Customer Services Heaven!

Many of my regular readers may have noticed a serious lack of blog posts recently, no excuses of course, but …

… first it was Christmas with my folks in the Lakes, then my fella’s Birthday, then it was New Year in France with Mum, then I was ill and then my Computer temporarily died!!!

Anyway, I’m better now and so is my machine, blog holiday is over and here are a couple of posts I prepared earlier!! Enjoy :-)

31 Dec. 08

Sitting at Liverpool Airport with a five and a half hour delay on my flight to the little house in France, presents me with an interesting opportunity to catch up on my Blog writing!!

Firstly as a follow up to my previous posts regarding customer service, I feel bound to report an example of customer service excellence I recently experienced.

At the PhoneFromHere.com office we have the ability to take credit card payments from customers using an HSBC card terminal plugged into an analogue phone line. This works very well and allows us to take both large and small payments quickly and securely. However, shortly before the Christmas break I was due to take payment from a number of clients, but the terminal wouldn’t work. After a quick call to HSBC customer support we identified that the problem lay not with the terminal but with the phone line. Our supplier is NTL business, so I gave them a call and reported a fault on the line. The lady took the details and then provided me with a reference number and said that they would be in touch! To be completely honest I was sceptical, to say the very least!!

20 minutes later, much to my surprise I received a phone call from an engineer and to my complete astonishment he was outside the office in the street fixing the connection and asking me to try the line out!! 10 minutes later and the problem was solved and the phone line and credit card terminal all operational, brilliant!!

NTL business (owned by Virgin), provided polite, fast and efficient customer services, brilliant! Just how it should be :-)

Customer Services... Hell – Part 2 (The Sequel)!!!

Following up from my previous post, Customer Services... Hell!! (Part 1) http://tinyurl.com/69gnnu; I feel compelled to share my experiences of another well known organisation's Customer Services department. Unfortunately for me this was going on during the same time frame as I was coping with my Orange Customer Service episode... all truly exhausting!

Part 2: Customer Services Virgin Media

I have an eee PC, a great device, very portable and I take it with me practically everywhere I go, in fact it's the tool I use to write most of my blogs. So the one thing that would make this device even more useful is an Internet connection and I have been thinking for some time about getting a mobile broadband dongle. However, many of the deals currently on the market are either too expensive for my budget, tied to a lengthy contract, or with a provider who has limited network coverage.

Recently a colleague of mine saw an article in the press (http://tinyurl.com/6k5ppa) stating that Virgin Media were launching an offer that would allow existing cable customers with Broadband in their home, to get a dongle for just £5 per month plus the cost of the dongle and a contact of just 12 months. Perfect!!

I was on the phone to Virgin Media on the day the offer launched, but the first guy I spoke to knew nothing about the offer and asked if he could call me back when he had the details. No call back was received, so I called again, this time I spoke to someone who knew about the offer and it appeared that I would need to upgrade my home broadband package in order to qualify! After doing some sums I decided to go ahead with the deal. Payment of £25 was taken there and then from my debit card for the Broadband device, only it turned out later that they also took payment for post and packing a further £5! I was annoyed that I hadn't been informed of this charge, but decided to accept it as reasonable and looked forward to receiving my dongle.

The courier service attempted to deliver the parcel the next working day, but obviously I was at work, so just a notice through the door on this occasion. I tried to ring the number to rearrange delivery only to be told that calls are charged at a premium rate and that I would need to hold, after 5 mins I hung up. I tried again later to be told that they were closed for the evening and that I would need to call back in the morning. I called back the next day, to be told that I couldn't rearrange delivery to an alternative address because all mobiles had to be delivered to the billing address. I said that I would pick the parcel up from the depo and asked for directions, apparently this was not possible either because the parcel was already out for delivery. I mentioned that the package was not a mobile phone but a broadband device and they said as this was the case I could in fact rearrange delivery to a different address!!!????

In the meantime I receive a number of voice mail messages and emails from Virgin Media explaining that the direct debit for my mobile broadband had not been set up correctly and therefore my dongle would not work even when I did receive it! Sigh! I made a few more calls to Virgin and eventually managed to set up the direct debit. Although, this involved speaking to 3 departments and having a battle over a password, which appeared to be correct on one occasion but strangely incorrect on the second occasion... Very odd!

2 days later the dongle turned up and I was VERY excited!! I rushed to plug it in to my eee PC whilst I was still at work, nothing happened... I plugged it into my office Mac and it was working within seconds, odd! I asked to borrow my colleagues Vodafone dongle, which I knew worked, but it didn't work anymore. Grrrrrr!!!

Some of my techie colleagues kindly had a go at trying to make either of the dongles work and eventually after a system update the Vodafone one just started working again, but alas the Virgin Media one, would not.

So, I went home and tried to get the dongle working on my old XP laptop, it was up and running in seconds. I then went back to the packaging to see if there was any instructions for trouble shooting, only to discover that Linux was not supported by the Virgin device. Doom!

I rang customer services, nobody was available to help!! I wrote an email to the person that had been provided as my contact, no response. I rang customer services again, this time I spoke to someone who tried to be helpful, but the official Virgin Media line is that they don't support Linux. However, Virgin Media tech support did have some unofficial hints and tips which could be read out to me, but not emailed because that would be classed as official support. I tried the suggested tips, but they were way too technical for me, I sent the info to my techie colleagues, but still no luck in getting the device to work with my eee PC. Sigh!

Next I scoured the eee PC user forums and found nothing, I posted my own comment and received a couple of suggestions (http://tinyurl.com/6jcvj4), but we couldn't get any of these to work either. Sigh, sigh!

