The likelihood is that I could probably be using my Mac a lot more effectively. I haven’t taken the time to get to know all the shortcuts. Simple things like file management seem far more difficult in Finder than when using Explorer in Windows. Photoshop feels no easier to use on one platform over another. I don’t even buy into the constant insistence that iTunes for OS X is good whilst the Windows version isn’t. I have no time for either, and they seem about the same to me!

I bought a Mac mainly to look at developing for iOS, like tens of thousands of others no doubt. I’d certainly take this over my prior attempt to develop for Android using an Eclipse environment in Windows, but for day to day use, Windows isn’t that bad, and OS X isn’t that good. The “it just works” philosophy is all well and good but really, the type of user that needs this level of simplicity doesn’t need a machine this powerful, and certainly not one this expensive. Depending on your viewpoint, you probably think i’m either stating the obvious or am completely wrong. There’s really no point arguing about it.

Bottom line – my Macbook Pro goes out of warranty tomorrow. If the tiny parts designed to last just long enough to ride out the warranty without any issues start breaking and i’m faced with shelling out for a whole new machine, it wouldn’t be close to a no-brainer.

That said, you’d have to be an idiot to buy another one of something that broke a day after the warranty expired.

It probably won’t break for a while yet, so I won’t make this decision now.

Faced with a generally lethargic internet connection, I emailed the complaints department that eventually helped me last time I had this issue but they confirmed my new area doesn’t suffer the same problem as my previous one and that I would need to take the normal route in. Trepidation.

Your customer feels trepidation when faced with raising an issue – you’re doing something wrong.

I called for broadband support, got nowhere, used the twitter route, and got nowhere. By some fantastic good luck, I received a feedback survey. This almost never happens when you want it to. Here’s my feedback, out in public, just in case it doesn’t do the desired job with whatever department i’ve submitted it to:

I called you for support, you told me your system was down, you needed to reboot, and would call me in 15 minutes. That was 3 days ago. You haven’t done anything to help me as far as I know, so you score nothing. Thankyou for this rare opportunity to contribute towards what have to be abysmal customer service scores. If anyone reads this, i’m still  waiting you YOU to call ME. Even your twitter team is now ignoring me, which is unusual. I eagerly await your call to explain everything that’s gone wrong so far, even though I 100% expected it to happen before dialing you number. After that maybe you can look at my issues after 70 hours of doing nothing to help me.

It’s been 2 days since the Twitter team started ignoring me so the weekend has nothing to do with this incidentally. Below are the tweets that accompany this “oh no not another negative Virgin Media story”.

Before I go, one more thing. One Twitter response says “we like to keep our promises”. I take issue with this. You take phone calls. Like any other big company, the person taking that phone call could be a high performing long standing team member or the new guy that won’t have worked out in a few weeks time. It could also be the long standing bare minimum type sick to death of his call centre job. Point is, unless you have a specific all encompassing process to handle promising to call someone back, you have virtually no chance of keeping the promise with any decent percentage of customers you promise it to. I’m going to assume you don’t have anything of the sort, though i’d love to be wrong. What you perhaps should have said is, “we like to keep our promises, but our processes don’t allow for it”. If they did, you’d have called me back. Saying you like to do the right thing is cheap. You should be most concerned that I had no expectation of receiving my call back.

You make a promise that I immediately assume you’ll break – you’re doing something wrong!

genre selection on virgin media's hold. must not get conned into thinking this means being asked to wait long is a good thing.

—
  (@tomdhawley) January 04, 2012

well that didn't take long. i've been through the rotation of three songs. songs tend to be 3 minutes. it's been ten. no surprises.

—
  (@tomdhawley) January 04, 2012

i suppose given tweets are timestamped i should admit that it's been 8, but 8 minutes before first contact is shit, virgin.

—
  (@tomdhawley) January 04, 2012

@tomdhawley We like to keep our promises, hope we did? ^JM

—
Virgin Media (@virginmedia) January 05, 2012

@tomdhawley Sorry you didn't get your call back :( Has anyone been in touch since? IP

—
Virgin Media (@virginmedia) January 05, 2012

problem is @virginmedia, your twitter and complaints side is a lot better than your call centre. do you have any influence there?

—
  (@tomdhawley) January 04, 2012

i don't want to rant about customer service @virginmedia, but after 45 minutes from kick-off, nobody has yet accessed my account!

