Barking

I’m not an angry man and it takes a lot to irritate me, but O2 have managed it today.

Rewind a few weeks to the announcement by Apple that the 3G iPhone is being launched on the 11th July. I patiently waited for O2 to update their website, and registered to be kept updated (nothing has been emailed to me as of the 1st July). In the meantime I happened to be passing by my local O2 store after finding out other stores were pre-credit checking for the iPhone launch.

First bit of rubbish customer service by O2. It was a lunch time and there were four customers in the Coventy store. Two members of staff were on duty with a third on their lunch break. If I was running a retail store I’d schedule shifts so that staff lunches were not over the main lunch period of 12-2pm. That’s what happened when I worked at Waitrose.

So after a wait of 20 minutes I finally spoke to a lady and explained that I wanted to open a new business account for the iPhone with four handsets, pre-credit check so that I didn’t have to hand around on the launch date and what would I need to do:

Sorry sir, you can’t do that

Now I know that is not true, and explained that other people had been able to do it. She begrudginly walked off to ‘ask her manager’ who was hiding out the back of the store and not dealing with customers when it was busy.

She returned, said ‘oh yeah we can, you’ll have to come back on the 1st of July’. I asked her what I would need and she told me the various bits of paperwork I would need.

Fast forward to today. I rang the O2 store in Coventry, asked if I could come in and pre-credit check for a business account, and double checked the paperwork I would need. The man I spoke to on the phone confirmed the paperwork and said I could come in today and do it. I double checked this would be OK for the business account and was assured this was the case.

An hour later I arrived at the store. Same story - busy at lunch with a long queue. I had anticipated this and needed to do some banking. I did this, came back half an hour later and the queue had gone.

I explained to the man what I wanted to do, he sat me down and began the process.

Next mistake he tried to credit check me as a personal user.

The man then had to ring his manager (who was off), couldn’t get through, rang the Birmingham branch, the person wasn’t available and waited for a call back. 30 minutes later after lots of waiting and trying different numbers he finally spoke to another colleague who dis-interestingly said it wasn’t possible.

The young man explained that they had been told about the pre-credit/iPhone process yesterday and that they hadn’t received all the relevent training.

At this point I have wasted a good 2 hours of time, got fairly frustrated and feel like 02 don’t want the £4,000 they are going to make from me.

I find it hard to beleive that the second time round O2 are still disorganised, don’t have a process in place for the iPhone sale and generally can’t be bothered to take my money or make their (and my) life a bit easier by doing things in advanced.

Right now I’m feeling like a really can’t be bother switching to O2 and the iPhone  isn’t really worth all the hassle. I have been chasing O2, wasted my time, put up with rude staff and had to deal with a lack of competence and training.

If I could get the iPhone on another network I certain would (Orange’s customer service was fantastic when I was with them), at the moment it’s doubtful I will get one at all. Right now, O2 your organisation and customer service is awful.

My new set of moo cards arrived today, they aren’t my main business cards, more for social acquaintances I meet at events and friends etc. I thought I’d have a bit of fun with them this time. So as I always seem to make the coffee and Greg doesn’t let me code any more they say:

I’m the coffee boy at senokian.com, tactilecrm.com
& resolverm.com. Sometimes I’m allowed to code, but
not often. Mainly I work on marketing and biz stuff.
My name is Jake Stride, please keep in touch.
On the blower: +44 xxxx xxxxxx | Twitter: jstride
Email & GTalk: jake dot stride at senokian dot com

This is what the front and backs look like:

I saw this sign outside of my local pub. Brought a smile to my face:

Senokian are pleased to announce what we believe to be the first ever Cat-5 dog lead - the item is for sale on E-Bay, and all proceeds will go to charity (the Lymphoma association in the UK).

UPDATE: After a few requests I am going to post a bit more about the chosen charity and why I chose them.

The proceeds of this charity auction will be going to the Lymphoma association in the UK. I have personally had first hand experience of the work they do, after my Father passed away from non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma over 4 years ago and I was diagnosed with, and now successfully in remission from, Hodgkin’s Lymphoma - the fact my father and I both had types of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is not related and just chance.

The Lymphoma Association provide emotional support and information on a range of issues to anyone with lymphatic cancer and their families, carers and friends. They do a fantastic job and were one of the first organisations I came into contact with after my diagnosis. The support they offer is invaluable.

