Customer service..... hmmmm

Its not often I feel obliged to blog, this is more an observation than a rant. I, and I would imagine a number of other people, spend a good proportion of my working life, trying to keep customers and clients happy. One of the main ways of doing this, is ensuring good communication. Now, as far as I am concerned, good communication, doesn't mean making a lot of noise, it means imparting useful information when it is available, or explaining why information can't be given if it's not available. Part of that "useful information" is often about managing expectations. If I'm not going to deliver something by a particular date, then I won't tell my client that it'll be there, even if that's what they'd ultimately like, because when that date comes, they'll be more than a bit annoyed.

Where is he going with this, I hear you ask. Well, I have had a Motorola Defy, for about 6 months. When I bought it, it had Android 2.1 on it, but with a promise of an update to 2.2 ( froyo) to come. I was never particularly worried about this update, but at the end of june, TMobile decided to tweet this: "Good News to all our Motorola Defy wielding customers, Android 2.2(Froyo) will start rolling out beginning of july". Excellent! So I keep checking for updates, but nothing appears... its now 11th July - which I think you can stop calling the beginning of july, and today, I decided to follow TMObileUKHelp on twitter, which is being inundated with questions along the lines of "where's my update". The standard response is " sorry, we don't know when its going to arrive". So, if TMobile don't know when the update is going to arrive, why did they shout about it? Surely, there was no conceivable benefit to that message. In fact, for the sake of a couple of days, why not hold off completely, and then tweet " Here it is!" then everyone would be happy.

Interesting idea of customer service...