When the customer has to fight you to use your website

Remember that email I got from KLAC? There were a couple of things that I didn't mention in my post:

• I got the email 4 days ago, on March 17.


• To encourage me to come back, I was told the following:

To avoid the deactivation of your account, go to www.am570radio.com and enter the bonus code [ACTIVE] into your All Access Pass account within the next seven days. This will keep your membership status active and gives you 1000 points for your All Access Pass just to get the ball rolling again.

Sounds like a deal, so I went to the website.

Then I began to remember why I didn't frequent the All Access Pass area. It's too hard to find the danged thing. Since KLAC is a ClearChannel website, they have the main page loaded with everything under the sun. So it takes a while to even FIND the All Access Pass area.

Then to confuse things further, they have two segregated All Access areas - the prizes area, and the social networking area. So I had to recheck the email and see where I was supposed to go.

Once I got to the right place, I had to figure out where to enter the bonus code. So I entered it, and was greeted with the following message:

Sorry

This Bonus Code is no longer available.

So much for using the bonus code within 7 days. I'm not hurt by the loss of 1,000 bonus points, since the points aren't that useful to me anyway, but my experience with KLAC's All Access website today reminds me of what I was encountering when I did visit it semi-regularly last year. Difficult navigation, a kitchen sink feel...heck, if I want that, I'll go to my MySpace account.

It's times like this when I really start to appreciate the sites that I do visit regularly - Twitter, Google Reader, FriendFeed. None of them is perfect, but you can improve them by building on what's already there, rather than trashing the whole UI and starting over.

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