Connecting the dots ...
“Thank you for calling T-Mobile… All of our representatives are ….
… Current wait time is: 1 hour 9 minutes! “
No, this is not a joke, this is for real. They do offer a call-back option though. 
Tags: Customer Service, Customer Disservice, Customer Support, Technical Support, T-Mobile
This isn’t so much a complicated process in bad need of angioplasty than a case of simply stupid waste:
My parents keep on receiving a ton of mail from the CA Dept. of Health regarding the Medicare prescription changes. So far so good, let’s keep them informed… although I am not sure why the same flyer gets mailed again and again. However, since they clearly have English indicated in their profile, why on earth do they have to be sent every single page in 12 (!) copies, in the following languages: English, Spanish, Armenian, Russian, Cambodian,Chinese, Farsi, Korean, Laotian, Tagalog, Hmong, Vietnamese ???
So much for the environment … and wasted taxpayer money
Tags: Business Process, BPR, Waste, Bureaucracy, CA State, State Government, Government Waste, Medicare
The last day of the year brought two Customer Support Horror Stories, from two Jeremies.
Quite a reading, side by side…. I don’t know about Netgear, but Dell had enough time to learn from their Jeff Jarvis fiasco. They lost measurable sales, let alone the intangible damage they caused to themselves. Perhaps 2006 will be the year companies realize that for every 100 or so mistreated customer there is a high-powered blogger who will publish their story? Anything less then excellent customer service is going to be very-very costly.
Update (12/31): Gee, it must be really slow if this made it to Memeorandum 🙂
Update (1/09): Customer Service, Dell, Yahoo, Flames and Blogs
Tags: Customer Service, Customer Disservice, Customer Support, Technical Support, Dell, Netgear, Dell Hell
(Updated)
Yes, I know, it’s still $25 a month, which really isn’t that much. And I’ve been a loyal customer for 3 years now, through good and bad times – mostly good nowadays, but the early days were at times shaky. 5 bucks less wasn’t enough to drive to another provider, although I admit those free calls to Europe by Lingo sounded quite tempting … but here I am, still with Vonage.
Eventually it might be Vonage themselves that drive me to another provider. Just because the time will come when I no longer like them. Part of what I used to like was the simplicity, transparency of their plans – everything included in on price, no hidden charges, tariffs, good-old-phone-company-games. Or so I thought… but when for my recent trip I wanted to download their SoftPhone, I found out I needed a separate account, with another number, and a limit of 400 minutes. WTF when I already have an unlimited plan with them? Needless to say I ended up not bothering about Softphone, there is always Skype:-)
Now here’s this ad in my email box:
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Recently featured in Men’s Health magazine as one of the top 100 Best New Tech Toys For Men, Vonage’s hottest new device, the Wi-Fi phone, is now available! |
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It’s easy – use it with your own wireless Internet network or when traveling and have access to a compatible Wi-Fi hotspot. It’s great for people on the go. All you have to do is go to any compatible hotspot found in airports, coffee bars, and nearly everywhere and use the Wi-Fi phone. And remember, to purchase a Wi-Fi phone, you will need to open a separate Vonage account. Click here for details.
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Great! This is a nice phone, I never liked the expensive but unintelligent 5.8Ghz unit at home, and this one gives me mobility (of course I’d perefer a Wifi/Cell combo, but I guess that’s a year away…).
But what’s wrong with these guys? To get the phone I need yet another account? Don’t they get it? Softphone, Wifi phone, ATA … these are just different devices that I should be able to purchase with the one-and-only regular Vonage plan. Or do they think the unlimited plan is too generous – now that their competitors have better plans? How about having to deal with 3 separate phone numbers? I have this bead feeling that a former innovator is trying to turn the wheels backward. Wake up Vonage! Customer loyalty is a terrible thing to lose.
Update (12/31):
Tags: Vonage, VOIP, WIFI Phone, Skype, Lingo, Phone Plans, Calling Plans, SoftPhone
(updated)
Little did Jeff Clavier or Brad Feld know just how timely their posts on “Shared Nothing Architecture” would become in days now that the granddaddy of all on-demand software, Salesforce.com was partially knocked out for almost a day.
