This piece will have little coherency, or indeed a point besides my searing anger at the bureaucratic mess that is ‘Student Finance England’. I just decided to compile a list of my pet hates in the form of a list of tips about a system that seems to infuriate all but the lucky few.
1. Make your product simple to access. That means don’t make your questions read like total gibberish and don’t have so many trick questions. If we have filled out the form, it’s pretty clear that we want a student loan, so why ask us at the end to check a box saying that we want to apply for a loan?
2. Either we apply online or we apply on paper. Make up your fucking minds.
3. It’s a week before we go back to university. Don’t, for the love of god, let your website crumble under the inevitably increased webtraffic. It happens every year – your constant protestations that you are ‘surprised’ by it contain as much truth as the results of a Russian general election.
4. Don’t make us apply for the same product twice. We’ve applied for a 3 or 5 year course. You know it. We know it. So why do we have to submit all our details every single year? We already spent many lost days trying to get you to accept our documents last year, why go through that punishing saga again? You can’t make every single student renew their loan every year and then complain of congestion when your phones get clogged up. Speaking of phones…
5. Get a decent helpline. If you aren’t going to make your product simple to access (and let’s face it, Student Finance UK is to simplicity what Iraq is to socio-political stability), then at the very least make sure we have a working number that we can phone you on when it all goes tits up.
6. Stone-Age cavemen had hold machines, even if it consisted of a gruff man telling you to wait for a minute while his mate got back from slaughtering a sabre-toothed lion. There is no excuse not to put people on hold, maybe even give them an indication of how long the wait will be. That means that we don’t have to sit at our desks pressing redial every 5 seconds only to hear the same voice over again telling us to call back later. Speaking of which…
7. Replace your recorded message with somebody other than a Scot. It’s bad enough having to worry about my own student loan without knowing that our rotten abscess of a political system gives anybody born north of the border a free ticket to university. This is Student Finance England, not Monarch of the fucking Glen.
And finally…
8. When I dial your number (08453005090), the last thing I want to hear, ad infinitum, is: “This number is no longer available, please hang up and redial 0845 300 50 90”.
One Comment
great article.