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 made the trip to London on Friday afternoon for this month’s MiniBar. As always an excellent event, and I as I arrived a bit early (well an hour) I got to have a really good chat with Christian before hand and get some interesting ideas for marketing Tactile CRM.

I had a chat and dinner with Kai (a friend from university) from Webconverger (a great product with big potential I think); an interesting converstation with somebody who wanted $15m to model London in 3D on the web to then plonk geodata on it. Not sure of the viability of it and thought a Google Maps mashup might be a good starting ground to prove that it works. Nick Halstead from fav.or.it was also there (I first met him at Fuel Conference on the Sun Startup Essentials stand), he had some interesting ideas for marketing/sales as well as managing to have a stack of free drinks various people brought over for him when they went to the bar due to a mix up!

I met and spoke to loads of other interseting people, failed dismally trying to do a qik stream of one of the talks, but got an old fashion photo (below) of the guys from School of Everything presenting on stage.

The event was sponsored by Channel 4, and Matt Locke gave a quick couple of minutes to introduce the program they are working on. I first saw Matt Locke when I visited the Thinking Digital conference in Newcastle and the stuff he is in involved in with Channel 4 looks/sounds pretty cool.

Unfortunately I am not around for the next one, but keep an eye out on the meet us category of the blog for when we are next there.

UPDATE: Kai managed to video some of it:

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:

Well trying to get the latest Tactile CRM newsletter sorted has lead me to buying my first windows machine in who knows how long (about 9 years I think). It is preloaded with Vista business, and apart from the arduous process of getting it started the first time (about 40 minutes for pre-installed windows to work out what it wanted to do, and the HP software too) seems OK.

It’s not going to replace the MacBook as a ‘no-holds-bar’d-on-the-move-desktop-replacement-machine’, but is certainly useful on the train due to its small size (it happily fits on the seat back trays you get on the Virgin trains, unlike the MacBook).

The main probelms I have with it so far are the sensitivity of the mouse, which I will be able to fix, and the huge power cable you get with it. Why design a nice small laptop, only to include a standard HP power supply that practically doubles the size of the thing!

I’m trying to steer clear of Vsta as much as possible, but will try to install Leopard (OS X) on it over the weekend and see what happens with that (note to self, find the restore procedure for the laptop before starting). In the meantime, here is my current screen shot of OS X Leopard on the HP 2133:

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

It’s not very often that I get excited about startups (except for my own of course). But since the guys at Soocial did their presentation at Fuel Conference and I got on the private beta I have been giving it a go. I have to admit I think it is an awesome application.

The basic premise is simple - a way to sync your contacts, Mac, Mobile and 3rd party apps. I think the interface is great, the support is awesome (I like the fact that the support emails are replied to by the ‘Support Monkey’), and it just works (OK, it’s in beta so there are a few bugs, but they jump on them and get them sorted).

I think it has great potential to work with Tactile CRM as a way to sync contacts over the air to mobiles (and potentially Outlook) without much work from us. All we’d need to do is integrate the two APIs. It also has its use as a way to transfer numbers when you switch mobiles too without any hassle.

I’m going to keep an eye on this one - carry on with the beta, and see where it goes.

I have the pleasure of putting together our company newsletters and also those for Tactile CRM. We currently use Campaign Monitor, which is a great piece of software, however Outlook 2007 isn’t.

Currently, I am redesigning and testing the Tactile CRM newsletter. It works fine in all browsers, until I come to Outlook 2007 - Campaign Monitor have an excellent tool for checking your email across a variety of clients. The first screenshot below is how it should look:

and this is how Outlook 2007 renders it:

Now as I am a bit of a perfectionist I needed to fix this. My next port of call was the MS website to get the Outlook 2007 trial. Signing up was a bit of a pain, but my frustration was complete when I got the following error message trying to do ‘Download 1′:

Of course I haven’t completed the second download. I have just come to the page and am trying to do the first one. If you want me to do the second one first, why have it as the second one?!

I still don’t have it installed but I have vented my frustration for the time being!

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 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:

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: