Reaping What They Sowed
Posted: Wed 12 January, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Travel 5 Comments »Sometimes life offers up an opportunity that’s just too sweet to miss. Many readers will know how much I hate Virgin Trains and their utterly shite levels of service/ punctuality/ common sense/ etc.
At Virgin Trains, we’re making moves towards a service that delivers
100% customer satisfaction. And with more new trains and faster, more
frequent journeys, we’re getting there.What we really need now is your feedback, to help us get there faster.
In return, we’ll enter you into a draw to win First Class leisure travel
for two on Virgin Trains for a whole year!
I got this email today telling me that they want feedback from customers about the service that Virgin offer. I can’t deny it, I couldn’t resist. So I’ve let them know what I think, and what could be improved.
Harveys
Posted: Wed 5 January, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services 13 Comments »There’s an advert currently on TV for Harveys furniture stores‘ January Sale, and frankly it annoys the tits off me.
The sales pitch is that they’ve “taken half the price off, then an extra ten percent”. Now, I’m no rocket scientist, but from the price examples they give, that’s just a bag of shite. They have one piece of furniture that was £899. It’s now £299. OK, So 899/2 is £450. Less 10% ( £45) we get £405. Not £299.
Not one example actually adds up to what they say. Quite how they’ve got the ad through OFCOM is beyond me. But there we go.
Ikea
Posted: Sun 2 January, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Sweary 3 Comments »What is it about Ikea? I’ve been three times now, and each time I reckon that the average IQ for the entire building is about 8. I’m including my own IQ in this average – but it’s not that much of a factor, considering the sheer number of people in the place.
Personally, I think a lot of Ikea’s stuff is bloody good. It’s just that buying it and getting through the store without aid of machetes and landmines is an utter cunt. If their website were any good – fuck it, even if their website were utter shite (Oh look, it is) but included some form of e-commerce (remember that terminology?) then I’d use the bloody thing. Instead it’s a sack of crap, and doesn’t actually even include some of the products they do. Guess what? The stuff we wanted was part of that section. Fuck it, we’re off to Ikea. Oh goody.
The problem with the place is that while the concept is great, the infrastructure is nothing short of fucking shit. The staff are International, to be charitable. Perhaps if you know Esperanto then you’ve a chance of getting sorted without resorting to sign-language and pop-eyes as a communication method. As it is, it’s like a Tower of Babel – multiple languages, and some impressive linguistic abilities. If you speak Swahili, or some obscure dialect from Papua New Guinea then you’re in with a shot of being served at Ikea. Effnic minorities are well served in this.
Unfortunately, Ikea’s concept seems to stick WAY too much in the hands of the general public, and they seem to be more comfortable with being spoon-fed stuff. Even the simple concepts like “getting your items in the car” seems to be beyond most of the motherfuckers. Rather than spreading themselves along the area, and standing back near the wall so people can make their way past, they all cram to the front where the cars are, as if they can book a space like that. No, instead it just blocks the entire fucking place for everyone else.
How more murders don’t happen every day in Ikea, I just don’t know – if I had to visit regularly, or God Forbid, work there, the place would be like a charnel house within minutes.
Getting Sorted
Posted: Wed 29 December, 2004 Filed under: Customer Services Leave a comment »Getting there – sorted out a multitude of address changes and account closures, either for now or for the end of January when I finally give up the house in Manchester.
It’s all happening, slowly but surely. Most unnatural – I’m sure these things are supposed to be more chaotic than this!
Bank Holidays
Posted: Tue 28 December, 2004 Filed under: Customer Services Leave a comment »Of course, the problem at the moment with changing all my address details is that if they can’t be done online, there’s pretty much fuck-all chance of doing them ’til tomorrow when Customer Services departments the country over finally open up again…
Renewal
Posted: Tue 23 November, 2004 Filed under: Customer Services, Thoughts 24 Comments »NOTE :If you’ve come here via Google, click here to go to the Royal Mail Renewal page.. This here is a blog entry about the renewal process, which has managed to get to #1 on Google.
Added 4/7/07
At long last, Royal Mail has started realising how useful the internet can be. My mail redirection was up for renewal, the letter came through about it, and yes, now I can do it online.
Simply go to www.royalmail.com/renewal and quote your reference number and PIN details as listed below.
Simple. Well, not quite. In a simple, yet silly, mistake, the form on the website has swapped the two numbers round, so that where the letter has Reference Number then PIN, the site has PIN then Reference Number. That’s just a niggle though, although personally I’d have thought it would be better to aim for consistency and thus making the process even easier. So you enter the numbers and ta-da, the redirection is renewed.
Except actually, no, it’s not. You then have to go through a registration process – email address, password, blah, blah, and when you complete the registration it takes you to a logged-in homepage, but doesn’t remember what else you were doing, so you have to go back and type in the Reference Number and PIN all over again. Another example of “usable, but not as easy as it should be”.
The rest of the process is a breeze, just credit card number etc. But that still doesn’t come down to “simply enter in the reference and PIN numbers”, does it? I know it’s only small niggles and irritances, but it doesn’t take much work to fix them. In fact even simple usability testing would/should have brought these to the attention of the developers.