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3 brands with crap customer service, and 1 good one…

Henry Elliss — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:59:38 +0000

I’ve been delaying writing this blog for months, partially because I’m a bit worried it’s going to be a mammoth one, but mainly because I was hoping all these issues would have been resolved by now. I’m finally biting the bullet and writing it now though, inspired by the positive response I got from 1 of these 4 companies. I’d normally write this sort of subject up on the Tamar blog, but since these are all starkly my own opinions (and in some cases I may get a little snipey) I thought it safest to write it here… So here’s the low-down, as I believe the kids on the street (don’t) say:

Company: The Google Store (run in the UK by ‘Merchandise Mania’)
What I paid for: A bunch of Google branded merchandise – a baby-gro (which will no longer fit, if it ever arrives), a cool USB laser-pointer thingy, plus a few other bits.
What I got: Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Ordered on September 3rd 2010, still no merchandise.
What happened when I complained: I’ve sent numerous e-mails, submitted an enquiry on the website and tweeted about it a few times, but if I’m remembering correctly I’ve never even had a reply. To be fair to Google here, the store is operated by different companies around the world, so I suppose this is more the merchandiser’s problem, but I would have hoped Google might have kept a closer tab on complaints and issues.

Company: Lastminute.com
What I paid for: I booked a stay at the Custom House hotel for the night of Kevin Smith’s big O2 gig, which I had tickets for. Didn’t break the bank, but I spent a bit more than I could have as I thought I might as well stay somewhere nice for my “evening out”…
What I got: Upon arriving for a pre-gig check-in, I was told that due to some error they didn’t explain, I had been moved to an “equivalent hotel” – the Ibis “over the road”. After walking the 20-minute walk to the Ibis, I checked in to the crappy Ibis. I should point out at this point that the reason I chose Custom House was for 4 specific reasons: It’s closeness to the DLR station – walking around the Docklands late at night is not a fun prospect; It’s promised facilities, including “On-demand HD movies”; High-speed internet access; Room service – perfect for the post-gig dinner. The Ibis had NONE of these features – the TV barely even picked up ITV, and I had to eat my dinner in reception!
What happened when I complained: My initial query was ignored for a few days, and only when I tweeted about it did I get a proper response. The customer service lady kept phoning me at the office, despite my plea to deal with it over e-mail – a classic technique to get me to accept a cobbled apology and move on. The gist of the initial “resolution” was that the Ibis disagreed, so tough shit (I’m paraphrasing). I didn’t give up at that, so after they’d made more enquiries and ignored my e-mails for weeks on end, they eventually gave me a £20 partial refund, basically to shut me up…. I was massively disappointed by this, especially from a company who seem to pride themselves on their great use of social media and their super customer support. And don’t even start me on the next time I used them – I’ll save that for another day, but needless to say I lost the £20 I got refunded!

Company: RockYou, the Facebook app developers
What I paid for: Wanting to see what this game was like, I started playing “Zoo World” for a few days, before seeing what I’d get for a tenner. Being a long-time Packrat player, I’ve always been very impressed with what you get from Alamofire when you pay for credits in their game, so I thought I’d give this app a go. I used PayPal to buy a $20 pack of ‘wildlife points’ – points you can use within the game.
What I got: What I paid for.. at first. It has since disappeared!
What happened when I complained: Despite being the biggest app developer on Facebook, raking in millions of dollars a year, Rockyou have utterly shit customer support. I’ve complained about the disappearance of my “credits” on their offsite forum, their Facebook fan page AND the main RockYou website, but haven’t received a single reply. The bastards… :D

The silver-lining after all this cloud….

Company: Coca Cola – cokezone
What I paid for: I’ve been religiously collecting CokeZone points for almost a year, with the aim of getting one of the magazine subscriptions you can swap them for – namely, Empire. Having collected 250 points, I claimed my subscription in late November 2009…
What I got: As of last week, my “rewards” page was still listing the subscription as being “processed” – almost 2 months later….
What happened when I complained: I made enquiries through the CokeZone website, to little avail, when I decided to try Tweeting both @EmpireMagazine and @CocaCola about the problem. Both replied within 20 minutes, with Coke passing me the e-mail of a person who very quickly solved the issue. Not only did they get the subscription (hopefully) sorted, they also refunded me the 250 points as an apology. What a nice gesture!

There you go, I told you it would be a bit of a mammoth post….! :D

My 5 relatively-boring (online) aims for 2010

Henry Elliss — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:31:07 +0000

As I’ve just discovered that I can post blogs from my Blackberry, I thought I’d take this opportunity (I.e. A very dull train journey to work) to jot down some of my online aims for 2010. I know what you’re thinking – dull, Dull, DULL! I think the same every time I spot a “10 greatest blah in 2009″ list on Twitter, so I don’t blame you at all if you skip this. But I reckon that by writing it down in a public forum, I might just have a chance of sticking to some of these…

Consolidate my efforts…

Having been doing internetty stuff for over 15 years now, I’ve collected quite a few different sites, projects and profiles along the way. Just as I think it will be for the internet as a whole, I’m going to aim to consolidate and reduce the amount of different places I ‘reside’ in 2010 – or at the very least try to reduce duplication and confusion.

Just off the top of my head I can list social networks I belong to (Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, FriendFeed, Yammer, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Google and Plaxo), websites I build/maintain (Melissa George, Elize du Toit, this one, My New York Wedding site, Our First Flat, Scilly Holiday), Projects I’ve started up (My social mash-up friend map, My family tree site, …) And many others I’ve probably forgotten. And that’s before I even start thinking about the sites I work on/with at Tamar. It’s a lot to remember! So I’m hoping to consolidate that down a bit… I think I’m going to start by closing my MySpace and Bebo accounts, since I haven’t got anything useful out of them for well over a year.

