare issue where customers located in New Zealand are blocked because CloudFlare believes their IP address is located outside of New Zealand) along with leveraging the distribution capabilities of YouTube for live video streaming which have more points of presence that would deal with the performance/reliability issues - heck, why not offer a TAB streaming application for Apple TV and charge $10 per month for those who have an internet connection but don't wan't a Sky subscription? Yeah, it was a mess with the old system - same situation as before where the money is authorised then never credited to the account, the system freezing during payments etc. As I said to myself last night - how can Pizza Hutt, Dominos and Hell Pizza able to deliver a consistent online payment experience when ordering a pizza and yet TAB seem to struggle. I mean, those three companies would be doing thousands of transactions around in New Zealand so why do TAB insist on going with IP Payments/Bambora when there are more reliable online EFTPOS vendors out there? I had a look at the TAB Australia website and I'm dumfounded as to why TAB NZ insisted on copying Paddy Power's design given how fast and responsive the TAB Australia website is like.

Unfortunately I wouldn't know who they are - IIRC there was the manager from the web team on the Des Coppins radio show (I heard from a customer at a store) but I'm unsure was to what degree of decision making he has vs. moving the deck chairs around on the titanic. I've met some of the programmers and shoot the breeze/venting but I've never met any of the people who have the final say in it all this but I assume that the board outlined what they wanted, a contractor came back with a plan and then the board signed off on it so ultimately it is the board who is responsible because it is almost a certainty that the board would have been given all the in's and out's of what they wanted to achieve with all the downsides noted but decided to go ahead anyway. Then again this reminds of the Kiwibank fiasco - they could have kept with Ultracs, upgraded to version 5.0, and given that Bendigo uses the exact software and has no scaling issues (the reason put out as to why they were migrating off Ultracs) along with migrating to MasterCard for Debit and Credit then use that leverage to get a better deal then talk to Apple and Google to get phone based payment up and running etc. but unfortunately the management at Kiwibank insisted on having a bespoke solution sitting on top of SAP as a giant vanity project to prove how much of a 'serious bank' Kiwibank is because they use a piece of software that has a notorious reputation for cost overruns (Commonwealth Bank/ASB use it because they make so much money that eventually if you drown a project in so much money that it'll eventually work out in the long run - Kiwibank doesn't have such a luxury). As an underlying in organisations it is always funny to watch how things crash and burn with those making the decisions living up to the peter principle.

Keeping in mind that I have limited experience in terms of the technical in's and out's behind the scenes when it comes what the bookies use but 'unsettled' points to a bet that was placed, resulted and the bookies have realised that they've resulted it incorrectly so they've had to reverse the pay out. This unsettling process (the correction) should occur on the same day (within minutes of the result being recognised as being incorrectly done) that the bet has been finalised but if it has been days after the event when they unsettled it then IMHO I'd put a complaint through. Regarding the other matters raised, I haven't had it occur on my own account so I can't really comment.

Disclaimer: I work at the TAB (I won't say where other than in the capacity of a customer facing role) but I'd prefer to remain anonymous for the sake of job security. I'll put some points out there and let people take from it what they will: 1) When calling up the help desk or phone bet - remember, the staff that answer the phones didn't make the choice to change the system, yelling and screaming at them along with a barrage of swearing won't magically bring back the old site or get the operator to fix something that they themselves cannot fix. 2) The OpenBet platform is a good platform (at the core of it) but the problem is that they tried to retrofit it with the old jetbet system for backwards compatibility with the retail sites and touchtone betting along with integration with the legacy parts of the system. What they should have done was to stand back and take a big picture analysis as to the direction the betting industry is taking and develop a system that didn't require the mess of compromises. The result of what you see today and the money spent is the result of so much work being spent trying to get the new system to integrate with the old processes. 3) With the moving of the data over to the new system they did some really stupid decisions for the sake of 'simplicity' - the new system only allows one card per account thus you cannot use the same card on more than one account which is fair enough from a fraud prevention point of view. The problem is that when they migrated the data across it resulted in all the old accounts with the same card being used across multiple accounts also migrated across with the net result of deposits failing. Why did they do it? apparently for the sake of convenience but what is more inconvenient - spending 2 minutes to re-enter the credit card number on the account or waiting 30 minutes on hold to then having the operator trying to locate the other accounts where the credit/debit card is used? Same can be said for the race tracker - why not just get the customer to enter it again where as they're now going to spend thousands of dollars more to try and retrieve the information off the old database with no guarantee that it can be migrated - why not just start with a clean slate and get the customers to choose them again rather than promise something only to find that the end result is iffy reliability? 4) The payment processor, IP Payments/Bambora, has always been a mess even before the change over with the constant breakdowns; the problem made worse by the fact that the system works by doing pre-authorisation, security check but the problem comes when the security check fails because what is meant to happen is a 'message' is sent back to IP Payments/Bambora to release the pre-authorisation but it doesn't resulting in people seeing money being deducted multiple times - it should drop off after 5-10 days but for the average person who needs the money for other things then the current system is unacceptable. 5) The website itself is one of those things that one can chalk up as "sounds great in theory" but in reality it becomes "if you try to be everything to everyone the end result is no one is happy". The website is meant to scale and adapt to screen sizes hence the mobile app looks the same as the website on a mobile phone web browser when being run on the same device (I wonder whether the app itself is nothing more than a Progressive Web Application (PWA)) but when you make such a choice you end up making compromises - buttons have to be bigger because you're not only catering for mouse input but also touch screen thus the target has to be big enough for a customer to easily press. The net result is that it isn't information dense enough resulting in the inability to display the full field of runners when trying to place a racing bet resulting in time spent scrolling up and down the page. I was thinking to myself, "maybe it is great for sport but bad for racing' but even for sports it is a mess. 6) With the attempt to be 'everything to everyone' the result is also lousy performance - it took 20-30 seconds to load up the results page for the EPL - and this is on a high end computer on a 100mbps fibre connection so it is hardly a situation where I lack the 'grunt'. 7) One thing to keep in mind that the programmers are working on the issues but keep in mind that the original scope of the project was laid down by the TAB/NZRB - it was ultimately TAB/NZRB that chose to to do what they did. 8) The one theme I am hearing 'on the streets' is about John Allen going on television saying, "everything is great, everything is awesome" and I can't help but be reminded of 'Baghdad Bob' with a side of 'Nero playing the fiddle as Rome burns' - the least he could have done was gone out and said, "we are aware of some teething issues and the transition wasn't as smooth as expected but we are working on addressing the sore points that our customers have provided feedback regarding..." - at least then he would win bit of a kudos for having a degree of humility but the fact that he keeps claiming everything is ok demonstrates just how out of touch he is with the day to day operations - that some how he can 'Donald Trump' his way to success by boasting benefits and ignoring the legitimate issues the customer base does have.