Just a quick update to let you know that I’m doing a few media spots today and tomorrow to talk about the US launch of Apple’s iPhone:
BBC World Service (Radio): Overnight tonight
BBC Radio 5 Live (Radio): LIVE Tonight at about 11.30pm
CNBC (TV): LIVE Friday 10.20am UK time
This past weekend I paid a pre-arranged visit to The Riverside Club in Northwood. It’s health and fitness centre operated by Esporta. Having driven past it for years, it’s always looked pretty good, and on the recommendation of a friend, I decided to take a look inside.
Having pre-arranged with a chap called Adam to visit on Saturday morning for a guided tour, and having asked about and been told the peak-rate membership costs (I was very clear to specify peak over off-peak or any other kind of limited membership) before walking through the door, I set off for the club.
Having been kept waiting for a good 10-15 minutes on arrival, a woman who’s name I simply cannot remember (it was a foreign name, that’s as memorable as it gets alas) appears, and tells me Adam is on the phone and won’t be able to do the tour as arranged, but that she will do it instead. Rather crap on the part of Adam, but we get on with the tour nonetheless. Facilities were very very impressive.
Having done the tour, we return to their coffee shop to discuss membership options. The rate card is produced, and I immediately see that Adam has lied about the peak rate membership costs, under quoting by some £50+ pounds a month. I’m not happy about this, but given how impressed I was with the facilities, this wasn’t necessarily a deal-breaker.
Unfortunately, the incredibly rude woman deputising for Adam was a deal-breaker, her attitude absolutely stunk. She became very abrupt and rude when I said I’d have to consider my options before signing a 12-month membership contract committing me to £1,600+ in fees (as would any sensible person), questioned my intelligence, chipped in with the line that only an idiot would sign up straight away, and that it was clear I didn’t care about my health and fitness.
I left. If that is how The Riverside Club treats people before they become members, I dread to think what they are like once you are locked-in for a year’s membership.
Two days later I got a call from Adam. I told him about what happened and how disgusted I was. He didn’t seem particularly bothered.
As readers of this blog will know, I’m a stickler for good customer service and basic courtesy. Therefore, I’ll be forwarding a copy of this blog post to Esporta’s head office. As for The Riverside Club, Adam and his colleagues, in particular the vile individual who wasted my time and insulted me this part Saturday morning should be ashamed of themselves – it’s nothing more than pathetic and I’m sure there are plenty of hard-working people out there that could do their jobs properly. Maybe Esporta should consider paying closer attention to this establishment and making some staff changes.
That is all for now. More people will be earmarked for killing in due course.
Ever since Telewest’s (now branded Virgin Media, or as most customers seem to refer to them – utter crap) dismal performance in January when I was left without a phone line for over a week, I’ve been steadily working on moving my business away from the company and back into the waiting arms of BT.
It has to be said, BT has been pretty good so far. Even the engineer from BT Openreach (engineering infrastructure division) got on with things after only minor complaining and managed to compete a complex, non-regulation reconnection wiring job free of charge to bring me back into the BT fold.
So my phone is back with BT, and now I am looking at pulling my broadband away from Virgin as well.
It has to be said, the broadband service has been pretty reliable ever since I first had it, and I was among the first Telewest broadband customers in the country. But at ₤37 a month for around 10Mb, albeit with the promise of a hike to around 20Mb in July, its proving a little too much money for what you get. And so, I’ve had Sky’s heavily-subsidised DSL broadband enabled on my BT line.
I’ve opted for the uncapped up to 16Mb service for ₤10 a month. Customer service sucks, but with these cheaper-than-cost DSL deals, you get what you pay for. Or rather, you don’t get what you don’t pay for.
At present, I’m achieving around 6.5Mb, but with some tweaking at the exchange (which I’m trying to get Sky to do) I know I can get more for my money. I’ve also had to spend a little bit on hardware. Sky supplied me with a free wireless four-port DSL router, a rebadged Netgear unit. It is rubbish. Very unstable and somehow managed to achieve a very slow connection irrespective of the actual line capabilities. ₤20 later and I’ve acquired a DSL modem router (not wireless) made by Linksys which is proving much better and is significantly more reliable than the rebadged Netgear unit. Eventually, the Linksys box will be mated with my existing wireless router in place of the cable modem currently connected to it.
