Wasting customers' time and money - what does it matter if you have a monopoly?

If you take over a rental house without having made contact with the previous tenants to do a formal takeover of the phone line, chances are you will have to arrange a new phone connection. And that not only costs money, it means that you have to be at the premises for all of a nominated half-day, in case BT engineers decide that they need access.

They won't decide whether they need that access until the actual day. So if you aren't living at the house at the time (perhaps, like my daughter, you are a student trying to get Broadband fixed up in time for your return at the beginning of the autumn term), you have to travel to the property just on the off-chance that the engineer needs to call in.

No worry that this can mean big wasted costs for the customer - BT isn't paying and you haven't any other choice. Whichever ISP you sign up to for your Broadband, in many places, you have no option other than a BT phone connection, and that means you have to carry the costs of BT's producer-focussed procedures.

Could BT change to being customer-focussed? Could they perhaps check out the line a few days ahead and decide then whether they will need access to the property in time to tell the customer whether they needed to be at the premises or not? Clearly they could, but they don't. It is simpler for them to do it the current way, whatever that means for the customer. In my daughter's case, the text to say "all done" came through just after she had started her outward train journey, when it was too late to save wasting 40 miles of lift from Dad, 140 miles of train travel and most of a day.

I know one company that I won't suggest she applies to work for as a graduate!

iStockPhoto don't want me to lose my credits...

Those lovely people at iStockPhoto wrote to me, concerned:

Pssst…hey there, It looks like the iStock credits you purchased are going to expire in 30 days and we don't want you to lose them.

My reply, to an email address that wasn't obviously a dead end, got bounced back. I don't have the energy to work out how I could get a message through to iStockPhoto, so I'm posting it here - just in case anyone from iStockPhoto scans for unhappy customer blogs:

Thanks so much for your reassurance about my credits, where you say "we don't want you to lose them."

There is a simple answer - don't arbitrarily help yourselves to my credits at a particular date, but show yourselves to be nice decent people by having credits that don't expire. Others manage it, and you could too.

So - show me that you really mean what you say and give me credits that don't expire. Or, if your beancounters forbid this, swap my about-to-be-destroyed credits with an equivalent number of new credits.

Or you can show that your words are just empty puff and destroy the credits as you planned.

Loose clip in HP Pavilion G6 laptop?

Here is a shot of the C-chaped metal clip that appears to have short-circuited the top SODIMM memory module in our HP Pavilion G6 laptop, giving my daughter a nasty fright:



HP engineers don't recognise the shape of the clip, so suggested that it must have been put there by the retailer (who fitted the extra SODIMM at time of purchase, 11 months back). I didn't watch carefully, but they fitted it pretty quickly and with no apparent problems, so it would be surprising if they had felt it necessary to insert a non-HP metal clip when the two metal arms would have held the SODIMM in place in the normal way.

I'm posting this in case anyone else has a similar problem (in our case: melted plastic cover, smoke, but no flames) and might happen upon this posting. If someone were the second person to find an identically-shaped metal clip floating around inside their HP laptop, then it might persuade HP to check again to see whether this wasn't (as seems the least unlikely solution) a component of theirs that had come loose and come to rest in a location where it did damage, rather than a foreign body introduced by person unkown!

Do get in touch if you are that second person.

When a laptop you made starts melting ...

... wouldn't it be a good idea to show a bit of contrition and urgency in sorting things for the customer?

My daughter's 11-month-old HP Pavilion G6 laptop started pouring out white smoke and melted an 8mm hole in the black plastic casing:


melted a SODIMM card, and damaged the chassis:


HP's reaction:

* Ask - almost before anything else - whether we had commenced legal proceedings against them
* Check no personal injury or damage to other property
* Take comprehensive other info (including weather conditions at the time of melting!)
* Ask for photos

... and warn that it would then take 48 hours (presumably not including weekends) to process the report and photos - because they needed "to consider all the information very carefully". Not just a wretchedly lazy turnaround time, but an insult to the intelligence. 

They don't have to grow a culture or take a Geiger counter reading. They have to read the words that their agent has added to a database and they need to look at a handful of photos I have sent them. How can it take 48 hours to look at that? I wonder whether that promised reaction time would have been faster if we had a leg injury to show to the press, or a lawyer champing at the bit? Just having a rather frightening incident and an unusable product doesn't seem to warrant any particular urgency.

If I made an item that sometimes melted when sitting on customers' legs (and had in the past brought me bad publicity by bursting into flames), I really think I would pull out the stops to speed up repair/replacement action.

I started reporting the incident at 1330 Friday (it then took 45 minutes queueing and answering questions) and had the photos back to them - to the email address they had specified - by 1420. 

And - no surprise - the rest of Friday passed by with no action. So, I guess it will be Monday (at best) before anyone thinks of starting to arrange a collection, which will be Tuesday ... and so a failure which is already embarrassing causes more inconvenience than needs be.

How confident HP must be about their market reputation and customer loyalty to feel so relaxed about sorting things out for customers with alarming problems!

Update after waiting one full working day: still no response, so I called Customer Service. The response now quoted is "up to three days" - explained by telling me that the problem "has to be investigated carefully" and "it has to be sent to another office". You couldn't make it up.

Final update - HP didn't even manage to get back to me in THREE working days. When I called them again, an engineer did look into it (while I waited on hold) and decided that the metal object that appears to have short-circuited the SODIMM memory module wasn't anything to do with HP because it wasn't a shape that he (or a colleague) recognised. He could only suggest that PC World (who fitted the extra SODIMM at time of purchase) must have used a metal clip to hold the memory in place - an explanation that I find unlikely in the extreme. I'm not stuck - PC World are repairing it under their extended warranty - but I am left having wasted five days, without even the satisfaction that HP have identified a credible cause.