interacting with a robot... what an experience

i've previously blogged that i was less than impressed with the service provided by the massive telecommunications company, telstra. have a read...

http://charlierobinson.blogspot.com/2008/08/interaction-with-bigpond.html

however something happened this week that i would like to compliment them for. one particular service. it seems that where telstra HUMANS can not provide a service, a telstra ROBOT can.

and provide it did. i made a routine call to the telstra technicians line (my internet connection wasn't working via the router). call made. all good. within five minutes i was back up and running. but not once did i speak with a human.

i spoke with and was lead through a series of checks, switches and refreshes by a robot. the problem was solved quickly and simply.

i was impressed.

so, telstra it seems robots can do for you what no human seems capable of - quick, fast efficient, polite service.

i feel sorry (afraid) for the future workforce of telstra.

xc

interaction with BigPond

dealing with telstra and bigpond has been a challenge. to say the least. frustrating. rude. inconsiderate are all words that spring to mind. and i could talk for hours on the subject of why. however i'd rather focus on the fact that its pay back time. customers rule.

a good thing happened to me this morning.

there was me politely trying to ring the number that they had provided via txt message to my personal mobile phone if i had queries. when i realised i couldn't translate the number to call.

you see the number provided was 13POND. go on you try (love to hear if you can or can't and what mobile phone you have) . i own a MotoQ. it uses a qwerty keyboard. so i asked a friend to translate the number for me. he has an iPhone. but he couldn't either.

i got it eventually (thanks to Trev's work colleague whoever you are).

but for BigPond, hmmmm i guess that just blows a stack of marketing dollars having to work out a new catchy phone number to drag in all your poor unsuspecting customers again. not that i should be feeling happy about this... but it did make me smile when i felt the smile wipe of that cocky BigPond sales guy face (over the line). a winning feeling. the customer fights back feeling. customers rule. it was good. great in fact.

so thanks MotoQ. and thanks iPhone...

....interesting though that a telecoms company hadn't yet realised that the latest gadgets on the market - and in fact the very customer base they want would be people using the latest gadgets on the market - hasn't caught up with the basic trend that their own phone number can't be translated by those very gadgets.

just goes to show just how out of touch they really are.

xc