Take a photo every day

I know this seems slightly ironic given my point above, but little projects like this are what makes the internet fun for me. As I explained in a previous post, I’m going to aim to produce a “My year in photos” collection over 2010, with a photo for every single day of the year. And for those of you that follow me on Twitter and see what I usually Twitpic – don’t worry, I’ll try to keep the pictures of my son to a minimum, I promise!

Blog smarter

As I already explained in my very first post, I do quite a bit of blogging already – not just here (if you can even call my sporadic missives ‘blogging’), but on the Tamar blog, the Econsultancy blog, Media140 and a few others. But in 2010 I’m going to try to blog more – not necessarily *more* blogging, just smarter blogging. I definitely need to keep this place a bit more lively, and I might start inviting guest bloggers on if anybody wants to contribute. With my work blogs I’m going to try to blog more about subjects people actually want to read about – not just a vanity exercise. And particularly with my work blogs, I’m only going to blog if there’s a clear benefit to doing so – not for me, obviously, but for my work.

300 entries on my map by 2011

Another of my favourite little projects at the moment is my social mash-up friend map thingy (note to self: come up with a better name for it…). I’ve had some great new entries on it lately, including some famous faces you might recognise (if you can find them!). I think the map currently has 124 photos on it – by the end of 2010 I want to get that to 300, which I think is pretty achievable. Heck, I’ve got 700 connections on Facebook, plus well over 1,000 on Twitter – 300 is a reasonable-enough chunk of that to aim for…

Somehow top 2009

Thanks to the internet, I have been lucky enough to do some very cool (and some very odd) things the past few years. As well as an appearance in The Times, a few very unflattering appearances on London Tonight, a totally libelous appearance in a book (and several subsequent mentions on the radio because of it) and meeting a few cool famous peeople, 2009 was topped off with an appearance on BBC1′s ‘Imagine‘ and a trip to Downing Street. I’m not entirely sure I *can* top those. without doing something illegal, so maybe this is a tough one – but at the very least I’d like to think I’ll get to do other interesting things in 2010…

To blog or not to blog – that is the question

Henry Elliss — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:28:40 +0000

Welcome to my brand new blog… possibly!

I’ve been mulling over the idea of having my own blog for a few years now (how indecisive am I?!) and have finally decided to dip my toe in the water and see how it feels. It’s not a decision I’m taking lightly though. Just like the issue of our over-crowded global population, I’m firmly of the opinion that there are already far too many blogs in the world (200 million plus, last time I heard!) so starting yet another is something I feel a little guilty about. To take the analogy further, there are also also a lot of unloved blogs out there in the world – perhaps I should have considered adopting an unwanted one first? Does it even work like that?!

Either way, I thought I’d at the very least give personal blogging a go – I promise I’ll stop it and delete it if nobody is reading it, how about that? I say “personal blogging” because I’m actually a regular blogger as it is anyway. I blog on our work blog at Tamar, plus I occassionally guest-blog on sites like Media140 and Econsultancy. I also run several different web projects too (details of which I’m sure I’ll share if I keep this going!) and have a very busy job and family life, so this isn’t something I’m going to be able to devote a shed-load of time to. But I promise that I’ll try to only post stuff that other people might find interesting.

One of the reasons I finally took the plunge today was a realisation that, despite blogging in a number of different places, I don’t actually have anywhere (bar Twitter) where I can give my opinion on things non-work related. For instance, I recently had a crappy experience with the LastMinute.com customer “support” team, but short of tweeting about it there was nowhere I could vent. Just the other day on Twitter I asked Google’s Spaminator Matt Cutts how best to deal with an issue I’ve had with a Google Store order (see left). His response reaffirmed the issue that not having my own blog means I have nowhere to air issues like that – so I thought that the simplest way to deal with that was to start one!

But before taking the final step and installing WordPress as I have (and messing around with my first slew of plugins), I jotted down a few of the pro’s and con’s to me doing this, which was what eventually persuaded me. Here’s what I came up with – let me know if I missed any!

To Blog – As I outlined above, I don’t have anywhere to post non-work related stuff, rants, vents, funnies or just random stuff.
Not to Blog – Does anyone actually want to read that though?! Probably not for the majority, but the ability to have somewhere to rant about companies and have them actually have a chance of seeing it and taking notice is quite appealing.
To Blog – I’ve got a reasonably-okay following on Twitter, so surely I can get a few people to read this, with the right incentives?
Not to Blog – Let’s face it, most of them at Br!tney spam-bots anyway – can spam-bots even read?!
To Blog – Back when I first started out with websites, I used the site henweb.co.uk as my “hub” – a good place to link to all the different stuff I was doing. I’ve not had that for a long time, and if nothing else it’ll make sure I don’t forget stuff I’m doing, which is something that happens far too often! :D
Not to Blog – There are already 200 million blogs. Do I really need to make that 200,000,001? Have I even got time to update it or enough crap to say?
To Blog – OF COURSE I HAVE! Anyone who knows me will attest that I’ve *always* got crap to say…! :D
Not to Blog – Is blogging just an exercise in online vanity?
To Blog – A few people have told me I’m an alright wordsmith in the past – including a few writers that I respect a lot. Even if nobody reads this, practise is always good isn’t it?

I’m sure there are other reasons that I’ve missed – why not let me know via the comments? If I’m being honest, I suspect my pro/con exercise was actually doing more to convince me than I’d hoped it would, but I think I’ve decided that I’m going to give this a go…

Henry

P.S. People are always telling me that I don’t do endings very well, so you might want to bear that in mind if you’re going to subscribe…!