Feb
11
2005

Unhappy customer

Last night we lost everything on our Skyplus box. The nice people on the sky helpdesk just made us go through a long process of checking if things were plugged in etc…. then got us to do a factory reset…. which wiped the hard drive and our settings. I’m not a happy bunny…. We’ve lost everything recorded, including a program about racing huskies in Wales with me in it. They blamed it on power cuts and surges – but everybody has them. It’s now working – but on parole.

This is the major problem with SkyPlus being a closed system. All you can do is press the buttons and loose everything. If the hard drive on your computer failed – you could run a range of disk doctor tools on it. I love SkyPlus, has changed the way we watch TV for the better. I now don’t trust it. Shame there’ll never be an open standards based media server/PVR that will work with Sky. I’d install one tomorrow.

To make matters worse, our new fridge is now making a huge noise. Don’t think I’ll ever buy Hotpoint again. Apart from the thing always making noises as it expands and contracts through out the day, they also didn’t ship the thing with the correct number of trays as listed in the catalogue. Somebody in the company has decided to ship the fridge without these trays based on some assumption that only a few people will notice and when they get stock levels back up, they’ll be able to ship them to those that notice. That’s a brand mentality I’d rather avoid. And now the fan is on the blink.

On the inside of the freezer door, there is a sticker for the customer care line…. nice touch I thought. After working my way through the disclaimer and options, I needed to provide a receipt number. I went back to my emails and found the reciept as an attachment from Comet (we ordered it online). I phoned Hotpoint back and they said the transaction number was too short. But she accepted it and then said I needed an authorisation code from Comet to get an engineer out to it. So I phoned Comet to hear that my transaction number is not correct…. I guess their online ordering and internal systems are not quite singing from the same hymn sheet. We then worked out that we needed a store number to make the other number work. Great eh? To cut a long story short – Comet are sending one of their repair people next week to look at it. It’s all crazy and didn’t give me a warm feeling.

When things go wrong, it’s a great opportunity for a company to have great conversation with an old customer. Get it right and you’re well on the way to building a long term relationship. Get it wrong and you’re burnt.

Written by Guy in: Rants |

No Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.