Tiresome Touts Thwacked by the Courts …. But the Beastly Badge Bureaucracy Remains Too Complex

I had a marvellous time at the first Cheltenham meeting of the season, as I’ve always seen it as the start of “proper” racing. It was great to see so many friends and owners there, with everyone dreaming of future successes and races to be won. Here’s hoping the dreams stay alive for as long as they possibly can.

One feature that was an enhancement to the owner / racegoer experience was the absence of the wretched touts who have tended to badger people from the minute they turn into Cheltenham racecourse. Jockey Club Racecourses elected to go to the High Court to apply for an injunction, which was successful, in what Ian Renton has termed a “landmark decision”. Basically it prohibits the selling and buying of tickets by touts on the racecourse property, and it is the first time ever that an injunction has been granted to stop this. If touts persist, then it becomes a criminal offence and they can be prosecuted for contempt of court, which carries a custodial sentence. This is far more effective than the tactic deployed at last year’s Festival where Cheltenham council issued Public Space Protection Orders, but with the maximum fine of £80 it was no surprise that this was no real deterrent.

So, well done Cheltenham on this ground-breaking initiative which is very likely now to be copied by other racecourses and sports venues, particularly rugby, tennis and football. Apparently the number of fake badges sold at last year’s Festival was over 1,000, with many racegoers then denied entry, having been fleeced by the touts. JCR believe that the touts were costing them an estimated £1m a year across their 15 racecourses, and the total cost to British Racing has been estimated at between £10m and £15m a year. From the racegoers’ perspective, it has finally removed the intimidatory presence of touts and their often aggressive behaviour. It will be interesting to see what happens now over the next 12 months because the injunction has only been granted until July 2019.

However, from an owner’s perspective, the subject of badges always raises the problems that still exist in both obtaining and allocating them. It is not really a problem for a sole owner. However for those who are actively involved in shared ownership, particularly partnerships and syndicates, it remains as I said in the header to this blog, a “beastly badge bureaucracy” which still causes anxiety and embarrassment when owners struggle to convince staff at Owners & Trainers desks that they are entitled to them.

The pass card system is OK as far as it goes, but clearly the quality of the owner experience is then determined by the people encountered behind the O&T desks. That remains very variable. In fact I don’t necessarily blame them, even though their social skills are sometimes lacking, because there are lots of opportunities for mistakes to be made and for badges, records, emails, requests etc. to be mislaid. To illustrate the problem using Cheltenham as an example, the course has two entrances and there is quite a steep slope separating them, so elderly owners can easily go to the wrong entrance and then struggle to get to the other one; the number of badges for shared ownership is different to the number of complimentary lunches, which leads to irritating negotiations within the ownership group; they require owners’ badges, arm bands and also tokens for lunch, and not every owner welcomes this festooning with accreditation; they post four badges and two car park labels to the syndicator and / or first-named owner, who then may find it difficult to forward the badges to co-owners in the time available. And then unfortunately, looking across UK racing the arrangements and bureaucracies vary from course to course.

It often feels that the owner is at the bottom of the pyramid, from an owner badge perspective. There are plenty of people who have automatic entitlement, not least the huge network of individuals under the Racecourse Association (RCA) auspices who are deemed to be eligible for access; the press; trainers, jockeys and also conditional and apprentice riders. As a result, many in racing, particularly from the training ranks who are immediately recognised by the O&T staff, fail to appreciate the embarrassment that occurs for “ordinary” owners. I’ve deliberately put this in inverted commas because the pass card system, when it was introduced, completely ignored best practice in customer relationship management (CRM) so it is impossible for courses to assess whether the individual proffering the card is a small shareholder in one horse or someone investing huge amounts of money in the sport every year. I always compare this to the CRM systems deployed by airlines, which have huge amounts of data on the value of their customers from a profitability perspective. Whenever they can, they upgrade the customers of greater value to better quality facilities. At the moment this is totally impossible in British racing – partly because there is no tiering of facilities so the 40th syndicate shareholder can be treated in the same way as someone who owns 20 horses outright, and also the pass card doesn’t retain any data that can be accessed on the owner’s individual profile and importance to racing.