The Typepad outage that prompted Brad and Jeff write their piece was just storm in a teacup; this is the real thing, the Perfect Storm. Real business customers could not conduct their business for a day. That something like this would happen was inevitable, but didnt’ we all expect it in the form of a major Internet outage? After all, on-demand vendors are likely to do everything in their power to avoid such outages – or do they? In the case of Salesforce.com, the answer is probably a yes: Earlier this year, Salesforce.com announced it would spend US$50 million to set up redundant East Coast and West Coast data centers with rapid data replication and failover capabilities, an initiative it dubbed “MirrorForce.” (source: IDG).
That’s exactly the kind of commitment Brad and Jeff are asking for, and not all (smaller) providers can afford it. Not that they all should… their core competency being in developing innvative software, not running data centers, which should be outsourced to the “pros” like Vinnie Mirchandani pointed it out numerous times.
Back to our “Perfect Storm”, it will have an effect on the entire on-demand industry, since Salesforce.com is such an icon for this segment. SAP, Oracle etc… will no doubt refer to this “vulnerability” in their sales pitches. Rival NetSuite will not brag about it on their homepage, but their salesforce will likely be trained to point out to prospects why this could never happen to them …
What exactly happened is still unknown – which in itself is quite a customer communications fiasco on Salesforce.com’s part. I bet it will soon be fixed though: the company will come forward with an explanation of what happened, what they do to avoid it in the future, and what they do to accomodate their customers who suffered from the outage. My bet is on Marc Benioff – he will somehow manage to turn this fiasco into a PR victory.
Talk about communication, I am amazed the blogosphere is not abuzz with this story – in fact it’s hardly being mentioned, in sharp contrast to the recent Typepad outage. Isn’t this the type of imbalance Chris Selland and Brad Feld just complained about? Or is everyone out Christmas shopping? 🙂 Ohh… stores close soon .. gotta run now:-)
P.S. Salesforceless.com is a valid site – I just bought it. (not that I know what to do with it… )
Happy Holidays!
Update (12/21): Others on the subject:
Update (12/23): Unlike Salesforce(less).com, TechCrunch is not mission critical software, just an extremely popular blog, yet when they have an outage, Mike finds it important enough to go public right-away. Way to go!
Update (12/31): Reuters talks about Web Services outages, citing Typepad, del.icio.us … etc, not even mentioning Salesforce(less).com. Funny… Nice-to-have services appear to be more important than mission critical business applications?
As if all the extended technical problems were not enough, now this: “Mena Trott implodes on stage at Les Blogs: calls participant an Asshole after lecturing audience about the importance of civility” (via The Blog Herald).
Yuck. Their user community’s love isn’t endless … and in the meantime there are other good blogging platforms. Pretty bad form, IMHO:-(
Update (12/7-8): This is now the juicy story of the Blogosphere:
… etc… etc… I wonder how long before it becomes Technorati #1?
Tags: Blogging, SixApart, Manners, Civility, LesBlogs, LesBlogs2
Winnie Mirchandani started a series of posts on business processes that badly need “angioplasty“. Processing rebates is certainly a most convoluted process – unfortunately by design. As Business Week points out, 40% of all rebates never get redeemed – and the industry counts on it.
(The Palm spinoff reunited with Palm again). Sent in not only
paperwork, but an actual, working older Palm III as trade-in
unit. The $100 rebate never arrived, not even after numerous
phone-calls and emails. They demanded copies of everything – but
of course I can’s just copy the trade-in unit. My
loss: $100 rebate, $50 trade-in value for the old Palm, about a
full day of my time fighting the bureaucracy. Did they lose
me as a customer? No.. still purchased all subsequent Treo
models:-(
Christmas shopping season is here, and we’re
all loyal players in the Grand Customer Deception game … I’m afraid the
angioplasty won’t be performed any time soon.
