Ooh: Duelling iPhones

I absolutely love my iPhone if you dont own one stop reading this blog now and go get one immediately!

There are so many things that make the iPhone cool but this post is specifically about iTunes.

On Friday night we had friends over so the wine was flowing and so was the music. The music was being played from our iPhones (both my wife and I have one) via a dock straight into our kitchen stereo and pumping out very, very loudly.

Anyway, we invented a new game called duelling iPhones.

Basically my wife and I took turns to download (buy) a track from iTunes which we thought bettered the track playing. We then switch the iPhone on the dock so while the next track played another was being downloaded.

Occasionally we'd find an album we didnt own and that was downloaded (purchased) also.

We had a great time back in the late 80s, early 90s and Apple made over £30 in the process.

Did I mention I love my iPhone.

Argh: Madonna / Transport for London

So, we're trying to be good eco citizens and using public transport to attend the Madonna gig at Wembley Stadium. The Jubilee Line from Waterloo on the outbound journey is busy but does exactly what it says on the tin and gets us their without any problems. Excellent. :-)

Typical Madonna, she arrives on stage late (which makes me thing of SG blog on the topic) and the gig is amazing. Wembley Stadium is amazing. The prices for everything were "amazing" but all in all a great evening.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/09/time.html

We meet up with friends and head back towards Wembley Park station at about 11.20 and the queues are horrendous and when I say horrendous I mean "wowzers, have you ever seen so many people waiting for a tube horrendous". There must have been several thousand people queuing up Wembley Way.

The queue shuffles forward slowly and everyone is in pretty good spirits after the gig. 20 minutes pass, shuffle, shuffle. Another 20 minutes pass, shuffle, shuffle. And then suddenly we hear the announcement that everyone was dreading "Wembley Park tube station is now closed". WTF!

It's midnight and at least 1,000 people are still waiting in line to catch the tube home (remember the official website said use public transport rather than the car) and they've f-ing closed the only tube station! Argh!

The crowd went from very happy to utterly, utterly pissed off and it suddenly became a very scary place to be.

So, WTF happened? The police blamed Madonna for being late on stage and I guess they have a point (have you read Seth blog article above?) however I lay blame with Boris and Transport for London for not have a contingency in place to safely get thousands of people (many of which are not from London) home safely.

Anyway, I'll never go back to Wembley by public transport so yet more churn. I will also tell at least 10 people about our nightmare so they will probably churn too.

The most frustrating aspect of all this is I bet no one really cares and nothing will happen to improve the situation. Argh!

Prologue - we got home safely just after 2pm having walked for 20 minutes to the Wembley IBIS and waiting in their lobby for the crowds to dissipate. Thank-you IBIS I will use your hotels more in future. We finally managing to get a £40 taxi home - so much for the travel card!

Argh: Barclaycard

So, I've been travelling in the states for the past week and about 7 days in my Barclaycard stops working. I'd been hammering it pretty hard so I assumed I'd hit the credit limit. Annoying but undestandable.

When I get back to the UK I call them up hoping they'll increase my credit limit all ready to beg for their kindness.

How quickly my happiness turns to sadness...

"No sir, you have £900 credit left however the fraud department has blocked your card because of some unusual transactions." Argh!

Now let me guess, transactions from the US maybe? Muppets.

The bright eyed call centre person apologies and follows that up with a "we did try to call you". I think the key word here is "try".

I have no voicemail and anyway I was in America!

This must be about the 4th or 5th time this has happened to me whilst travelling and it's f-ing annoying to find yourself both embarassed and financially challenged in a foreign country.

I understand credit card fraud is an issue so why not email me saying "are these your transactions?" click yes within 12 hours or we'll suspend your card or text me or actually ring me or something. Argh!

So, I'm now going to become a churn statistic for Company Barclaycard. Another fine example of how to totally piss off your customers.

Actually, I'll wait 48 hours to see if a bottle of nice wine appears with an apology but I'm not holding my breadth. They'd probably rather watch me churn and then spend several hundreds of pounds on marketing activity to try and win me and my 10 friends back. Argh!

Churn

Following on from my Orange experience I starting to think about churn...

I became a churn statistic for Orange (plus hopefully a few friends) and I wonder if they will even notice?

I was pretty loyal to Orange until this point. I would have probably recommended them but that all change because of one problem.

I wonder if "we failed to serve this customer satisfactorily" appears in their churn report?

I wonder if they realise that by hiring dumb and dumber to answer the phones it is costing them more and more in churn? And more and more to analyse churn using expensive analysts!

I do think we'll all look back at this decade and wonder what we were thinking.

What do they say in medicine, prevention is better than cure.

And another thing, do you think the Orange CEO chooses his shoes by price? So why choose his call centre people that way. Argh!

Argh: Orange Safe Guard

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