Well, i’ve fallen off this wagon, probably for the better I think. Americano coffee is nice enough, but not quite the same luxurious experience as the real stuff – which is much more suitable for the winter weather….
On Monday I flew up to Edinburgh from London City Airport – first time i’ve done that as I usually go via Heathrow or Luton which are closer to where I live.
The downside to City always used to be the cost – because it was geared up for ‘city’ types on expenses then the flights used to cost an arm and a leg – but now that Royal Bank and HBoS staff are grounded the rates seems to have come right down and it make City a nice place to travel from – like a day in a spa compared to Heathrow!!!!
Well, it does not happen often, but i’m actually very pleased with a new product i’ve bought – a Toyota Prius. It’s not flash, but it has good gadgets in it and just drives well.
Of course all did not go 100% smoothly; I leased the car and had a torturous time getting the paperwork I need from the lease company to get residents parking and residents discount for congestion charge.
Same happened with the last car – reminder to self, don’t lease another car without sorting this out in advance.
When O2 first announced that they were to be the first UK mobile operator to have the rights to sell iPhones and contracts, there was a lot of debate as to whether they had paid too much in terms of revenue share they’d have to give to Apple.
I actually thought that they’d do well from it, irrespective of the relatively high share they were giving away. My logic was based on that they were likely to be acquiring ‘happy customers’, i.e. customers who, on average, would be advocates – of the phone and by default of O2, until such time as their exclusivity runs out. As input to that, I had considered the USA launch, noting that despite locked phones, the post launch price cut, and relatively poor mobile service from AT & T, the vast majority of existing customers are still massively positive about the device – and sales figures continue to look good.
I even pondered for a moment that O2 might have taken this acquisition of happy customers into account in their calculations and that they had figured out the ‘net promoter’ impact to show an overall positive return. Of course that would therefore mean that O2 were in full control of the launch plan, had designed the perfect customer experience around it, and all they had to do was hit the on button on 9th November……and that was where my assumptions seem to have fallen apart.
Consider what has actually happened in my case:
- I am a long term O2 contract customer, on a reasonably high tariff, and they regularly tell me how important I am to them, and how I have my own special ‘select’ number to call if I want to talk to them.
- When the iPhone deal was announced I phoned them up to see what the deal/ options were going to be; their answer…….go to our web site and have a look, we can’t tell you anything over the phone.
- Fair enough I thought, their call volumes will be very high so I can understand their logic, although I thought the might have a programme to allow existing customers to talk to someone.
- As time went on, there were no more details announced, so I thought I’d phone up again to have some specific questions answered. On that call, the penny dropped for me….there is no designed customer experience, or at least not a good one, there is no segmentation in place that differentiates between existing and new customers…..and that the all my thoughts about O2 acquiring advocates were about to fall by the wayside.
In fact it’s worse than that – the 1600 minutes I have stacked up in credit with O2 will disappear if I merge my existing account with an iPhone account. So as an existing customer it costs me more to switch to an iPhone than it does for a new subscriber. And when I then look at how I come to have 1600 minutes built up, I realise that the O2 proposition that supposedly keeps me on the right tariff is not worth the paper it is written on
So – what does that tell us (other than that I will need to spend most of this week on the phone to use up my credits)? I think it tells us that:
1) O2 are going to miss out on the chance to buy/ convert a load of high value, customers who could improve the advocate balance of their customer base (which according to Reicheld is the only metric that matters).
2) That there is obviously some weirdness going on behind the scenes in which O2 and Apple, whilst partnering, are squabbling over the customer experience – and Apple won.
3) That there is a strong danger that O2 will negatively impact trust and quality of relationships in that segment of their customer base that is already a loyal customer, and which switches to an iPhone.
Come on O2 – you’ve got 3 days to at least notice that you have ignored your existing customers. You seem to be able to send me text messages about all sorts of irrelevant stuff – how about one about my iPhone and how to avoid losing my credits????
I took out a 12 month subscription to Setanta in July 07 and then found that I did not use it much (Rangers were having a very poor season so not much reason to watch).
I called them in mid July to cancel but could never get through – the call centre system did not have a queue and just kept asking me to ‘call back later’.
So, I backed things up with two e-mails – neither of which were responded to. Bear in mind that they had already taken my August payment and no doubt will be trying to take my September payment.
I finally got through to them on the phone this morning, only to be told that I had to put my cancellation request in writing.
They have wasted a lot of my time, and stolen my money – not good!!!! Now i’ll need to spend more time fighting to get my money back.
Well, the end of an era…..i’ve given up my Rangers season ticket after 20 years.
Admittedly this is partly to do with another truly bad season – no trophies for the second year running; but in practice it is more to do with the fact that living in London means that I only attend 5-6 games a year. I also don’t like the ‘lock-in’ approach that means I have to commit to buying tickets for all European games before the draw has been made – very inflexible and no use for those not living in Glasgow.
Anyway, the way the ticket situation is these days, I can just as easily buy a ticket for the games I want to see.
Of course, so far as Rangers are concerned – they won’t notice; as technically i’ve not given it up. My brother is taking it over and paying me for it. Of course if Rangers would adopt a more realistic/ customer friendly set of processes, we would not have to tackle things this way – not much chance of that happening; football clubs remain one of the less advanced sectors in terms of customer-friendly processes. No doubt this is a legacy of demand for tickets outweighing supply – eventually they will recognise that this is rarely still the case.
I was trying to renew one of my domain names that was bought originally through this lot. Despite sending me e-mails regularly, their customer log-in (which uses e-mail) refused to recognise my e-mail address so I could not get in to renew.
So….I had to then phone them up at a cost of 10p per minute. After 40 minutes on hold I got through to Peter – he said that he had to look up some information and that he’d call me back after 2 the next day – by which point I had one day left before the domain expired. From our discussion, I had very little confidence that this call-back was in fact going to happen – so I checked with Peter who re-assured me that he would indeed call back the following day to progress.
……guess what…..no call back. Thankfully I then found a way to renew the domain through the reseller I use who have an account with 123reg.
Needless to say, any business I have with 123reg is now about to be shifted.
This ongoing court case over bank charges looks set to rumble on for a while – although I don’t see how any can doubt that the bank charge regime quoted was based on excessive profits.
The much bigger issue, I suspect, will be this – the UK Information Commissioners investigation into practicies within Barclays call centres. There must be a lot of call centre managers panicking at present – Barclays are unlikely to be the only ones whose practices merit investigation.
It has emerged that in 2005, personal details of over 100,000 Bulldog Broadband customers were stolen.
Bulldog was under the ownership of Cable & Wireless at the time but has since been taken over by Pipex. Cable & Wireless has pledged to investigate the security breach.
James Brown, Managing Director of Bulldog Internet, told The Guardian newspaper: “Our understanding is that, following an external enquiry by Cable & Wireless, it has become apparent that at some point in December 2005, Cable & Wireless had some of their customer contact details illegally obtained by a third party. This resulted in a small number of their customers receiving unsolicited calls.”
While it hasn’t been made clear exactly what details were “illegally obtained”, although one of the affected consumers has apparently contacted The Guardian since and told them that the details included credit card and bank account details.
Despite this, a Cable & Wireless spokesperson insisted that none of the 100,000 customers had experienced their cards or accounts being accessed or used illegally.
“We are already taking appropriate legal action against the third parties that we believe may be responsible for this unauthorised use of our customer data,” she added.
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