—
  (@tomdhawley) January 04, 2012

@tomdhawley We hope this has been sorted for you. How did the call back go? ^JM

—
Virgin Media (@virginmedia) January 05, 2012

@virginmedia there was no call back. That's the point. I'd have happily put money on getting no call back. Nothing resolved whatsoever.

—
  (@tomdhawley) January 05, 2012

@virginmedia I should not now be expected to start again, wouldn't you agree?

—
  (@tomdhawley) January 05, 2012

@tomdhawley What was your call regarding Tom? ^SD

—
Virgin Media (@virginmedia) January 05, 2012

@virginmedia frequently getting about 1.5-2Mbps. Called on advice of complaints dept as they resolved the issue last time but...

—
  (@tomdhawley) January 05, 2012

@virginmedia ...on the call, but as i also said earlier, i shouldn't be expected to start again. too much time wasted. so. what now?

—
  (@tomdhawley) January 05, 2012

My latest customer service nightmare is Virgin Media who have been supplying me broadband with speeds between 100kbps and 800kbps throughout the vast majority of the first four months of my time with them. These were the kinds of speeds NTL sold back in 2002 when broadband was in it’s infancy. The service now is supposed to be 10,000kbps, so i’m getting between 1-10% of what i’m paying for. This is all the time, except very late at night when like most people, I prefer to sleep.

I won’t bore you with the entire history in detail, but it’s along simple lines. They admit it’s a network problem, they’ve allegedly tried three upgrades to fix it. I don’t know whether that specifically caused things to get even worse, but they are. Nothing has ever improved. On the CS side, not once have they ever emailed me without me first having to email them to remind them that I exist. They also refuse to provide regular updates on the basis that another department deals with the upgrade work. My response to this: they can talk to the other department and then talk to me. That seemed to upset them, as i’ve been ignored for the 13 days since making that perfectly reasonable request. I followed up with this today.

Good morning,

This email would be intended for X, but as I addressed him directly in my last email and heard nothing back, I’d like to be clear that in the event of his absence I want this to be dealt with by somebody else.

I last emailed you on 13/09 and have received no response. This actually is surprising and disappointing as you’ve been fairly quick to respond until now.

Another window of expected progress on my very long standing speed issue has passed and at least the third time you haven’t taken the initiative to contact me to tell me why absolutely nothing has changed. Please get back to me on the topics of the previous email (i asked several questions to which I still want the answers) and give me an update on Monday (27/09) or i’ll have to assume i’m being intentionally ignored and submit a new complaint, this time on the topic of Customer Services.

I asked for this issue to be escalated in my last email precisely because I don’t feel it’s being given enough priority, and if you completely ignoring me for 12 days doesn’t prove i’m right about this I don’t know what does. Please could you let me know who manages complaints as i’d also like to send them an email. I dislike the culture of copying in higher-ups to be taken seriously, but I feel i’m out of options. Your site seems to indicate that James Mitchell and Claire Aitkenhead are the right people. Am I on the right lines? Your site also suggests if I copy in Neil Berkett or Richard Branson it would get more attention from your team. I’ll do whatever works after 4 months and ZERO progress.

I wonder if you think i’m being unreasonable? I’m not. I’m paying good money, getting nothing close to what I should for it, and now getting no customer service to boot. I have every right to expect you to deal with this, and you absolutely do have a responsibility to me, so please, get this back on track immediately.

Regards,

Tom Hawley

The frustration here is that cable has the potential to be so much better than the only alternative, ADSL. I find it so hard to accept that I may have to go back to pulling data through decades old strands of wire blowing in the wind above my street when there’s a whole network of cables that were actually meant to be used for data under the slabs capable of delivering speeds far higher than I’ll ever need. ADSL can only provide me around 4Mbps due to my distance from the exchange, but when Virgin Media is giving me less than 1Mbps most of the time, it may be time to accept that the inferior technology managed properly is better than the best technology horrendously mismanaged.

They’ve already given me the out if I want it:

Obviously the last thing we want you to do is cancel your service but I certainly do appreciate that right from the word go, your broadband performance has been affected. So if you wanted to go ahead with your request to cancel then I will release you from your contract with no cancellation fee’s being applied.

I’ve continued to ride this out across 4 months and 12 emails because they seem absolutely sure they’re capable of fixing this. I learned yesterday that my friend the other side of the main road I live next to has no problem with his Virgin Media broadband speeds. What are the odds that he’s connected to a different port to me with no problems when he’s so nearby? I don’t care. I shouldn’t need to think about any of this.