Today I forgot my dog’s lead when bringing him to work (Archie is on Twitter, he has been banned from Facebook for not being human, this blog is named after him, and he is mentioned in our ‘working with us‘ section on our website). As a result and after a quick bit of engineering in the office we came up with the hand crafted Cat-5 dog lead you see below:

We are fairly certain we have invented the first ever Cat-5 dog lead (please let us know if there is any prior art) and thought as other people have sold a load of old crap old rope on E-Bay, we’d give it a go too and sell our high quality Cat-5 dog lead on E-Bay and donate the profits to charity.

I went out last night for a drink with a few friends and we were discussing viral marketing and how many large companies can’t do what they want because of processes that they have in place.

We came up with a few various ideas and ways around them, but in the meantime we got onto the John West Salmon advert (below). This is another one of those adverts that has gone around the web, it has currently had over 1.8 million views.

It’s not as funny as the Brains one in my opinion, but I still find myself amused by it:

We’ve added a new category to the blog called ‘Meet Us‘. It’s a list of events that Senokian people are going to be at.

If you fancy meeting up or finding out more about us and what we do then keep an eye on it and let us know.

I thought the Cadbury’s Gorilla advert was quite funny but I never really got it.

I know it is sad, but this is my new favourite advert. I think it is absolute genius, it has a connection to the product and brings a smile to my face whenever I see. I don’t think it will be as big as the Cadbury one, but well done Drench:

We get quite a few emails about why the blog is called barking so I thought I’d right write a quick post as to why.

As many of you will know, Archie is our office dog and he comes in every day to keep everyone company. Technically he is ‘Head of Morale and Security’ although he would soon sooner lick you to death than get aggressive!

Unfortunately the story is no more interesting than we needed a name for the blog and thought barking seemed like a good a name as any - we did think it would be nice to name it after Archie but thought that didn’t fit quite as well as barking - so there you are.

You never know, we may one day get a guest post from him; the best you will get for the moment though is some pictures of him enjoying himself on a recent trip to Cornwall.

Had a great afternoon at the TechCrunch UK meetup yesterday, spoke to a lot of cool people and got a few people interested in Tactile CRM.

Blagged some swag, a couple of t-shirts, a bag and a frisbee too, and managed to snap Mike Butcher with one of our dragons on his head!

I had an interesting conversation with a few guys about usability and managed to get some good tips about Corsica for my trip in July! A few cheeky beers were had throughout the afternoon and everyone was really friendly.

Well done to Mike for organising the event and I look forward to the next one.

When launching a new product, such as Tactile CRM, I have found there are two main areas that you need to work on. The first is obviously writing the software itself and the second is marketing that product and getting people to use/pay for it.

Tactile CRM has been live for a couple of months now and we are really pleased with the number of people signing up (we are currently on target for our projections). The main push now is twofold - development and sales/marketing - and more around the sales/marketing side of the application than the development.

Don’t get me wrong, Tactile CRM is an awesome piece of software from a technical/engineering perspective - it is really well built, easy to expand and add to, and the feedback we get from users is excellent. Obviously as Senokian we are comfortable with the development of an application like this as we do it on a regular basis for customers.

The new and unknown area for us however is the sales/marketing side of things. Adwords, and exhibitions/trade shows are easy to cost/plan, the difficult part is getting the buzz around the product - people and sites talking and discussing your application.

So far we have had a reasonable amount of success with our marketing, the graph below shows two decent spikes. The first was getting mentioned in the Amazon AWS newsletter, the second appearing on the new Google Solutions Marketplace. Both of these obviously drove a decent amount of traffic and sign ups to the site, however we need more people to talk about Tactile CRM.

Currently I am working on getting coverage on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch. Which brings me on to my current dilemma. Do we add new features we think are useful, or go for the bigger ones that are likely to get more press coverage (and still be useful in the long run).

I’m thinking things like the Google Contacts API integration we did - we were doing import work that people had asked for and at the same time Google launched the new API. As a result we were the first CRM system to implement it and a few people picked it up. ReadWriteWeb included us in an article on Socialprise and helped to drive more traffic to the site. This wasn’t a feature people request but one we added for PR purposes.

So the dilemma I now face is should the next set of features we add be for PR/marketing purposes or customers. I know the answer to this question when a product has reached critical mass is to add features for users but as we are not there yet, the PR/marketing drives the users and is the most important thing at the moment.