A frustrating Monday! As if I hadn’t enough to do this week two essential technologies let me down! firstly my ‘Upstairs’ PC, the one I do all the work on at the weekend started making funny noises on Saturday and gave up the ghost completely by Sunday. Seems that the main fan in the computer, yes the one that keeps eveything cool, became clogged with dust and stuff and stopped rotating, result? an overheating PC – at least it had the decency to cut out before the motherboard got frazzled.
Cue early Monday trip to Grapevine Computer in Altrincham. Sure I could have called him over, but I know what he’s like, he’s a busy chap and would have had to close his shop to do so, so I did the best thing for both of us, he is 2 minutes away, so it was PC in the back of the car get to Altrincham by 10am. Rick immediately stopped what he was doing, opened up the PC, blew all the rubbish out of it and replaced the power pack inside. I was away by 10.30 and the computer was up and running 5 minutes later.
Was that great customer service?, well yes, but it shouldn’t have broken down in the 1st place, it was after all only 11 month’s old- but Rcik read the situation perfectly and did exactly what he should have done. Good man!
Next I dropped my iPhone on Sunday and found out Monday morning that it wouldn’t charge. I phomed 02 – seems that when I trnsferred my wife’s iPhone to my account, having created anew account I forgor to resinstate the insurance – Bring it on 02 – what’s the worst that can happen? Well how about a bill for £429 to replace the handset. I upgraded in June so there was no hope of renewing the contract early or getting a new handset out of them for anything less. “So are you saying that the best you can do is for me to pay you £429” “Yes” – so that was it was it? well I spend about £100 a month on the phones so do you think that that was good service, no it was not, not at all, in fact they couldn’t care less.
I booked an appoinment at the Arndale in Manchester at 12.10 (The Trafford Centre wait was 5 days!) Gor to the Arndale at 11.45, giving me a chance to check out a few shoe shops! took my place in the queue. They were BRILLIANT! immediately get me settled, “Hello Nigel just wait a moment over there” , “what’s the problem” , “someone will be with you shortly”. OK I had to wait but like a fine restaurant they attended to me immediately and kept me up to date with the wait time.
After about 20 minutes (I was in awe of how busy the shop was!), I was in front of Adam, the tech guy who immediately apologised for the wait time and started to sort me out with a new hand set. He took a while because the systems in the shop were down, but the upside of that was he couldn’t take the obligatory £139 for the new phone- so guess what?, rather than pee me off after such a long wait he gave it to me! I was amazed but there you go, I was well impressed, and went about spending £35 in the shop on accessories, and I’ll be back there in a few weeks sorting myself out with an iPad for Christmas. I have to say that even apart from the unusual outcome their customer service was incredible.
Which leads me on to Experience Number 3!
I got back to the office, (after stopping at Sanam for some samosas!), and attepted to engage once again with Channel Advisor to try and get my feeds working on Shopzilla, Nextag,Pricegrabber and Google Base. This has been going on since November the 4th! Having sent a number emails to “the Techie guy” last Friday and hearing nothing back when I got back to the office I emailed him again. You see he has never put a phone number on any of his emails so I couldn’t ring him! amazing but true!
Eventually I received an email from him saying that he was too busy to call me but if I had any further technical problem I should contact the support team, a process that going via America could take days. Of course I was fuming and complained to him and the sales exec who sold me the service in the first place, and was then told by both of them that they had already told me they ecouldn’t call me, they didn’t have the time, the Sales guy did eventually, and received both barrels and a demand that the MD call me. I am told he will call me tomorrow.
Furthermore I checked the feeds that should have been working this evening and all the links from the two search engines that are running go to Shoes.co.uk’s home page, not the product pages. So Mr Whizz kid can’t even get those right, cue another email tonight to the MD demanding some attention.
There are a lot of companies out there touting for business, times ar hard and business is tough. Some are making it because they impress, some will come a cropper, no matter how good they think they are because they give shoddy service. Three examples all in one day – IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW BUSY YOU ARE – YOU CAN STILL IMPRESS! – in fact it is the perfect opportunity to show just how good you are! – food for thought isn’ t it?
