The Underscore Archives

On 27 Feb 2007, at 12:40, Alex Stanhope wrote:

> Demon seems to be a hot topic.  I guess the instant a company  
> becomes widely
> used by a community (like [_]) there are going to be positive and  
> negative
> experiences.  In this area though I get the impression there are  
> more -1s
> than +1s.

Thing is, Demon's been the star player since the early days and  
historically they've had a great reputation.  They've only started  
getting -1s in the past five years or so.


In my opinion, when it comes to customer service, the average  
experience (mean, median or mode) is pretty much irrelevant.  A  
company's customer service quality is equal to the _worst_ call  
experienced by a customer.

If I'm running a service, I don't care how many people think it's  
great.  I only care how many people think it sucks, and why they  
think it sucks, so I can correct that problem.


For example, a few years back, we were talking about BT Openworld.   
They partitioned their customers by "home gateway":  a customer was  
permanently assigned to a given gateway machine (eg. "hg23").  All  
customers grouped under that gateway affected each other and suffered  
the same outages.  Not all gateways were equal, though.  Some had  
more bandwidth allocated for the same number of customers, and some  
used different software versions.

So, one customer would say "BT Openworld is great: fast, reliable  
service".  Another (such as myself) would say "BT Openworld is bad:  
often broken, with terrible bandwidth".  All other customers on the  
same gateway as myself would have had the same experience as me.

Now, say that all gateways but one are reliable and fast.  This means  
that the average customer experience is good.  However, if you're one  
of the poor sods on HG23, you're screwed for 12 months and they  
wouldn't let you change gateway.  In my opinion, screwing a certain  
percentage of your customers cannot be made up for by any number of  
good reports.

A bad call will lose a customer forever.  A good call will only keep  
a customer until next time.


So, my high regard for Demon built up over many years was destroyed  
very quickly by their incompetent service.  I don't care how many  
people think they're great, as I've experienced them at (hopefully)  
their worst.  Until I see a hell of a lot of evidence that they've  
fixed the problems and ideally restaffed those departments, they've  
got a black mark.

Tom

-- 
Tom Gidden
http://gidden.net/tom/