Open letter to O2 - anyone listening?

My daughter has an O2 phone. She’s been waiting for the 12 months to end for the last few months to get a new phone.
Its finally out of contract so we called to try and get renewed with the phone she wants.

After simple security q&a (see more later), the best the sales agent could do was to increase her contract in money and length to get a free phone.
I try for the best deal I can get – which isn’t any deal, so we decide to go elsewhere

My daughter looks on the various websites and we find various better deals ( she wants more text) but she doesn’t want to be without service and I don’t want more paperwork
We then find the same phone on the O2 website, free on a 12 month contract, so we try to do that, but of course that means a fresh contract and we therefore need to go back and cancel the old contract. We might as well try for a “common sense” saving of effort (for both of us and O2) whereby we don’t cancel and they just give us the online deal

We phone again, abandoned once on the “thinking of cancelling” option. Eventually got thro and then get transferred to the “right” person. She wants to know our security question, not the security answer, the question. Well 12 months have passed….you know where this is going. She says it’s a DPA regulation – I tell her its not. Its more than my bank (first direct) want. Slowly we negotiate different questions. The tariff we’re on. Its on the bill. Well it isn’t. (subsequently find a second page of a bill later with it on). Eventually we spend several minutes debating info before I find a bank file and give her bank details instead. I’m very wound up by now to say the least !

She cant do the common sense deal. So we need to cancel to buy again. She can't cancel us, so she transfers us to "retentions" not cancellations.

I explain why we want to cancel. Cancel and not buy again, since the whole experience has been so dumb and annoying.

We now get the offer we wanted to start with – a free phone, a 12 month contract. And we get a load of free texts. No paperwork.

So we get to where we needed to be.

A waste of my time and the four agents we spoke to. And O2 are giving away money. 4 contacts and a give away. Expensive way to renew. That's ok, they'll say - we were retained.

We were churned, we were retained, we cost money in time and giveaways, in brand damage.

I asked both the last 2 agents if they could take customer suggestions about how to improve. The first said no, I’d have to speak to customer services. The second said yes she would. I wonder what it woudl say if you could see what she captured compared to what I offered as feedback.

Anyone at O2 there?

Humourous assessment centre

HOW TO PROPERLY PLACE NEW EMPLOYEES
1. Put 400 bricks in a closed room.
2. Put your new hires in the room and close the door.
3. Leave them alone and come back after 6 hours.
4. Then analyze the situation:

a. If they are counting the bricks, put them in the Accounting Department.
b. If they are recounting them, put them in Auditing.
c. If they have messed up the whole place with the bricks, put them in Engineering.
d. If they are arranging the bricks in some strange order, put them in Planning.
e. If they are throwing the bricks at each other, put them in Operations.
f. If they are sleeping, put them in Security.
g. If they have broken the bricks into pieces, put them in Information Technology.
h. If they are sitting idle, put them in Human Resources.
i. If they say they have tried different combinations, they are looking for more,yet not a brick has been moved, put them in Sales.
j. If they have already left for the day, put them in Management.
k. If they are staring out of the window, put them in Strategic Planning.
l. If they are talking to each other, and not a single brick has been moved,congratulate them and put them in Top Management.
m. Finally, if they have surrounded themselves with bricks in such a way that they can neither be seen nor heard from, put them in Parliament

That was the quarter that was

Unbelievably its July already. The monsoons have arrived, in Sheffield if not in Mumbai.

The tide mark up the wall in client Irwin Mitchell's ground floor offices on Friday had to be seen to be believed. Of course disaster recovery plans and blitz spirit meant customers and clients were not suffering, even if staff have. It's a timely reminder to test your back up plan, including how you'd enact it without mobile phones, power and transport.

Looking back over April, May, June it's been constant travel with the awards and conference circuit with some memorable papers, and some maybe not so!

The key changes that I've observed over this period of constant listening have been:
1) Major change is the constant mantra - email me at peter.massey@budd.uk.com if you want ten top success tips from these programmes
2) Management are recognising that customers know the answers, what's wrong and what's right
3) Front line staff are being listened to more and more
4) Management teams are swimming in information, but few have information with which they can drive the business, the customer experience; they have no tracking or reporting on how well they are driving the customer experience week on week
5) Cross functional business change is still the big deal

If you want to talk about these issues in yoru context - get in touch
Have a happy third quarter !