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.

I get a lot of speculative CVs through the post?! and email from various people.

This in itself isn’t a problem -  we have an area on our website that explains what we like to see in an application, details of student placements, and what it is like working with us. We pay attention to detail, although we’re not quite this bad. We are also very firm with recruitment agencies as we get a lot of irritating calls and haven’t had any good experiences with them (a sentiment echo’d by many).

Normally I deal with each one and respond with an email. Today was different. I got a random CV from a student, covering letter and all, that didn’t once include their email address. Now it just so happens that we don’t have any student placements at present, but with only a phone/mobile number I have no way to contact them unless I ring, which I don’t want to.

Moral of the story: if you’re going to speculatively apply for a job with us, at lease include your email address.

We successfully launched Tactile CRM earlier this year and have lots of nice people onboard - thanks to everyone who is using it.

Work has now begun on our second application in the suite, Resolve RM, and we will be writing about the process of launching it on this blog. No holds bar’d, the good the bad and the ugly, warts and all, etc. etc.

The idea isn’t new, there are plenty of resources out there, Ryan Carson blogged about selling Drop Send, and put together a Web App, Guy Kawaski wrote about building a web app for about $12,000, I came across an interesting post title ‘Diary of a Failed Startup‘ yesterday, the list goes on.

What we aim to do is talk about our day to day problems, solutions, issues etc. that we come across and how we deal with them. We’ll also be applying things we learnt launching Tactile CRM.

This may be a resource for anybody interested in what we do, looking for tips, ideas, and pitfalls/mistakes we make along the way, or it may be of no interest to anybody. Time will tell.

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

I had a great time at the Fuel Conference last Friday. I thought it was very well organised and the content/speakers were great. As usual, missrogue was very good (and jet lagged) - slides are below:

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I also had a chance to meet the guys from soocial, and rummble amongst a load of other really interesting people. I hope the soocial guys made it home after the football (they are Dutch and were enjoying the win over France when I left them!).

They also had a weird sign on some chairs that clearly weren’t broken:

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.

As mentioned at Thinking Digital, here is the first pass at BuzzWord Bingo for the conference.

I’m at Thinking Digital in Newcastle this week. Went to a great presentation yesterday by Tara Hunt, slides are below, and met some great people, including one of my university lecturers Lindsay Marshall.

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It kicks off properly today so I’ll write some more about it this evening, in the meantime I wanted to post a couple of links to a blog I read about Dashboard Design we were discussing last night:

• Enterprise Dashboard
• Dashboard Spy

Normally I hate phoning large companies and getting put through their phone systems. T-Mobile is an ideal example of this - everytime I call them they make me listen to their menu options, push 3 or 4 numbers and then I get put straight through to the business team who have no idea which buttons I have pressed.

Today was different though. I called Black Horse for the first time, they asked me 3 simple questions which I answered by voice instead of key presses. It got every single one right first time even in the car, on the motorway, and on handsfree. Once I had done that a nice lady answered the phone - ‘Hi Mr Stride’, I was taken back at first but I assume from my date of birth and phone number they were able to verify who I was.

The rest of the converstation was very much in taken in awe at how well the IVR had worked and that they knew who I was before I even spoke to a person.

Well done Black Horse, an excellent example of using technology just the right amount, not losing the personal touch, and not irritating your customers.

It amazes me just how many people fail in the sales process at the first stage. Let me give you an example:

Last week I was ringing around trying to get further details about some property to let in the area. I had to ring 3 times before ‘the person I needed to talk to’ was in the office. However, before I managed to get through the lady answering the phone never once bothered to take my details or get somebody to call me back.

In this situation I was motivated enough to call back and be persitent; there are numerous other occassions when this had not been so and a potential company has lost out on a sale simple becuase they didn’t know who I was.

Using an CRM package (such as Tactile CRM) can obviously help with this, but a large part is down to the education of staff and having a process in place to deal with things like this.