Tag Archives: customer service

Silverstone’s booking policy sucks

Silverstone Entrance

I’ve been very frustrated in recent weeks by Silverstone’s booking policy. You may remember I blogged my excitement about heading out on a rally day, courtesy of my friends at my last birthday. Due to my own ineptitude, I booked it for a weekend on which we had another commitment, so I tried to move the date – to find that – despite the fact this was within three days of the original booking and I hadn’t (and still haven’t, in fact) received a confirmation of the booking, I couldn’t shift it.

The rationale is it stops Silverstone being left with last minute-cancellations and empty race slots, but seriously – the booking and re-booking attempt were both made two months in advance of the day itself. Silverstone’s margins can’t be so tight that they can’t make the occasional exception, especially as the two months would give them plenty of time to re-sell the slot! In case there are any Silverstone fans out there waiting to tell me off for not buying the cancellation indemnity insurance – I checked up about this. It only covers you in the event of a crisis on the day, not any personal conflicts.

So it’s all very annoying, and whilst several of Silverstone’s customer support staff have been unfailingly polite throughout the proceedings, they’ve also been stern and unbending; the only silver lining is that I’ve been able to transfer my birthday gift to someone else.

So thanks, Silverstone, but no thanks. You’ve ruined the birthday present my friends clubbed together to buy me last year, for a not insignificant birthday. I’m blaming you, as I find your rebooking policy insincere and I have no respect for an organisation that can’t flex for exceptions when its important for their relationship with their customers and immaterial to them in any real terms.

TranquilPC – good service or bad?

Whilst I’ve been frustrated with how long its taken Tranquil PC to fix my media centre, I finally got an explanation out of them on Friday; they’re not only replacing the hard drive but upgrading the whole build to the latest components needed to ensure repeat failure doesn’t happen. I’m guessing something overheated as the parts being replaced include the cooling system and the DC power supply unit.

I’m not sure if I should be annoyed at being shipped a ‘defective’ machine or impressed that they are taking the trouble to use what they’ve learned in the last 9 months of shipping my PC to upgrade it for me. I’m leaning to the latter; but we’ll see what kind of shape its in when they eventually get it back to me…

Ikea nearly embraces SaaS

I’m a believer in SaaS. It seems the natural evolution of computing and there are thousands of possibilities of awesome once any service becomes available via the Internet. But I’m aware of the anxiety of some companies in embracing these technologies – they have nervousness about putting confidential information on the web, or of losing control… I have more sympathy for some of these perspectives than others.

All the same, I was slightly impressed when I discovered that Ikea’s kitchen planner tool allows you to save your kitchen plans online for remote retrieval. After all, this company refused to have a webstore for years, so progress had been made…

What this app means is that you can pop into Ikea, design up a kitchen with the dubious help of their experts, and then check it again from home, in case you’ve changed your mind about something or the other. Or you can design it up from home, take it into the store for confirmation and order. You might even be able to place the order directly from home, but I’m not sure we’re at the point where people are buying kitchens without seeing them first.

So great on that front… but:

1) The application is clunky, slow, and not remotely intuitively
2) It’s a downloadable Windows application using the website only as a shared storage medium – are Flash / etc not up to the challenge?
3) The software doesn’t provide enough guidance in structuring your kitchen. You almost want Ikea to upsell to you — “have you considered that you might need a cultery drawer, sir,” or “have you really designed a kitchen without a sink, you dolt” would be handy. E-Commerce 101, surely…
4) The in-store ‘help’ is just rubbish. 4 bored looking people teaching you tricks with the application (…”oh no, the software doesn’t let you put a sink in a corner unit… that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Just add it afterwards.”) I remember the days when the guys at Ikea helped you actually come to some sensible design decisions…

So, a good first step… but Ikea’s long walk into fully enabled E-Commerce has a way to go… and it does feel like they need to fix some more basic customer support issues for this hybrid experience,or people will wonder why the struggled their way through traffic, parking and crowds to actually come into the store. Unless, of course, my expectations are unreasaonbly high, and some analyst at Ikea has done the calculations and they’re happy getting the volume of trade they do by cutting prices to nothing (an entire, reasonable sized kitchen, sans appliances, costed up at a ludicrously low price…)

Oh, I’m looking at a new kitchen, btw. In case you didn’t realise. But I have had more fun than you’d expect for the first day on vacation, despite the trip to Ikea ;-)