My hopes of Virgin Media coming through and working this out are extremely low. I throw out lines like this in the hope that it inspires them to prove me wrong. Perhaps admitting that negates the intent?

Why post this up? In the hopes that somebody searching “virgin media good or bad” considers the above before taking their plunge… and in the hope that it might inspire action to work on my issues of course.

I’m almost done chasing this rainbow. I’ll probably have to go “back to BT”, and that’s perhaps the worst thing of all. They never change either.

Anyone can see that the way mobile and home broadband providers alike throw around the term “unlimited*” amounts to false advertising. We’re used to that. This is different. The “unlimited*” claim is gradually disappearing. Who would have thought that what replaced them would be worse? Anyone paying attention, of course.

Today O2 launched their mid 90′s video chat on the iPhone 4. Know this. Either it nevers comes to 3G, or you will consume your monthly allowance within a few days using it. As an aside, I don’t care about that. I don’t want to video chat any more than anyone else in the world ever has. It’s the weakest addition to a far more tempting new iPhone than expected. Back on point. Video chat on iPhones is just one good example of the problem we have here. Within a few months, there won’t be any unlimited data plans to take up for any phone.

Don’t feel too sorry for mobile networks. They are backtracking and you have some right to be annoyed. They did promise too much early on in this brave new world. Were they to state that they couldn’t stay in business offering unlimited mobile internet, the wouldn’t be lying, but the way they’ve chosen to act on this reality is a step too far.

It would be perfectly fair to cap usage at 500MB/750MB/1GB, O2, if you were genuinely selling that bandwidth to me to consume when I choose to, but you’re not. You’re selling it with a 30 day expiry, after which you have the money, and you steal back whatever I haven’t used. I have my next 500MB, but i’ve just paid for that in full and who knows whether i’ll have used it 30 days from now?

In any normal month I won’t top your 16MB/day (500MB/month) cap, O2. But all that supposed goodwill I should be building up during months of using maybe 2-300MB means nothing to you. Next month when i’m stood on a cliff top 200 miles from home with particularly good 3G reception downloading all the podcasts I want to listen to on the long drive home the next day, i’ll hit your cap. What happens after that is unthinkable. Its pounds per Megabyte. That’s a penalty, not a price. You shouldn’t be penalising loyal customers. You’re not a bank.

Why not pay more for the 1GB plan? Two reasons. First, it costs a lot more and gives me call/text allowances far higher than I need. Second, even with a 1GB cap, i’ll still be using well under 16MB most days of any normal month.

There’s no value for value here. It’s just the latest instance of an age old practice of packaging things in such a way as to force customers into having to decide between something which won’t meet their needs and something which on a normal day would far exceed them. It’s worth noting that even then, with 1GB a month we’re talking about 32MB a day, which is about the amount a phone with a strong 3G signal can pull back in under 5 minutes.

I’d talk about O2 having lied to me over the phone three times in a one week period, but i’m sick of the topic already.

The online interface for the ASDA card was always weak, breaking constantly. Logging in required the account number every single time and that’s still true today. Junk. Whichever owner was in charge at the time put up notices on the site saying username logins were coming. That was about a year ago from memory. Whichever company promised it, they clearly changed their mind. Liars.

That said, once you were logged in, transactions and statements were easy to access and making a payment was well integrated. Clicked the button, entered some payment card details and more often than not, it processed it.

That interface has this month been removed and replaced with the crap pictured.

In case it’s not completely clear, this is a disjointed page not related to the ASDA card account manager, requiring entry of the account number in full before the card details. In Firefox the card branding images obscure two vital text boxes. Even if they didn’t, this page inspires no confidence. There’s no way i’m using this excuse for a payment page.

As a bonus, the page leading here informs us to note the transaction reference, as they can’t provide a confirmation email. Of course they can’t! The page has nothing to do with the site we’re using. They have no idea what my email address is. That’s way off in an entirely different database!

I’m one of the parasites that signed up for this card purely to buy petrol and get a 2p/litre discount, which they dropped to 1p/litre and no doubt will drop altogether before too long. I look forward to cutting the thing in half when it becomes worthless. I’m not the guy they want, customer wise, but I can imagine just how this experience translates to the poor debt-laden card jugglers.

Sort it out, Santander. There’s so little to like about you overall. You have no real identity, yet you’re destroying existing identities, you’re sacking people, naturally, and your web interface is dismal.

