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Month: October 2007

Carphone Warehouse: Shoddy Customer Support

I’ve just sent the following email to Carphone Warehouse’s customer support department as, after years of service with them, I’ve become very dissatisfied with their service and I’m looking at moving away from them as quickly as possible.

From what I’ve heard from co-workers, I’m not the only person which has had this sort of experience recently with Carphone Warhouse: going from a company I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to one that I’m on the verge of hating with every breath I take. Who else (reading this blog) has had this sort of experience with them and if you’d recommend any other mobile phone retailer.

I would like my PAC code so I can port to O2 directly. Please supply this within 48 hours and do not cancel my contract until further notice.

Reasons for porting:
* Very poor customer support by Carphone Warehouse Upgrade Department.
I called once today for an upgrade: they offered me a “special” of the Nokia N95 on 30GBP per month: which is exactly the same as O2 offer directly!). They then said that I couldn’t call them back within 10 minutes, and that they would call me back. No call received within 30 minutes.
* Very poor customer support by Carphone Warehouse Cancellation Department.
I called requesting my PAC code and “Gary” constantly tried to make it out like it was my fault: why didn’t I get the name of the person I spoke to 30 minutes ago concerning my upgrade (so he could arrange for action to be taken against him for breach of Carphone Warehouse policy), that I hadn’t received my cashback vouchers as I hadn’t returned the bills (number of paper bills received FROM Carphone Warehouse to date: 1, number of printed out internet bills sent to Carphone Warehouse to date: 3), that I should spend £35 per month and get a £90 cashback for more minutes per month (even though I had told him I didn’t use that many minutes or texts) and then to top it all – after requesting my PAC code a further 4 times(!!!) he then told me I couldn’t actually get my PAC code over the phone!
* Constant calls from your upgrade department
After the first call regarding an upgrade, I told your upgrade department that I couldn’t take the call as I was at work and that I’d go into a branch to arrange an upgrade. I have had at least 5 calls since then!
* Poor Website service.
I chose O2 from the Carphone Warehouse as I had been very impressed by O2’s online billing for my previous O2 PAYG service. I was not told at any point that I would be “serviced” by Carphone Warehouse and use their poor online web solution.
* Poor “general feeling” of Carphone Warehouse.
At work, I know of 2 other people which are with Carphone Warehouse – and neither of them are happy with the service they have been receiving from you recently (billing problems, the poor web site service for O2 customers and general dissatisfaction).

Until recently, I have been very happy with Carphone Warehouse and have been, in my eyes, a very long term customer. I’ve been with you one way or another for about 10 years – starting on One2One with a Motorola, getting a 07050 personal number from you, upgrading to a Nokia 6210 on Orange, getting an additional Sony Ericsson P800 pay as you go from you and finally upgrading to a Nokia 6230i on an O2 Pay Monthly £35 contract: and it’s extremely worrying that if a loyal and long last customer such as myself has gone from happy and willing to recommend you to friends and family to annoyed (and after the last phone call to your customer services for my PAC code- extremely angry!) that it’s just shocking.

Oh – one thing I didn’t include in the email is the person in their cancellations department (who can only accept cancellations via postal email and can only accept requests for PAC codes via written requests!) gave me a “good reason to stay with Carphone Warehouse directly” – if I moved to another provider (or O2 directly), I may have to pay Carphone Warehouse for the current month on my contract. And that is the best reason they could provide for me staying with them!

Personal: Funny

From my other half whilst watching TV last night:

TV: *baby squeak noise*
Other half: Should babies squeak like that? Well, I guess it’s been in water for nine months so it’ll probably be rusty.

I know she was kidding, but still funny! 😀

Blogging: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

Ok, no lies, but last months blogging stats.

I currently have 763 posts (14 during September) and 2,410 comments (only 8 of those during September) with 436,819 spam comments caught by Akismet (a further 70,298 were caught by Spam Karma before that) since my last install.

Since I seem to have conflicting information from my stats systems, I’ll put the data in a table:

Item/Source Google
Analytics
AwStats Webalizer
Unique Visitors 3,287 6,785 10,799 -“Total Unique Sites”
Visits 3,424 46,744 73,298
Page Views 4,426 81,673 125,511
Average pageviews 1.29 6.88 n/a
Bandwidth usage n/a 2.45Gb 2.67Gb

And now for the top 5 visitor locations – it’s amazing that the 3 different stats programs gave different top 5 results: 9 different countries were in the top five:

Item/Source Google
Analytics
AwStats Webalizer
Visitors UK 2. 32.56% visits 4. 2121 pages 3. 0.68% hits
  US 1. 43.08% visits 1. 47,195 pages 2. 3.34% hits
  Canada 3. 3.68% visits 5. 1415 pages 11. 0.02% hits
  Australia 4. 2.75% visits 6. 1004 pages 9. 0.08% hits
  Germany 5. 1.55% visits 9. 673 pages 16. 0.01% hits
  India 6. 1.08% visits 21.93 pages  
  Sweden 10. 0.58% visits 3. 11,201 pages 4. 0.51% hits
  Unknown 38. 0.15% visits 2. 12,654 pages 1. 94.48% hits
  Mexico 37. 0.18% visits 37.11 pages 5. 0.23% hits

But what browsers do my visitors use? I’m a bit disappointed not to see ArcWeb or Fresco in this list:

Item/Source Google
Analytics
AwStats Webalizer
Internet Explorer 69.86% – 2,392 visits 33% – 43,760 hits  
  9.0 0.04% – 1 visit 0% – 15 hits  
  7.0 37.54% – 898 visits 13.5% – 17,871 hits  
  6.0 61.87% – 1,480 visits 19% – 25,276 hits  
  5.5 0.29% – 7 visits 0.1% – 164 hits  
Firefox 24.53% – 840 visits 20.2% – 26,756 hits  
  2.0.0.7 26.31% – 221 visits 2.4% – 3,248 hits  
  2.0.0.6 58.10% – 488 visits 6.5% – 8,608 hits  
  1.5.0.12 2.98% – 25 visits 0.3% – 451 hits  
  2.0.0.4 2.14% – 18 visits 0.1% – 245 hits  
Safari 2.69% – 92 visits 1.3% – 1,724 hits  
Opera 1.34% – 46 visits 0.6% – 845  
Mozilla 0.96% – 33 visits 1.1% – 1,503 hits  
Netscape 0.23% – 8 visits 0.2% – 363 hits  
Camino 0.15% – 5 visits 0% – 89 hits  
Konqueror 0.12% – 4 visits 0% – 66 hits  
Playstation 3 0.03% – 1 visit n/a  
Sony Ericsson 0.03% – 1 visit 13 hits  

I think that’s enough stats for now.