chrisgreen.co.uk

Just a quick update to say I’ll be on Wake Up To Money on BBC Radio 5 Live tomorrow (Monday May 28th) at 5.30am UK time talking about Facebook and its ambitious plans for the future. Should be an entertaining discussion - don’t miss it!

You can download the podcast of the show here.

There are good mobile phone companies and there are bad ones. After today, T-Mobile has demonstrated to this customer that they are undoubtedly the worst!

One of the most important tools I use every day is my mobile phone. It really is a lifeline, keeping me in touch with contacts, colleagues, family and friends. Therefore I take my choice of mobile phone and mobile phone service very seriously.

I currently carry two devices – a Motorola RAZR mobile phone containing a Vodafone SIM card. That phone is the one that most of my voice traffic goes through, as the number associated with it is the one on my business cards. The other device is a Sidekick II running on T-Mobile. While also a phone, I use it mostly for data, in particular email and text messages as it has a full QWERTY keyboard and, financially at least, a good call plan for texts and data access.

I switched to the Sidekick II in March last year, having previously been a fierce and loyal Blackberry user. I still think Blackberry devices (the proper ones, not the hybrid phone ones) are great, but the Sidekick II offers certain features, such as a fully-features web browser, that trumps the capabilities of a Blackberry. I also really like the Sidekick’s ZX Spectrum-like rubber keyboard.

Anyway – back to today’s saga. Having decided that I’m fed up carrying two devices and nursing two mobile bills, I wanted to start the process of moving from two devices and mobiles services to one. The plan was to leave Vodafone, and move my number to T-Mobile, having first made sure I had like-for-like services set up and working with T-Mobile before going to Vodafone (who I would like to add have been extremely reliable and offered good service over the years – I was planning to leave purely on cost-cutting and practicality grounds).

With Vodafone I have a service called Vodafone Mail, which allows people to send faxes to a number associated with my mobile number, with the faxes landing in my voicemail for me to forward on to a fax machine of my choice or to view online. T-Mobile has a similar service called Fax Messaging. It doesn’t allow for online viewing, but is otherwise a like-for-like product. Therefore I wanted it enabled.

Should have been an easy enough process – it’s a standard feature costing £1.50 a month and advertised on the T-Mobile site.

No!

The first person I spoke to cut me off, as did the second, and the third. The fourth person spent ages allegedly setting the service up, only to reveal after nearly 25 minutes that he knew nothing of the service and would need to transfer me to Technical.

The first person within T-Mobile Technical I spoke to (person five in total) knew nothing of the service and spend another 25 minutes looking up the service and allegedly enabling it.

With the service enabled (after I explained to him what it was and read the entire web page to him) I gave it a full hour before trying it out. A problem – the so-called Fax number rings straight through to my Sidekick. Manually bouncing the call to voicemail results in voicemail rejecting the call because it can’t handle faxes….because the service hasn’t been enabled.

I call back – and am cut off by the person who answered the call (person six) who claimed to be transferring me to Technical.

I call back again (person seven), and am transferred to Technical (person eight) who hasn’t a clue what is wrong. He takes my office landline number and promises to call back in 15 minutes.

THREE HOURS LATER – no call. So I call back. The person I speak to (person nine) put me on hold for about seven minutes while they talk to Technical. I’m promised a call back from technical in five minutes on my landline, amid claims that they had tried several times to call me but the line was engaged. I explain that this is untruthful – no call received and my line has voicemail, not an engaged tone, and no message was left to say they had tried to call.

ANOTHER HOUR LATER – Still no call – so I ring again. The person I speak to (person 10) claims attempts were made to call me, but my line was engaged. I again explain that this is untruthful – no call received and my line has voicemail, not an engaged tone, and no message was left to say they had tried to call. Claims are then made that a text was sent to my mobile saying that attempts had been made to call me but my landline was engaged. This text eventually turned up at 5.15pm, which doesn’t speak well for T-Mobile’s ability to deliver its own SMS messages in a timely fashion. Also – no effort was made to call the phone the text was sent to.

My call is passed on to a chap in Technical called David (person 11) who does at least have the courtesy to call back and to do so exactly when he said he would. Several calls are then exchanged between us, with each time David ensuring me that everything has been set up, or re-set up and this time it will really work, or give it up to an hour and it will work. Each time, the same thing happens - the so-called Fax number rings straight through to my Sidekick. Manually bouncing the call to voicemail results in voicemail rejecting the call because it can’t handle faxes….because the service hasn’t been enabled.

