Jul
7
A crisis of identity
Filed Under Customer Service | 1 Comment
Today, within minutes of each other, I received two emails.
The first, from LoveFilm, opened: “Dear {CUSTOMER_INFO_FIRST_NAME}”.
The second, from Easyjet, greeted me: “NAME: [[Firstname]] [[Surname]]”.
Doesn’t anyone pay attention any more?
Jun
27
Anyone in the UK who watches TV has to pay a license fee every year. The money raised from this is used to fund the BBC. This is a matter of much controversy, made significantly worse by the tactics used by “TV Licensing” in trying to hunt down and executedeal with people who don’t pay. [...]
Jun
3
Shameful Registration Forms
Filed Under Ecommerce | 2 Comments
Almost anyone who lives outside the US but who has had to deal with US-based websites will have stories of hate about registration forms that complain that your state/zipcode/phone number is invalid, solely because it falls squarely outside the sphere of understanding of the parochial programmer who created the form.
When I still lived in Northern [...]
Feb
6
Useless service, in double quick time
Filed Under Customer Service, Data Protection / FOI | Leave a Comment
Tim Trent has written an article about the BT SMS fiasco: Anatomy of a Marketing Disaster.
In it he describes some of the responses that people have been given when they have tried to talk to BT about this service.
This morning, on the Data Protection list, an even better one was unveiled. After sending a s10 [...]
Jul
27
Chelsea Wine Bar, Belfast
Filed Under Customer Service, Northern Ireland | 2 Comments
Things to expect if you’re considering eating in the Chelsea Winebar, Belfast, and planning to to pay by card, rather than cash:
your card to repeatedly decline
the staff to seem embarrassed for you, but insist on another card
your second card to also decline
the manager who is subsquently called to explain that their machine doesn’t really work [...]
Apr
14
Grepping the Annual Reports
Filed Under Business | Leave a Comment
An interesting take on the latest crop of annual report by Motley Fool UK:
Phrase
# Reports in which it appears
our success
154
we were successful
24
our failure
1
we were unsuccessful
3
we failed
2
our fault
0
our error
0
our lack of judgement
0
mistake
4
Mar
4
Today’s Deals
Filed Under Ecommerce | Leave a Comment
Amazon drink the kool-aid.
They should really support some form of auto-discovery - I can’t see yet how to find these if you don’t know of their existence. I also can’t see yet how to subscribe to someone’s wishlist, which would be a useful addition.
Feb
29
Stupid Validation
Filed Under Ecommerce | 4 Comments
I’m a big suporter of websites doing proper validation. I even released a perl module to help people do it more easily (on the, perhaps naive, assumption that the easier it is the more likely it is people will do it).
But I’m an even bigger detractor of websites doing stupid validation. Yesterday I finally caved [...]
Feb
28
Buying Software
Filed Under Ecommerce | Leave a Comment
Back in the early 90s I got a bundled copy of Microsoft Money with a PC. At the time I had next to no money, and was pretty much living off credit cards. Keeping track of who I had to pay when was critically important, and so I tried Money, found it invaluable, and have [...]
Feb
22
24 hour service?
Filed Under Customer Service | 1 Comment
Recently I’ve been having trouble with my central heating. The timer would call for heat, but the boiler wouldn’t realise this, and so wouldn’t actually give me any.
I’ve had Pipeline Services out to look at it four times in the last month. Each time they “fixed” the problem, only for it to return in a [...]