Finally, tired and frustrated I decide to return the device, I call Virgin Media customer services, go through the security check and I am then told that the Mobile Broadband department is closed for the evening and that Virgin Media Cable cannot help me! I call back in the morning, I get through but the operator cannot hear me. I try again and the operator still cannot hear me. I hang up and test my phone, which appears to be working fine and call again. Finally this time the operator can hear me. I am pretty annoyed at this point, so much so that the Virgin Customer Services agent tells me to 'calm down!', this acts like a red rag to a bull! Anyway in the end I request a returns bag and end the call. 4 days later this has still not arrived, so I call Virgin Customer Services again, this time I am told that I need to wait 5 days and that the returns bag is on the way, I wait 8 days, still no returns bag. So, I call back and I re-order the returns bag, explaining that I am worried that very soon my 28 days return period will have expired, meaning I will be tied into their contract. I am reassured that my request for the returns bag has been logged even if it hasn't been received and therefore there will be no problem getting released from the contract. A new returns bag is requested for dispatch...

I have now been waiting a further 5 days, still no sign of a returns bag and to add insult to injury they have now started billing me for the service!! I am exhausted!

As 'Globus' commented on the first part of my rant (in this blog post: http://tinyurl.com/69gnnu), why is it that all of these service providers appear to deliver such poor standards and low levels of customer service, it is quite simply unbelievable and unacceptable!!

So, any thoughts guys? Am I the only one to experience this type of Customer Services Hell?? What should the providers be doing to improve things? What level of service would be considered 'enough'? I look forward to hearing from you all :-)

As a side note; I am also extremely annoyed with my Linux based eee PC, it seems that absolutely nothing is compatible with it, my blackberry won't sink with it, neither will my camera, iTunes doesn't work with it, neither does 4OD, I have had problems with Star Office and now the Virgin Media dongle doesn't work. I think this is the last straw and I am seriously considering installing XP over the Christmas break!!

Customer Services... Hell!!

Some of you may have noticed that I didn't get around to posting a blog last week, to be honest I have at least two entries part written, but for the majority of last week I spent every spare second on the phone to one customer services department or another and therefore had no time left to blog, or almost anything else for that matter!!

Part 1: Customer Services, Orange

As you may remember I have a Blackberry Bold, which I was very excited to receive a few months ago (http://tinyurl.com/68w5g8). However, for all the good looks of this device it has in fact turned out to be somewhat unreliable. The phone regularly crashes and takes several long minutes to reboot, displaying only a white screen and an egg timer, which does nothing for me except raise my blood pressure. It struggles to find reception even when there is good signal coverage, which means it is really only usable in a big city such as Manchester, where it stays within a high strength mobile network cell at all times. Having said that, the device was also virtually useless in London as it couldn't cope with picking up and loosing the signal everytime I went in and out of the Underground and as a result I missed two important calls. Last weekend I was in the Lakes, where admittedly the signal is very poor, but to my dismay the Blackberry had drained itself of battery power in just a couple of hours, my guess is that this was probably due to it's constant searching for a network that wasn't there!

So finally I decided it was time to find out what was causing these issues, I did a bit of searching on Google and came up with this: http://tinyurl.com/6dgn89. Yikes!! It seemed that I wasn't the only one experiencing these issues, but annoyingly here I am a month on from the date that this article was written and yet Orange still hadn't contacted me...

I called Orange customer services and politely explained the problem, they provided me with a link to the Blackberry website to download and install new software to my device, stating that all of the issues referred to in the press had now been resolved. I tried the URL provided, but the message which came up read, “I'm sorry, this page had been removed”. I called Orange again, waited 20 mins on the line, was transferred through 2 departments and was then hung up on. Next I wrote an email, to which I received a call back the following morning whilst I was at work, I was transferred into a queue for 10 mins and then asked if I was still happy to hold... I exploded!

Anyway the Orange representative I spoke to seemed to think that the Blackberry website was still the best bet, this guy claimed that there were no issues with the handsets as far as Orange were concerned??!! I lost my temper and told him he would have to call me back after 5pm when I had finished work. 7.30 pm still no call back, I called Orange customer services again, this time I found a very helpful lady who, called me back on my home phone, ran a diagnostic test on my handset and promptly confirmed it was faulty, shipping a new handset to me the following morning.

The handset arrived, the courier was on time and charming, all good so far, but apparently the courier only brings the device itself so I keep the existing sim, memory stick, battery and back plate. Obviously this is hassle as I now have to sink my device with the data backed up on my home PC and as a result my emails won't work and I have no address book for the remainder of the day, but hey no big deal we are making progress at least!!

So, on Saturday morning I sink the device with the backup, that all works fine except that I now lose Blackberry Maps from the menu!!! Argggggghhh. I search the internet and find this: http://tinyurl.com/6dgac5, it says that Orange are not including Blackberry Maps on the device, Grrrrrrrr! The maps better be included, they were there before I did the sink with my backup... I call Orange customer services again, this time the frustration in my voice must have been very clear, I only had to wait on hold for 5 mins and was only transferred once, but the representative in the technical support department did manage to get the maps back onto the device. Unfortunately, the only way this could be achieved was to wipe my email and Facebook config!!?? So, after I finished the call with Orange I then had to set these up manually, but eventually I had a device that resembled my old one, hopefully minus the issues!

That evening I set off to the cinema in Didsbury, 3 or 4 miles from my home and guess what... the stooopid thing couldn't find a signal!!!! We came home and it wouldn't sink with the broadband and then crashed, taking 8 mins to reboot!!

Today the device has behaved much better, although the back plate doesn't seem to fit the new device properly, however I have decided to give the Blackberry Bold a week or two and see if things have improved, before I do anything more... mainly, however because I can't cope with the thought of calling customer services again!!!

Why is it that we have to get so cross and angry with customer services agents before our problems are taken seriously, 'Sigh'

Part 2 of Customer Services Hell!! Coming Soon...