Orange Fuck up iPhone launch

Feeling a bit let down by Orange today. I was browsing the BBC Tech site looking for anything interesting and saw an article that Tesco are going to sell the iPhone. I open it up read it and it says Orange are reporting 30,000 sales on the first day of the iPhone going on sale.

I was pretty surprised as about 2 months ago they emailed me as a customer notifying me they would be selling the iPhone and asking if I wanted to pre-Register my interest. Here is the reply confirming I had pre-registered and that they will be in contact again nearer to the time. Well I have not had anything from them since.

So I'm a pretty pissed off Orange customer who is out of contract and if I do not hear from them I'll be giving O2 a call in the next couple of days to see if they are looking for new customers as I'm sure some will have left to go back to Orange.

Aside from totally mismanaging my expectations - why bother emailing people asking to pre-register then totally ignore them - they have obviously underestimated the response as their entire site appears to be down today. Really not making me feel they are the best operator/network.

The orange site today looks like this....

If you work in Customer Service Remember the name Dave Carroll

I love this story that Faris just posted about a Country & Western Singer - Dave Carroll who had his guitar broken by baggage handlers from United Airlines. Having had a very bad experience myself with Unite Airlines I am not surprised.



Dave says: Full Story: http://www.davecarrollmusic.com/story... -

In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didn't deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say no to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming. I promise. Follow me at http://twitter.com/DaveCarroll

It looks like Dave has been on TV a lot stateside - the cynical side of me thinks this is not a bad publicity stunt for him and his band? We'll see.

A real Man Bites Dog moment - I love it when big corporations take people for granted and get bitten. I bet Ms. Irlweg is regretting not helping him out now. In one day his video has been viewed nearly 400,000 times, has 7,000 favorites and has over 3,000 comments - nice one.



Hopefully customer service teams are being briefed on this all over the world and they will change their behavior - but I doubt it.

Rackspace Customer Service Win

Just to follow up on last weeks post about the excellent Bunny Boiler mailer Rackspace sent us. Well no sooner had we made our tongue in cheek joke about boiling Barry up, then they were on the phone with the quote, and a damn good excuse why they hadn't sent it, bad timing.

It's refreshing to see a company that does in fact care, and when they get some feedback from customers, act on it pretty damn quickly - nice one Barry.

Just goes to show if you really mean you are obsessed customer service when things go awry its not what you say but what you do that counts. So if you act on it, rectify it, and explain it, people come out the back of it thinking even more positively about you than before.

Things do go wrong for everyone, but it really is a case that 'It's not what goes wrong but how you deal with things when they do go wrong that people remember you for'

I now remember Rackspace for sorting it out. Thanks guys, I look forward to the next mailer I hope it doesn't have an effigy of me in it ;-)

BBC Weather in Beta Test

Like any good Brit I have an unhealthy obsession with the weather. I use the BBC 5 day forecast but have a feed on my iGoogle page so haven't visited the site itself for a while, but I've just noticed a new development on the site.

The BBC are Beta testing a new design for their online weather centre and testing it in a quite public manner (the big pink button top right hand corner):



It is interesting to see the text book way the BBC roll out new developments. The new service appears to be based on a very similar platform and technology to that of the service that has been available on digital TV like Sky+ for some time now.




It's definitely got some new features and looks impressive.



This feedback page also impressed me - when the BBC get it right they do it well and this is something more companies should look to learn from in terms of open beta testing with real users and a developed and considered feedback loop.