The worst example of customer care I have seen ever is from the UK mobile provider O2. I got a Blackberry Pearl back in October to have access to email on the road. I have avoided the “crackberry” effect for some time, but I felt I needed to have access now.
When I first set up the phone, I got a few of my emails for about 2 hours and then it stopped. We use hosted mail and I was trying to connect through the Blackberry Enterprise Services. Unfortunately, Blackberry provides terrible diagnostics when you can connect to Enterprise Services. What diagnostic tools there are reminds me of some of the lower level Windows system admin tools. The hosted service provider kept asking me to wipe my device. I got tired of this and just used my Pearl as a phone for a while.
In January I decided to get the Pearl working as an email device, because as a pure phone, it’s not very good. I worked with our phone distributor, Bridgwater Communications, which provided terrible technical support as well. Finally Bridgwater’s CEO got involved and they determined that we were on the wrong tariff. O2 at that point said we had signed the wrong contract.
At this point, it is probably Bridgwater’s fault that we had the wrong tariff, but O2 should be able to provide clear guidance in situations like ours. But this is where O2 really went wrong. O2’s legal team sat on our contract for nearly four months saying that they would get to it. Bridgwater brought up our case in a O2 UK/Ireland distributor meeting as an example of how not to treat a customer. According to Bridgwater, O2’s response was something to the effect of “Oh well.”
After administrative delay upon administrative delay, I started sending daily emails to Bridgwater to pass on to O2. As late as the May 8, I got the following response from Bridgwater: “Had been given 24 hour sla [Service Level Agreement] on Friday, however O2 could not do any connections this last 4 days as they are changing systems. I have chased them now and await up date.”
Finally on the May 11, I get: “I am being told that the Blackberry should be working, can you check for me and come back to me.” Well I have been working with the email hosting company for the last two weeks. I can’t work on this all the time, but they have been responding to me daily asking if it works yet. Their diagnostics are as good as mine because Blackberry’s tools are terrible. However, since this case has been active for so long, it probably pops up to the top of their dashboard.
I have been an O2 customer for awhile, but I give up. Orange is too expensive, but good. Vodafone is okay. T-Mobile has poor network coverage compared to the others. I’ll have to choose among(st) these for something other than O2. In the mean time, at least I have avoided the crackberry effect.
Conclusion - Blackberry tools are bad. O2 is terrible!