Tags: rebate, rebates, customer service, customer disservice, retail, deception, business process
Microsoft appears to think the safest PC is one you don’t access at all…
CNET reports Critical Windows patch may wreak PC havoc:
“Installing the patch can cause serious problems, Microsoft said in an advisory posted to its Web site Friday. The patch could lock users out of their PC, prevent the Windows Firewall from starting, block certain applications from running or installing, and empty the network connections folder, among other things, the software maker said. “
But wait, here comes the best part:
“ Even if users experience PC trouble after installing the patch, they will still be protected against any attack exploiting the Windows flaw, a Microsoft representative said. “
Let me get this straight: I get locked out of my PC, and I’ll be safe from attacks. (???)
I have a few better ideas:
Tags: Windows, Windows Update, Critical Update, WinXP, Windows XP, XP, Security
(Updates at the bottom)
Technorati is dressing up a dying sick body in fancy new clothes. Who cares, if the body fails it’s basic functions?
The latest new feature, Blog Finder meets more criticism than welcome: here, here, here, here, to list just a few, but it’s all so irrelevant. Let’s face it: it really does not matter, whether this latest feature works or not. There’s an old IT axiom: Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you have the wrong data to begin with, it really does not matter how many layers of extra services you put on it, the output is still worthless.
Everybody seems to be talking about performance problems; for example here, here, here, here, here and here, but IMHO not getting data out of Technorati is by far not the worst; getting the WRONG information is far, far worse. Techorati has major problems parsing the main pages of blogs built on standard templates of major bog platforms, and the result is the result is entries in their metadata where:
I myself, and other bloggers documented this before: here, here, here and here again just giving a sample, and here’s a little gem of a title and article that have nothing to do with each other:
Now, let’s talk about communication: emailing techorati support is a complete dead end. Bloggers quickly learned the trick: emailing Dave Sifry (CEO), or perhaps Kevin Marks, or tagging blog entries with their names used to result in a response, and sometimes even corrective action. That’s no longer the case. I understand. The CEO personally emailing back is not exactly scalable communication. But why doesn’t Technorati have a searchable Knowledge Base, or at least a FAQ of known issues and solutions? This is really Customer Service 101.
The SiliconBeat, Joi Ito, and many others welcome Dave Sifry’s post discussing the problems: “ Once we got our keyword search infrastructure back on track, our infrastructure team has been working 100% on fixing Cosmos search. Our current plan is to have Cosmos search back up and running by the end of September .“
Sorry, Dave, but your keyword search is far from fixed, it still results in timeout in more than half the cases.. in fact the Technorati homepage is often unaccessible. On this chart a response time above 3 seconds is considered critical – wow, I am generally happy getting anything below 30 seconds, if at all. On the input side, Technorati claims to index posts within minutes, yet several influential bloggers complain they have not been indexed for weeks. Dave strikes an honest tone and discusses some of the issues, but frankly, I doubt he really knows the status of his own business.
All this makes me wonder if Technorati is an “idea company” – they truly are Innovators of the Blogosphere, just can’t execute. This makes me wish BL Ochman’s recent “hot tip” about an imminent buyout were true.
Update (9/10) This is pathetic: New Orleans is listed as #6 on the Tehcnorati Top Search list, yet clicking on it results in this:
Update (9/11) Can’t log in to Technorati account, infinite loop asking to log in again and again …
Tags: Blogs, Blogging, Technorati, Technorati Bugs, Tags, Tagging, Sifry, Customer Service, Customer Disservice
What does a “Bitch Dog” and a “Palestinian Bomber” have in common?
My guess: disgruntled customer service employees messing up their employer’s CRM data.
(via Chris Selland and Brad Feld)
Update: (8/28) Oops, there’s more.. has being rude and brainless become a hiring criteria nationwide?
What’s next?
Update (3/18/07): Next is Hertz calling Phil Wainewright “English John”. Phil, compared to the above, that’s not too bad 🙂
Tags: CRM, Customer Service, Customer Disservice, Customer Data
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