Choccie
Posted: Tue 18 October, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Travel 1 Comment »One thing I really shouldn’t do is head in to excellent chocolate shops on my own. While wandering around last night I found the Puccini Bomboni shop in Singel, Amsterdam. Adrian had mentioned about this a while ago on the currently-defunct-and-thus-no-link Uborka.nu so I made a mental note to go back.
I had some time spare today where nothing was going on, so I wandered back – and oh dear, oh dear. €35 later, and I’ve got a selection box of some truly evil-looking (calorie-wise) choccies, as well as some caramel nougat, and chocolate-covered orange slices. (Think grand-scale jaffa cakes) – and I’m being dead good, and not even opening any of it ’til I get home.
The shop is fantastic though – you can almost get high on the smell of the chocolate. The staff were lovely too, translating the Dutch labels (who’d have thought that rabarber meant rhubarb, eh? Ha. ) and generally just being really nice. I’m sure I’ll do more of a review of the chocs themselves when we’ve eaten a few, but I can say already that some of them look deeply tempting. Getting them home intact will be an achievement for sure.
Bias
Posted: Thu 13 October, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, News 1 Comment »Some companies just don’t seem to learn from their mistakes, do they?
A case in point – good old RyanAir. Not content with having had to go to court about their failure to provide free wheelchairs for their disabled passengers, they’ve now refused to allow a group of blind- and partially-sighted people to fly.
Supposedly it’s because “Ryanair has imposed a limit of four disabled passengers per flight”. Brilliant…
Speed of Communications
Posted: Tue 4 October, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Weirdness Leave a comment »After the conversation today, I’m beginning to suspect that either a)Argos exists in a different dimension to the rest of the world, or b) they’re a bunch of fucktard cunts with the technical skills of a slightly retarded marmoset. Or c) Both.
I’ve ordered a new sofa-bed for the spare bedroom – a long story I can’t be arsed to go into now, but it was needed – and ordered it from Argos. No particular reason, other than that they had one we liked. Which, when all’s said and done, is as good a reason as any.
The first insult-to-injury moment comes when the website says “This item is only available for home delivery” – fair enough, I don’t want to load a sofa-bed plus mattress etc into a Ford Focus – and I can see that this kind of thing would take up room in the shop warehouse, so great, deliver it directly to me. “Delivery costs £5 extra”. Cunts. Charging me to deliver something I can’t collect from the store – not just because it’s a hassle, but because you won’t stock it in the shops is taking the piss. But hey ho, it’s only a fiver. I can live with that.
So I ordered it. Easy. Except no confirmation comes through to my email address – it should do, they say they’ve sent one. And I can’t log back in using the email address I thought I’d given them, which means I’ve probably fucked it up. I call the customer helpline…
“Oh, don’t worry, the order’s gone through, but sometimes we it takes two days to send out the email”
“Eh? You’re taking the piss. Two days to send an email?”
“No, that’s right. It can take two days. It takes at least twenty-four hours for your customer account to be sorted out too.”
“But I did it all online – the information’s in the bloody database already!”
“Yeah, but it still takes time to set up…”
I despair. Bunch of idiots in a parallel dimension, I’m sure of it.
Despair
Posted: Tue 27 September, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts Leave a comment »For some reason unknown to all but themselves, I’ve recently been getting a lot of contacts from a couple of IT agencies (I won’t name them here, because why should I give them any credit? Instead I shall name them Aldous and Regressive – which should be enough of a clue for any other IT people who read this…) about jobs in Manchester. Now, I told all the agencies I deal with (including Aldous and Regressive) that I had moved – and let’s face it, we’re talking nine months ago here, so you’d think they might have had time to alter their records by now.
Anyway, yesterday I got emails from both companies, despite repeatedly telling them by phone and email that I a) had moved, and b) wasn’t looking for work. You’d think that was fairly blunt, wouldn’t you?
But oh no, not in Regressive’s case. Instead, I got the following reply.
Thanks for the update- where are you now looking for work? Regressive has offices across the Uk and Europe and we would be more than happy to keep you posted about other suitable roles.
Kind regards
Sometimes agencies are just too bloody thick to be believed.
