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11 February 2012 I've had by BlackBerry 8320 phone for almost four years, deliberatlly not upgrading just to upgrade. As a phone and for email the BB 8320 has been wonderful. Indeed as a phone I think it still supasses many of the new smart phones (inparticular the iPhone). In recent weeks, however, my trusted companion has not quite been 100%. Coupled with the technical issues and the fact that there are a couple of realy interested phones avaliable I decided it's time to look at a replacement. The phone I was mainly interested in was the Samsung Galaxy S II (phone of the year T3 magazine 2011). I visited my local Orange shop with the intention of a close inspection of the Galaxy SII. Paul the guy in the shop took his time to explain the features and the great new promotion. The promotion started on the 3rd of Feb and for £26 a month you got the phone free with 200 mins, 750mb and unlimited text messages. In this time of austerity a sub £40 a month contract is great, particularly when you consider a typical household will have at least two mobiles and a landline contract - each could be £40 a month and that's just short of £1,440 a year excluding app purchases! Ok. so we have a phone, Paul from the Harrogate Orange shop has shown me the features, and they have the white version in stock. A great experience so far. The only issue now being that 200mins isn't quite enough time per month and i didn't want to pay more than £26 a month. Now customer experince becomes fragmented. Rather than deal with Paul who's been doing a great job, I now have to phone customer service's retention team to discuss contract options. A 15 minuit telephone call and the new package has been arrived at. So I'm now at the point where i've seen and handled a phone and love it, i've also been able to arrange which contact will work for me ... but not for the bomb shell ... customer services tell me they they have no stock! What, how can you have, no stock, I've just been playing with a phone in an Orange shop. A phone that I could of paid for and walked out of the shop. That to me is the definition of in stock and avaliable. So after a little research ... it seems Orange has stock associated to promotion/targets ... and products can't be switched between allocations. Thus, in store have targets and associated stock, like wise the customer support team have targets and associate stock. I dont' necessarly subscribe to the theory "the customer is always right" but i definatly agree with with the sentiment that " the consumer should never be miffed off". 23 January 2012 Watching the press over the weekend since the blackout on the 18th its been interesting to see what people made of it all. The expectation was that without protest there was a real risk of the US Senate passing what by all admissions was a knee jerk and highly contentious piece of legalisation ... not to mention seemingly heavily promoted by self interested media companies and brand owners. "The legislation has broad support from organizations that rely on copyright, including the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Macmillan US, Viacom, and various other companies and unions in the cable, movie, and music industries. Supporters also include trademark-dependent companies such as Nike, L'Oréal, and Acushnet Company.", see Wikipedia:Stop_Online_Piracy_Act Wednesday the 18th blackout was aimed to generate press against SOPA, and as predicted it did just that. nb. re the student complaints ... i find it somewhat amusing that those students who have grown up in the digital age weren't shouting at each other how to work around the blackout. Two simple options (1) use google cache; or (2) turn off javascript. To put all this action into context, the following table illustrates members of Congress's Positions on SOPA/PIPA as tracked by ProPublica.org. ProPublica.org latest updates says "SOPA and PIPA have been indefinitely postponed". Links: 21 January 2012 We decided to go for the 555 promotion, we selected our three 9.5" pizzas and filled the basket. But strangely no discount was forthcoming. I tried this a number of ways but always the same ... No discount? This was some what vexing and we were all getting hungry. This reminded me of a promotional problem I had seen before ... The issue is two fold (1) the inability to recognise the contents of the basket; (2) not anticipating the varity of user interactions. The solution to both our basket and hunger problem took a little time to work out ... Looking at the interface again I noticed a DEALS tab ... Clicking on this took us to a page where all the promotions were listed with the ability to place an order, Yea!!!! The order was placed and we just needed to wait for the notification to pick up the pizzas. While waiting for the green light to pick up the pizza we mused that dominos would be getting into a trouble with customers. They would see the 555 deal but be unable to make it work. This is a UK wide promotion so You would have to assume this is goi to be a big problem. This was semi confirmed when we went to collect the pizza, an argument about the promotion was already raging. I think it's safe to say there will be update requests to the site. There's a great book by Steve Krug entitle "Don't make me think" ... to paraphrase what it is saying ... it's advice is that an interface should be obvious and not require un due amounts of thought. This is the oposit of what i was faced with at Dominos.
Possible Improvements
1) The 555 promotion banner links to the DEALS page ... this is the obvious and easiest fix. It also let's customers see what other promotions are available.
2) The 555 promotion banner links to the 555 promotion order page. This is a more appropriate fix for just the 555 promotion, however linking directly to the 555 order page effectively hides the other promotions ... one of which might be more interesting to the customer. For this reason I think we rule this option out, unless perhaps there is another link to the DEALS page.
3) Configure the promotional engine to work correctly - but my guess is that this is a more complicated issue and will require a fix.
4) Fix the Ecommerce promotional engine so that it can detect and correctly apply promotions to appropriate orders (this may be v.complicated).
Out of Stock, Orange made me see red!
Another week and yet another ecommerce/customer service disaster. This time it's the mobile phone company Orange and their customer service team's out-of-stock messages doing their best confuse and frustrate their customers.
At this point I wonder ... do the guys at Orange buy into the concept of "multi channel" and what about a wholistic customer experience? Maybe some more lessions need to be learnt!
Aftermath of Wikipedia Blackout
2012
Supporters
Opponents
Jan 18
80
31
Jan 19
65
101
Jan 23
56
203
May 30
55
205
Domino's Don't Make Me Think (school boy error)
Amusing incident when getting a treat pizza from Dominios tonight. Buying online we noticed the 555 offer. Order any three 9.5" pizzas for £5.55, a great price.
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