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How about actually providing some customer service!

Here’s our experience so far;

- Purchased from a store in UK
- Returned defective product via rude staff, and only a partial refund.
- Got a letter saying ’sad to see you go’
- Direct Debit wasn’t cancelled as promised causing another payment to go out
- Got a call weeks later saying ‘Welcome to Orange’. wtf!
- Completed internet for asking for explanation of bad service etc but no reply after a week except dodgy emails like this…

Is there anyone at Orange who cares?

David.
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Hello

We recently sent you an email requesting feedback on our Online services. We’d like to apologise for an error which meant that a number of customer’s email addresses were not hidden from view in the mail. We’re now reviewing our email policy to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

Once again we would like to apologise for any inconvenience this has caused you.

Orange

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Orange OK on store sales, but failed terribly with in store post purchase complaints (Emma I hope you’re reading this, try to remember customers pay your wages) and online complaint handling.

Thank you for your email.

In order to assist with your query please provide the 4 digit PIN you selected to authorise my access to your account.

If you do not remember your PIN, please provide the below identification requirements:

On Account (billed) Customers: If you are the account owner, forward your full name, date of birth, current residential address and method of payment to enable me to access your details.

Prepaid: Customers: If you are the account owner, forward your full name, ID number (I.e. drivers licence number, passport number etc) used at time of connection, date of birth, and address at time of connection so that I can confirm your identity.

If you are not the account owner, I cannot confirm this information with you. The account owner will need to raise a new incident and provide the required details to authorise access to their account.

If the account is in a company name, I will require a Letter of Authority on company letterhead, listing your ABN, and signed by a Director in order to action your request. This letter of authorisation may be scanned and attached to this email or alternatively faxed to 03 6210 3362 attention ‘Correspondence Team’ for actioning.

Once I have verified that you are the account holder, I will update your Contact Us profile with your mobile number and account PIN so that this information is automatically provided should you email us from your registered email address in future.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Kind Regards

Tara
Correspondence Team

Vodafone Pty Limited ABN 76 062 954 554
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And today Orange have sent me a customer service survey asking how the issue was handled (btw this email had no reply address and contained dozens of other peoples emails ‘bcc’d'!!)

Shame the issue is still open.

And then Vodafone asked me to confirm my ID – still no help yet.

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Orange strive to supply customers with the highest level of service and we would therefore like to advise that this is an automated response.

IMPORTANT…As this is an automated response, please do not reply to this acknowledgment, we will endeavour to answer your original email as soon as possible.

Please be advised that Orange aim to answer all email queries within 24 hours. However, for this time of year we are unusually busy and there may be a longer wait than anticipated.

It is not intended that this service should be used to obtain information on your account. Customer Services will not reply to messages relating to your bill, top ups, change of personal details or activated products and services via email. If you have any queries specifically related to your account please call Customer Services on 150 if you are a pay monthly customer or 450 if you are a pay as you go customer.

If you have a Billing Enquiry I am pleased to advise that you can now send a secure message, please sign into your online account at http://www.orange.co.uk. Once you have signed into the account select the billing and payment tab at the top of the screen. Please select the option to view your bills and you will then be taken to the screen where you can view your last 18 invoices.

Next to your latest or the previous months bill will be an option to view an e-bill. Please select this tab and you will be taken to a bill summary page. Please scroll to the bottom of the page and select the option to “click here to make a general enquiry”. This will take you to the secure message page. Select on the send a message tab and this will enable you to submit a secure message query to Orange.

Emails relating to lost, stolen, damaged or faulty phones cannot be answered by email and will not therefore receive a reply. Please call Orange Customer Services on 150 (07973100150 from a landline) for Pay Monthly or 450 (07973100450) for Pay As You Go or you may be able to find the answer to your query by going to http://www.orange.co.uk/mobile_help_and_support/

If you have an Orange phone and you are experiencing difficulties with your online account, you can contact our technical helpdesk by dialling 439 from your Orange phone or 07973100439 from a landline.

Kind Regards

Orange Online Services

We’ve received your enquiry and we’ll have someone get back to you ASAP.

Below is your enquiry and reference number. If you would like to add to your enquiry, click reply first and enter your update between the lines below.

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Question Reference #100204-000084
Summary: Fwd: Your Vodafone Email Bill for 10 Dec 2009 to 09 Jan 2010
Date Created: 04/02/2010 11:14 AM
Last Updated: 04/02/2010 11:14 AM
Status: Unresolved
First Name:
Surname:
Enquiry PIN:
Mobile Number:

Email Address

Discussion Thread…. etc

Thanks for the follow up and I hear your point. We feel strongly that the new Retweet API / functionality will have a net benefit effect on the ecosystem as a whole. Overall most of the app partners we have talked to feel that the delta to integrate it has been trivial and the value has eclipsed the work required.

To talk to your higher level question about raw tweets — we are definitely keen on adding more context around tweets as is seen with the Geolocation and Retweet launches. I would also posit that by including this metadata with the tweet we empower the ecosystem to be more creative as the data has more signal to work with. From a pure content transformation standpoint there may be more work, but we are servicing myriad of uses that go beyond just that.

Hope that makes sense and I welcome your feedback.

Best, Ryan”

One major reasons is security, compliance archiving is another and also control.

AOL, Yahoo, MSN could all decide to turn off their systems tomorrow, you have no recourse, you’re using a free service with no service level agreements.

Do you want your corporate chats going across unencrypted data channels?

Sametime and Microsoft OCS come to that, both offer options for companies to connect their internal users with outside services such as AOL, Yahoo, Jabber and MSN, so while there are “walls”, there are also gates.

I don’t think the world is suddenly going to switch off email and IM and use ‘Wave’ instead.

I think we (Cleartext) are heading down the same road as far as messaging goes, but we’re hoping to morph to this type of platform as users accept different usage models.

So for us our current hybrid IM/Micro-blogging platform based on XMPP is still good to go. Maybe we’ll just push the email integration along a bit faster, I never did like POP and IMAP, XMPP< ->SMTP feels much nicer and is more realistic for the average business user.