Arses
Posted: Fri 23 September, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Sweary, Thoughts Leave a comment »It’s going to be one of those days today. The ineffable tossers at TicketMaster sent out an email today containing an offer that – for once – was actually going to be of use to me, as it involved tickets for a new London show at half price. Perfect for Mother’s birthday in late November, in fact.
So I went to order them, typed in the password that was on the page they gave me, and an error message popped up. “That password doesn’t exist on our system”, sayeth the message. “Oh bugger”, thoughteth I, “must’ve typed it wrong”. But no – repeated tried later, it’s still knackered.
I finally got hold of ticketmaster on the phone, to be confronted with what can only be described as an idiot. “You must have an offer code, or I can’t enter it”. “There isn’t one on the email ticketmaster sent out, nor on the web-page”. “There must be – I can’t enter the offer without the code”. So forth, so fifth. Yes, another prize twunt-monkey employed by Twuntmaster.
Eventually, a supervisor comes on the line. “Yeah, the password was entered wrongly. We’re sorting it out now.”
And lo, job done – but surely it’s better to let the front-line frigmonkeys know that there’s a problem, rather than ending up with pissed-off customers, and complaints?
Mickey D’s
Posted: Fri 23 September, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Sweary, Thoughts 2 Comments »This one’s been brewing since last weekend – you have been warned!
Currently, there’s an advert on TV for McDonalds, telling everyone about their “great” new toasted deli sandwiches, “freshly prepared on the premises”. (In fact, it says it on the website too – “Did you know that our Deli sandwiches are freshly made on the spot?“) OK, all fair and good.
On the weekend, on our way down to Portsmouth/ Waterlooville, we ended up stopping at a McDonalds for the first time in ages. Now, Herself is vegetarian, which kind of limits the choices in a burger place, but all the same you don’t expect to be greeted with the response “Sorry, we don’t do veggie burgers any more, we only do these “Grilled Veggie Melt” sandwiches. Which, frankly, sucks – if you’re going to something like fucking McDonalds, you’re pretty likely to want a fucking burger, not some grilled sandwich with houmous, pitta bread, and chargrilled vegetables. It’s not rocket science, but apparently McDonalds (advised by those pious holier-than-thou cocksucker in the Vegetarian Society) have decided that vegetarians don’t want burgers, they want these godforsaken concoctions loaded with bland cheese and – having now tried one – no fucking taste whatsoever.
The secondary factor is that, for reasons known only to Herself, she doesn’t like courgette. Fair enough. These pox-arsed sandwiches are – let’s not forget – “prepared fresh on the spot”, so we can just ask for one without courgettes in, can’t we? Um, no. When they say “prepared fresh on the spot”, the bullshitting lying corporate tosswhores knows as McDonalds actually mean “we get in bags of pre-mixed vegetable concoction, and thaw it out in the morning. When you order it, we put the stuff together, which is how we can get away with calling it ‘prepared on the spot'”. So you’ve a) no choice, b) no options, and c) a diagram involving a canoe, a creek, and the exact directions to the nearest paddle-store, 100km away. Cunts.
Smooth Marketing
Posted: Thu 22 September, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Festering Season, Thoughts Leave a comment »
I’ve written before about the (in my opinion) really rather good company, Hotel Chocolat, who do some of the best chocolate I’ve had in a very long time.
In a similar kind of vein to Innocent, Hotel Chocolat have looked at the way people buy things, and have applied it to their company – and this is something that certainly shows up in both the way they market themselves, and the ordering process.
When you order with them, you can choose the dates you want the items to arrive – particularly in the case of things like Easter, Christmas etc. this can be really useful, as you can order well in advance, and choose to have them delivered to you immediately (so you can wrap it and send it on, or give it as a gift, I assume) or delivered straight to the recipient’s door as close to the day as possible. It doesn’t sound like much, but it shows the thought that’s gone into the process.
An example of the marketing skill came through in the post yesterday – an order form from them with a cover note that basically said “These are the people you ordered stuff for through us last Christmas – tell us what you’d like to order for them this year, and it’s all sorted” (I assume you had to pay them too, but that wasn’t mentioned in the letter) It just struck me that it was again something really simple, but that kept Hotel Chocolat in mind, and made you think “that’s actually really rather clever”.
Well, it impressed me, anyway. But I’m kind of sad like that.