joeware - never stop exploring... :)

Those who know me know I am not a phone person. I turn phone ringers off and even if they are on, I could let a phone ring for an hour without it bothering me one bit. I much prefer email for several reasons that I have outlined before but quickly I prefer the clarity, the asynch component, and I have less trouble understanding email usually than someone on a crappy phone or with a heavy accent. If I allowed it, I would be on the phone all of the time because there are people all over the world who seem to feel I am the one they need to talk to. I don’t allow it. This annoys a lot of people who only like the phone but this is not my issue, I much prefer the little peace and quiet I get by turning off ringers than talking with people.

So anyway, that makes the following kind of funny. I am actually looking at replacing my Sony Ericsson T-637 with some form of PDA phone. It isn’t because I intend to talk on the phone any more than I do now, it is so when I am traveling for work, I can quickly pull up web pages or data that I need usually when standing at some airline counter or something without having to pull out my laptop.

The company I work for gets discounts at all of the major vendors so I look at all of them and finally settle on a phone that seems pretty good and I have heard good things about and go to the vendor’s (Cingular) web page they have specifically set up for us to order phones and services through so we get all of our discounts.  I start going through the order process and low and behold the first screen I hit where I pick the phone just starts reloading over and over and over and over and over again. I finally hit stop and it displays a half loaded page. I see the menu which says PDA Phones so I go into that which loads perfectly fine, except there are no images for the phones, just nice boxes with little red X’s meaning the images aren’t available.

As you can guess, by this point I am extremely impressed by Cingular’s web site. I tough it out because I should order this new phone and I pick the phone and run into odd issues with the pages reloading and I have to click reload 2,3,4 times and then I hit something else when picking a service (2000 minutes[1]) and then more issues when I go to pick a data package (unlimited). All of this and I am thinking, wow, the people at Cingular appear to be boneheads. The coup de grace pops occurs after I select the data package when the site comes back and says there is something wrong with my order.

At this point I am thinking, do I really want to sit on a phone with someone to order a new phone? Plus… I expect when I have issues and such I will be using the Cingular website, do I really want a vendor whose website skills apparently end after putting a title on a web page? I think, hmmm, being a guy used to doing support for others, let’s see how this place measures up there? I go to the report a problem website and report the issue – it appears to work. The next day I get a response. The response… you should call in and order over the phone. My response, no. Why doesn’t your website work? How do I know it will work later when I have a problem and I can’t call anyone but can use a webbrowser?  They say they are looking into it and will correct the problem. I like websites because they help the company help you help yourself. It is great because you don’t have to sit on the phone for hours waiting for someone who can speak English or has more than an 8th grade education. A website that isn’t working doesn’t bode well for any of the support capabilities for a company. But still, I know I have been with support groups that have screwed up initially and people gave us a chance to fix things…

A week later (I am not in a hurry to get a phone as you may have figured out), I try the webpage again. All of the exact same issues. I contact support again, again they say I should call them. Again I say that their website should work.

A week later (still not in a hurry as you can see), I try the webpage again. No change, even the images still aren’t displaying. I don’t know about you, but I think even a complete moron supporting a web page could get images back into place within 2 weeks. So I go back to the main vendor discount page because I recall seeing a big message that said something like “We care about our relationship with you and XYZ company, if you have a problem with service or support, email the account management staff directly for resolution” and the email address.

So I email them, first response, oh yeah, that is a known issue, we have been working on that, how about you call me and I will walk through the process and if it doesn’t work on your end MAYBE it will work on mine. WTF!!!! First off, I explained the whole calling bit before. Second off…. MAYBE IT WILL WORK???? So not only can the people at Cingular not run their web pages in a way that is actually useable, their own staff seems to be fully aware of it and accepting of it and pretty much seem to expect it to not work…

If anyone that reads this works for cingular web support or knows anyone who works for cingular web support, I WOULD LOVE to hear the response as to why in 3 weeks they can’t get a web page working or at the very least showing images. I mean seriously, if any pages are going to work on a website, I would expect the ones that allow people to order the products would be the ones you know???

Like I said, a main part of my job is doing support and if ever something was completely down for three weeks, I can’t imagine we would still be offering support for that company. I expect after 24 hours we would be getting beat without mercy.

So I will send another email to account team explaining that I don’t truly believe they actually care and ask for an explanation why it still doesn’t work after like 3 weeks. Then I will try it again next week and if it doesn’t work, I will go look at the other vendors again.

People of Cingular… I don’t want any additional discounts, I don’t want to be called by any managers apologizing profusely, I don’t want to get a nice free gift for being so patient. I just want your shit to work. If you want, let me know and I can put you in touch with people who can offer you obviously much better support than what you are getting now.

   joe

 

[1] While I don’t ever intend to spend 2000 minutes on the phone in a month, I get a large package like that JUST IN CASE something blows at work and I am sitting there on conference calls for hours at a time. This has happened more than once when dealing with this that or the other customer.