Basically the pass card system, although an improvement, is not fit for purpose when evaluated from three perspectives: properly controlling abuse and the illicit market in owner’s badges (obtained by and for people not entitled to them); maximising the overall owner experience through the tiering of benefits; and incentivising owners to invest more in ownership in order to obtain those greater benefits. A big opportunity was missed, but then it was motivated primarily by the RCA trying to address the first of my three perspectives rather than, just as importantly, the other two.

Finally, and perhaps the subject of another blog, not many successful consumer-orientated companies would survive on a totally fragmented basis with every part of their business doing their own thing, in their own way. Ideally the whole of British racing would participate in a Shared Service Racing Transaction Centre where all the administration to do with racing and ownership would be done using state of the art systems, software and communications processes from one site. We are light years away from that, and I’d be pretty certain that there has been no discussion of an initiative which would lead to a huge improvement in efficiency, a much better customer experience and considerable cost savings. Such a pity!

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The New PASS System Fails its Tests: British Racing Needs to Learn from these Fiascos

In the last blog I covered the launch of the new PASS system that was introduced at the beginning of November. Without repeating too much detail of that blog, the Privilege Access Swipe System (PASS) card was introduced over 20 years ago by racecourses to manage exclusive complimentary access for owners to courses. The new PASS cards, provided by the Racecourse Association (RCA), have been designed to “ensure quick and easy access to racecourses”; to “revolutionise your pre-arrival and entry experience”; giving you “the chance to personalise your raceday experience from start to finish”; and “this modern and mobile system allows better communication between you and racecourses, ensuring a personal touch to the raceday experience”.

For the new system to work properly, it needs to be suitable for all the different types of owner and unfortunately, from our experience in terms of partnerships, it most definitely isn’t, neither for those of us who have no problems whatsoever in using the internet nor equally for those of our owners who don’t or won’t. My wife, who does all the administration for Owners for Owners, has found it extremely frustrating and technically impossible to cover all the different requirements of our owners, and it most definitely hasn’t “revolutionised or personalised” our raceday experience. In fact it has done exactly the opposite. The frustration it has caused is so great that it has fundamentally challenged our commitment to running partnerships in the future, because the hassle of doing it is just becoming intolerable. In the future we may well switch to running syndicates instead, or owning horses outside Owners for Owners.

Before detailing some of the things wrong with the PASS system, I need to vent the frustration not just with the system but with the repeated inability of British Racing to apply any of the basic rules of change management. This is not just a personal opinion, as I have spoken at length with the Racehorse Owners Association (ROA) on the subject and they have been inundated with vehement complaints; I gather they have logged over 200 problems with the system. As far as I know, the whole system was rushed into operation at the last minute; there was no proper testing or Beta site to find out what might have been wrong with the system before they launched it; there were no user groups to guide design and implementation; the ROA, which could have helped enormously, was kept on the sidelines; and once again British Racing has a fiasco on its hands. It is not just Owners for Owners who are rethinking ownership. We have already heard from a number of our owners that they are considering packing in ownership because of the endless hassles, constant frustrations and just the rank inability of the racing administrators to shape up and test systems properly before launching them. This is a shocking self-inflicted wound that could easily drive owners out of the sport. It is time the ineptitude was not tolerated. For those of us who have worked in major companies worldwide, if you are in charge of a significant process launch such as the PASS system and get it wrong, you lose your job.

Right, I now feel a bit better for that rant. Here are some of the things wrong with the system:

• Some owners have not even heard anything about it, and others have not received a new card.
• For those who have received cards, not all of them have worked.
• Registration procedures have been followed but the cards have not been activated.
• Changes to passwords have been requested but there has been no response from the site.
• There is enormous confusion about what the PASS system is designed to do.
• There is equal confusion about the differences between the RCA and ROA, and the role of the PASS system in complimentary badge entitlement for those who own more than 50% of a horse.
• The length of time to brief owners on the changes and the detail of operation have been inadequate.
• British Racing refuses to acknowledge the implication of the age of most owners. Many of them cannot or will not interact with racing through the internet. The designers of the PASS system have not built this into the process with sufficient sensitivity (or at all).
• The system may work well for sole owners and even syndicates where there are nominated owners who control matters, but it will not work for a partnership of owners, some of whom wish to attend with a guest and others who cannot attend – it does not allow the pooling of the badge allocation.