With the two most recent versions, for some reason the names haven’t gelled with me. Until I just looked it up, I couldn’t remember what kind of animal, or what it’s key characteristic was. I know it’s 9.04 and that’s all. When looking for support people like to use the characteristic to refer to the version rather than the number, e.g. “Gutsy”, so obviously this is important!

At first I thought it was the number of syllables in the characteristic. Gut-sy and Har-dy roll nicely off the tounge, but then so does Jaun-ty and I failed to remember it.

I think it’s about the number of syllables in both words. No more than two. More than two and it’s a poor choice. In-tre-pid I-bex and Jaun-ty Jack-a-lope are the only versions with three syllable words.

Next up, Karmic Koala. Now THAT is a good Ubuntu version name.

Here’s a scenario i’m hating right now:

- Lovefilm likes to save what must be a minute amount of money on postage and envelopes by sending discs together in one envelope whenever the customer is stupid enough to give them the opportunity = whenever they dare to return two titles within about a day of each other.

- Lovefilm encourages customers to send titles back in the same way, optional though it must be. Unfortunately this would degrade the service for the customer as they end up holding on to one watched disc until they watc another, therefore no customer in their right mind would opt to do this. This point is the one they seem to have the hardest time understanding, incredibly obvious as it is.

- Lovefilm therefore creates a situation whereby the customer runs out of envelopes, because they receive two discs in one envelope, but only return one in said envelope.

- Lovefilm on their help pages make the audacious claim that we “can” send discs back in any envelope, by just putting the freepost address on it. As I have pointed out to their customer service agents on many occasions, a major part of the deal when I signed up for this service was sending discs back in the envelope provided. Show me where in the advert it said I had to get out of work in time to find an open shop and buy a DVD sized envelope at my own expense.

- Lovefilm, almost to their credit, states at the very bottom of the same help page that if they wish to, customers can click a link to order spare envelopes. This would solve all my problems. I still dislike all of the above, but this would keep me happy enough to stop complaining.

Sadly, this link doesn’t do anything for me. After twelve days of trying the link and being told by customer services that they have also manually dispatched envelopes to me twice, i’m tired of the battle. It’s time for Lovefilm to step up and walk to a post box because i’m shouting about it, as they sure don’t seem interested in doing any more than repeatedly trying the same thing I tried in the first place at the moment.

Here’s my latest rant to customer services. I know it tends to be better to maintain politeness in these communications, and the earlier ones did, but as I say in the first paragraph, they’re not paying any attention anyway:

You’re not helping. As usual you’re ignoring what i’m actually saying. You’ve tried to send me envelopes three times now with no luck and you still think it’s worth trying a fourth? Where’s the common sense? Does your thought process not give you a clue that something else might be wrong here? No. You’ll keep hitting a button that is clearly doing nothing rather than actually spending any time helping me.

Please escalate this to a manager immediately. I’m baffled by your inadequacy over something so incredibly simple.

If you had a competent competitor you’d have lost my custom a week ago. Since you don’t, i’ll just do all I can to make public your inability to perform simple tasks in the hope that it might incentivise you to learn. I see your twitter support person is now ignoring me after initially taking an interest. I suppose the complexity of the problem, mailing an empty envelope to an address, sent them running.

I’m going to have to look into starting some kind of customer service crusade sooner or later, because there simply aren’t any good experiences to be found anywhere at the moment, and having to go to the lengths of public shaming to get the most simple problems looked at is far from ideal.

Supervisory Intervention [20/08/09]

Well, finally, 13 days since being promised envelopes I have a serious response from Lovefilm:

The tool on the website which dispatches spare envelopes to customers via their account page has became faulty. This was an issue in the fulfilment part of the dispatch so customer’s accounts pages would appear as though the request had been successful and actioned.

Any agents dealing with customers in this regard would have been advising that the dispatch had occurred, however this was unintentionally the incorrect information.

This matter has been raised with the technical department and work on a fix will begin immediately.

I apologies for the inconvenience caused and have immediately arranged for some envelopes to be sent manually from the distribution centre. In the interests of goodwill, I have added 1 free month of service to your account to hopefully allow for the time that you have lost.

I trust this is in order

This pretty much confirms that the now 5+ assurances including Customer Services and @lovefilm on Twitter have been empty, meaningless.. call it what you want. I include today’s reassurance from @lovefilm because no mention was made of the above technical issue, so @lovefilm probably didn’t know. If not then surely @lovefilm would have mentioned it? There doesn’t seem to be any notable link between Customer Services and @lovefilm on Twitter.