For now, the cable modem remains in situ, until the 20Mb upgrade is completed. By then, I’ll be ready to make a final decision on which service to dump.
The Press Gazette today published an excellent article discussing the relative merits and media applications for Twitter. Rather good timing since we have just launched the IT PRO Twitter feed.
The article was written by Linda Jones, and features comment from Stuart Dredge as well as me. It raises several important discussion points.
You can read the piece by clicking here.
It’s a Monday night, I’m sat on the couch in the study with a bottle of wine updating various blogs, installing apps on my Facebook page, setting up a second Twitter feed while updating my main one, installing the beta of Safari for Windows on one of the laptops, watching Current TV and stress testing a Sky Broadband DSL line.
I really am a geek.
Unfortunately, due to a technical hitch with my mic that nearly derailed the whole thing, the interview has not been put online. However, it went rather well.
We also covered off the privacy issues of such services holding and displaying personal information, and even talked about Sony’s plans to morph the PSP into a phone - yes, yet another attempt at an iPhone killer.
Just a quick note to say I’ll be popping up on CNBC this Monday (June 11th) at about 10.20am talking about Facebook. We will be discussing why Facebook has become so popular so quickly and whether it is likely to command the same huge valuations that MySpace and Bebo have managed.
As always, I’ll post a link to the CNBC video once it is online, and in the meantime, here’s my Facebook page.
To be perfectly clear - the situation with T-Mobile and the Fax Messaging service has gone beyond a joke. I really did not believe a so-called ‘business’ could operate in such an amateur and ludicrous fashion.
It is now obvious that the call I received from the T-Mobile press office, followed by the numerous time-wasting and pointless calls from someone called Shynai (assuming that’s even the person’s real name) were not sincere. The apologies were hollow and clearly meant as some kind of twisted unfunny joke rather than a professional attempt to rectify an otherwise simple situation that for no good reason has been turned into a frustrating and quite frankly offensive saga.
And to top matters, to think that the best way to handle a customer who is justifiably fed up with all the messing around and lies he has had to deal with from a multitude of T-Mobile staff since this started is to spend ages doing nothing before phoning and reading the same unhelpful scripted responses down the phone over and over again while talking over and ignoring his attempts to explain for the umpteenth time what the problem is and how it can be fixed very easily by implementing one simple network divert setting.
Also - refusing to let me speak to senior technical staff because they are “not customer facing” is pathetic. If these people speak English and haven’t had their tongues ripped out, then they can speak to a paying customer. Using this line is a lazy excuse to avoid dealing with a problem and doing a job properly. Instead you are wasting my time by forcing me to work through a non-technical go-between who isn’t even listening because it isn’t in their patronising script.
I had no choice but to terminate the most recent call, as due to the ridiculous route the call was heading down I was in danger of becoming anything other than polite and civil in the face of such absurdity.
Listen T-Mobile people - we concluded a week ago that your system for auto-detecting a fax clearly doesn’t work properly, so JUST SET A DIVERT ON THE NUMBER YOU ALLOCATED FOR FAXES TO DIVERT ALL CALLS TO VOICEMAIL - thus fixing the problem as then no fax calls will make the phone ring regardless of whether your flawed system can recognise them as incoming faxes.
You can do this, I DO IT ALL THE TIME VIA MY VOICE NUMBER – THE ONE ON YOUR NETWORK.
I’ve been offered a goodwill gesture of free line rental for six months. I will be curious to see if T-Mobile even bothers to apply this to my account. On current performance, it almost certainly won’t happen. While it in no way represents a satisfactory conclusion to this mess (which is still not resolved to my perfectly reasonable expectations), it would go some way to financially compensating me for the hours of my time that T-Mobile has wasted without a second thought.
It is not rocket science, there is no need to keep alienating a customer over it.
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An annual horror film festival in London’s Leicester Suqare. This year’s event takes place from August 24-27 2007 at the Odeon West End cinema on the south side of the Square
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