I am personally lobbying the RCA for immediate changes, and my wife is doing the same with the ROA. The core problem here is the lack of detailed information as to how ownership actually works. The designers of processes tend to be young, technically competent, based in London with great broadband access, and don’t own horses. The owners tend to be older, technically cautious, based in the country with often poor broadband, and own horses despite the frustrations of it. Without really careful and sympathetic design of any process changes, it is inevitable that there will be continued fiascos such as this one. Alas, I am going to have to return to this subject again on the next blog, as I’ve run out of space on this one! Yours, in frustration!

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First Class or Third Class: The Beastly Business of Bargaining for Badges

Very occasionally in my management consultancy career I enjoyed entering an aircraft and turning left to fly first class. Bearing in mind that I was a procurement specialist, it would hardly have been an impressive action on the part of the client to spend all that money on me. However, when I did travel like that, I really enjoyed it, and it was always on the Heathrow to JFK run. Currently a first-class flight with British Airways and onward helicopter into Manhattan is just a whisker under £5,000. You book your ticket and check in online; there is a limo to the airport; you are fast-tracked through security; you can relax with a glass or three of Krug before being feted by top-class cabin staff while enjoying an excellent gourmet dinner; before a relaxing sleep in a luxury fold-down seat.

You’re probably wondering why I’m wittering on about such luxuries. It is because, if you take the average price of the average racehorse and its average training fees over its average career, and total it all up before dividing it by the number of races the horse runs, you’ll find that it is between £4,000 and £5,000. If you take into account the purchase price of the bloodstock and write that off completely, it would take the average racecourse appearance cost up to nearer £7,000.

So next time you go racing as an owner, you may (but then again, may not) want to consider the fact that your investment for that afternoon is somewhere between £4,000 and £7,000. You may also want to reflect upon whether you are being treated in the same way as someone with a first-class ticket on British Airways.

That, in a nutshell, is the difference between being a purchaser of racehorses and a purchaser of other luxury goods and services. In one, we have traditionally been treated as relatively unimportant, whereas in the other we are the number one customer.

Let’s just examine one aspect in more detail – badge allocation and collection. In our house, my wife Jack and I share the same office to do all the admin and communications for Owners for Owners. One of the biggest sources of tension is dealing with racecourses and persuading them to allocate as many badges as we need for our owners. Some courses are miserly, while others are generous; some are highly inefficient, requiring lots of emails and phone calls, while others appear far more switched-on and customer orientated; some hide behind health & safety rules (“we can’t have too many owners in the paddock”), while others will do everything they can to accommodate; some of the staff on O&T desks haven’t a clue, whereas others are highly professional “owner ambassadors”; the one common denominator is that you will invariably have to join a shuffling queue and be given the once-over by someone who suspects you are trying to blag your way in for nothing. Allocations can vary between 6, 8, 10, 12 or more. Sometimes there is a free hot meal and sometimes only a bun and cup of tea. Some accept ROA swipe cards, some don’t. Hardly ever do you see a computer. Usually there is just a long list of names by horse and race, and someone has to track down manually who you are.

I don’t think airlines selling first-class tickets would keep many customers paying £4-5,000 a time for the privilege of being treated so shabbily and inefficiently. Surely it’s time to catch up with modern customer relationship management and jump several decades at a single go, by introducing smart technology, owner recognition systems, privilege cards, professionally trained customer liaison staff and also some old-fashioned courtesy towards racing’s number one customer, i.e. the owner. Many decades ago I worked with British Airways on their behavioural training programme, “Putting People First”. It’s about time racing and racecourses did the same: “Putting Owners First”, and genuinely meaning it.

I am always interested to hear your views so please do leave a comment. If you can't see the comment box at the bottom of this post then navigate to the post using the right hand navigation or click here > and scroll to the bottom of the page. Look forward to hearing your views. Thanks very much for sharing them.