Better, I think, that they found a genuine issue and may fix it meaning in future the link may work than going through this again next time the two in one envelope policy catches me out (customers love to be caught out by companies they pay £13 a month to – gives us a warm feeling inside) but that it took this long and of course, escalation to convince anybody there was a problem that is clearly very real doesn’t smell like good CS. The honest response does however win some points with me, and the compensation helps too, though i’ll have to keep an eye on my bank account and make sure that actually happens.

Good, bad or somewhere in the middle, this isn’t over until envelopes arrive on my doorstep, and we’re not there yet. I did get a DVD today though, a film called ’21′ about card counting students. Looks good. That took two days to arrive, so i’ll expect the envelopes on Saturday. For that I blame Royal Mail – a company far worse than Lovefilm, no question.

Sorted  [21/08/09]

A total of twelve envelopes showed up at last, so it looks like the manual effort by the supervisor had the desired effect, and judging by the sheer number I now have, I imagine the @lovefilm (twitter) attempt may have also been successful. It’s going to be a while before I have to face this problem again, for which I am thankful. I’d still rather they went to one DVD per envelope, but I don’t see it happening. @lovefilm completely ignored that suggestion. @lovefilm is extremely selective about what @lovefilm responds to, considering the volume of mentions @lovefilm gets is actually quite low. Companies haven’t worked this twitter usage out yet, and I expect most will decide against it sooner or later. Maybe some more about that in another post.

The overall customer experience here was very poor until the last few days. All but the supervisory response from customer services was useless, not because of the lack of envelopes as they were clearly misled by their system, but because they simply didn’t listen to anything I was saying. I see no reason why only a supervisor should be able to delve beyond the most basic complaints. To repeat myself, that’s not helpful.

Having been right on from day one about the problem it’s very easy to be smug here, but moving past that this does lead to a nugget that CS departments should consider… Systems aren’t always right. If your system is saying one thing and i’m saying another, you’re probably better off listening to me. I am a real person and I have no reason to lie to you! Your system can lie to you without even knowing it’s doing it and without any malicious intent. Put the person first.

Incidentally, the free month has been applied to my account as my next billing date has advanced by a month, so thats a definite upside. BT wasted a lot more of my time and gave me £3 less compensation just a few months ago.

There’s a tendancy people have to be so elated when a problem finally gets resolved that all is forgiven immediately. This is a really bad thing and it’s a huge contributor towards poor customer service. It tells businesses that people don’t mind waiting for a resolution as long as a good one eventually comes along. I’ve been guilty of helping maintaining this pattern of behaviour, but i’m trying to change.

LOVEFiLM Customer Service spent about 10 of 12 working days failing to help me at all. For that they get no points. The eventual resolution also loses points for being far too late. If the things that were done on those last two days were done on the first two, this would have been a positive experience. Things being as they were, this one gets filed under poor customer service.

Users must love this model. Pay once and get lifetime upgrades for nothing. This is fine for Facebook and Zynga poker, incentivised by visits to their respective sites every time their app is used, but many great apps aren’t necessarily those tied to large sites, or even tied to sites at all. What does this great deal mean for smaller, standalone apps?

Unless a few developers are going to prove me wrong over the coming months, it seems to incentivise getting one app out of the door, then moving on to the next. Why, as a developer, spend time improving an application when you stand to earn nothing more from existing users? To create buzz perhaps and entice new users, but the fact is some of these apps have a certain user base that will exhaust itself fairly quickly. It doesn’t seem likely that smaller app developers sustain initial sales. Existing users may be all these developers have.

We’ll pay for the next version of Windows and OS X. Apple even charge iPod Touch users to upgrade to iPhone OS 3.0. This is a good concept; it’s just the price points that can vary from nominal (Snow Leopard) to extortionate  (Windows 7 Ultimate).

The application I use more than any other on my iPhone seems to be stagnating. I won’t name it here because I still hope i’m wrong, but I see questions aimed at the developer going unanswered. I would much, much rather feed another $1 into the machine for an upgrade to what I think was a $2 app for bug fixes and improvements than see the current version be the last to ship whilst the developer moves on to concentrate on an application I have no interest before abandoning that and moving on yet again.

Here i’ll be accountable. One more personal blog in a sea of millions.