As I am sure you can appreciate – I’m not happy. My entire lunch break and other time has been well and truly wasted by T-Mobile’s inability to enable an advertised service on my account. I ask for two things – first, that the technical problem be escalated immediately to the next line of technical support. I’m told this will be done straight away but that it will take up to THREE DAYS before I get a call from someone to deal with it. I also ask for a complaint to be escalated as I am unhappy with the time wasting, inconvenience, aggravation, lying and poor customer service I have experienced. Begrudgingly, this is also agreed to.

I’m not expecting much as I’ve had previous experience of how T-Mobile deals with customer complaints – ignoring them basically. Hence this blog post so that this experience can at least be of use to potential and current customers.

As I finish writing this, it’s just gone 7pm. I’ve just had a voicemail from David. For what feels like the hundredth time today he’s said that he has redone the divert setting for the fax number and it really will divert straight to the fax-enabled voicemail service, and that all the fax services that need to be enabled on my account are set up and working.

NO - THEY ARE NOT!!!!!!

The fax number still rings straight through to my Sidekick, and bouncing the call to voicemail see the call answered by the dulcet tones of my voicemail greeting, shortly after which the fax call is rejected by the T-Mobile voicemail system. Exactly what it has been doing since 11am this morning when this was supposed to have been first set up.

Just saying it’s all fixed doesn’t make it so – you actually have to physically do something to deal with the issue. The failure to resolve the issue and the disrespectful way that this issue and I as a customer have been dealt with by various people at T-Mobile today is nothing short of sickening. It certainly isn’t professional! I’d also like to mention that at no point in this saga have I referenced or in any other way used my credentials as a journalist to try and get preferential treatment. I have approached this as any other ordinary customer would.

The scary thing was – at 10am this morning, I was seriously planning to axe my Vodafone account and port the number (which is the one on my business cards) over to T-Mobile, and with it all the call traffic that is associated with that number. On current form – it’ll be a cold day in hell before that happens!

* AN UPDATE: Just had a call from a supervisor at T-Mobile Technical. He was no use whatsoever, offered a derisory £5 goodwill gesture, and confirmed that despite being told at 6pm that the problem would be escalated, it still had not been passed on to anyone higher-up the technical food chain or competent. He also stuck to the claim that attempts had been made to call me (which they were not), and that my landline phone was engaged (not true, our landline phones at IT PRO cut to voicemail when busy, not an engaged tone – and no voicemails were left by anyone from T-Mobile). He seemed uninterested in doing anything about the previous individual – allegedly called Ian – who was sticking by his false story that he had tried to call me back. The safe money says that the technical call back I’ve been promised for tomorrow will not happen, and that T-Mobile will do nothing about my complaint in regards to having endured a combination of being messed around and misled by in total 12 different people over the course of today.

Also - at this stage I fully sympathise with the BBC’s John Sweeney when he lost it during the Panorama look at Scientology – T-Mobile have wound me up and messed me around to such a degree I want to do exactly the same thing to their head of customer service.

* ANOTHER UPDATE: It’s now noon the next day - no response from anyone at T-Mobile regarding either the complaint or the outstanding issue - and the Fax Messaging still is not working!

* YET ANOTHER UPDATE: It is now a week since this whole saga started, and despite the intervention of T-Mobile press people and the managing director’s office,  the problem still hasn’t been resolved. Even the MD’s office is proving hopeless in doing anything useful

OK, so you know things are not going well when I do one of these on a Wednesday. On the plus side, I have not done a TILTW post in over six weeks, mainly because life and work has been pretty good, and busy, for the most part.

Anyway – time for a braindump. This latest crop of bullet points actally span the last three weeks to be honest, but they are more interesting than just the last 72 hours.

1) Comedy shows at Fopp are brilliant!
2) Comedy shows at Fopp are even more brilliant when in the right company
3) Valencia is a really nice place, especially the marina, but it’s a pig to get to and from if you fly from Heathrow.
4) The quality of English used in some of the written journalism I’ve been reading of late is bloody awful, and the author deserves a baseball bat round the head for it.
5) The digitisation of the entire UK speed camera network worries me, not because of the Big Brother implications, but because it raises the chances of the bastards catching me and the Rover……assuming we ever stray over the speed limit, which of course we never do, as that would be illegal.
6) Speaking of Big Brother, the new series starts on Channel 4 a week on Friday. I’m seriously considering emigrating to the Lost island for the duration as it doesn’t appear to be in range of a British TV signal.
7) I really want to go and see the film Fast Food Nation, but hardly any cinemas are showing it……but the Prince Charles Cinema (the cheap one) off Leicester Square will be showing it next week, which is great.
8.) I have plans for Saturday, possibly Sunday, but no idea what to do with Monday.
9) The Tube has already become the hottest, most uncomfortable place on the planet, and it’s only May!
10) The broadband router Sky supplied with my DSL service is still shite!
11) On the plus side, the Virgin cable broadband is still working really well, and so might get a stay of execution.
12) The new Haymarket Hotel is really cool, and the restaurant there is excellent.
13) I was recently described as the Alan Sugar of IT journalism – not sure if that was an insult of a compliment.
14) I am deeply in love with my new Macbook – I might have missed out on the 0.16Ghz speed bump and some extra hard drive space, but it is by far the best computer I have ever owned.
15) Katie on the Apprentice is either a man in drag or she used to be a man before the operation.
16) Liverpool missed out in the European Cup final. I think they need a spell in the Championship to rediscover the art of playing real football again 
17) I hate going to Paris on business.
18) Planning a summer BBQ party, but no idea which date to do it on, and whether I should go for a Saturday or a Sunday – advice please.
19) Some people (by which I mean cantankerous old bastards who seem to live to write snotty complaint emails) shouldn’t be allowed to read business IT news web sites. Or own technology. Or be allowed to waste valuable oxygen by continuing to live.
20) I need a new bag for work!
21) Despite what people might tell you – mojitos, wine, gin & tonics and beer do nit mix well, if my hangover after the Met Bar was anything to go by.

I had a comment posted to the blog a little while ago that I thought warranted a proper reply, rather than being buried as another comment. Mhairi Clarke contacted me to ask about my views and experiences using Twitter, the short message mini-blog system:

So are you still twittering? Do you find it useful? I’m a PR student almost at the end of a masters degree and I’m writing about PR and new media as part of my uni blog. From a social aspect I can see the benefits although it’s probably not something I’m going to do to be honest but in terms of receiving news and communicating with audiences it seems like a massive jump in the right direction?

Hi Mhairi

Yes, I am still using Twitter, in fact I’m using it more often than ever before. At the time of writing, I’ve made 227 Twitter posts, and have 34 Twitter friends and 27 followers, all of whom are a mixture of friends, work contacts, industry peers and people stalking me (in a friendly way, rather than the Jack Nicholson’s character from the Shining approach). Also – I am pleased to say that Scoble is NOT one of my friends or followers.

As I use a device with a proper QWERTY keyboard (my Sidekick 2) rather than a phone, it is much easier and quicker for me to punch out a Twitter post than for people using a phone text message-style. It’s not cheap, as at the moment SMS posts to Twitter do not come out of my free texts allowance, but hoping that will change soon.

As for what Twitter brings to the table, you are right, it is a very effective news distribution and promotion mechanism, and I am looking at how we can use Twitter to point people towards interesting content online and offline. The BBC and most recently Al Jazeera have had great success using Twitter to promote and link to new news articles as they are posted to the web. For the user, this provides a cheap, near-real-time and multi-device way of being kept in touch with important and breaking news.

Socially, Twitter fulfils many of the functions of a blog, only in very small, bite size chunks. It is that limitation that makes it complementary to a blog, rather than a replacement. Twitter is for quick thoughts and outbursts. The blog is for longer (or slightly longer) more considered posts, and allows for more use of linking and graphics. The Twitter feed is a way for my friends and other people I know to keep up to date with where I am and what I am doing – and visa versa, to engage me and those who subscribe to my Twitter feed in conversation and debate, and Twitter can serve as a conversation starter and thought provoker.

You really should give it a go – Like a Sky+ box it’s as addictive as crack and can be very amusing.

Amid the remains of my hangover, I’ve just realised that this blog is two years old today.

Yes, for the last 730 days I’ve actually managed to keep this blog more-or-less ticking over and current, and that has got to be a record for me. It is also a great advert for Wordpress – in that it is easy enough to use and maintain that I have not become fed up and despondent about the whole concept of blogging.

Mind you, looking at the growing list of monthly archives to the left, I’m going to have to sort out an overall archive page or something to tidy it up.