Comments on: a tale of orcon proportions

By: friday beers — Code to Customer — Ruby on Rails developers from Wellington, New Zealand

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 02:40:14 +0000

[...] they got off to a shaky start, but boy, did they pick it up. Congratulations to Duncan Blair (their Head of Marketing and [...]

By: Nik

Nik — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:17:05 +0000

Thanks Duncan – Glad to see you guys are on to it!

I’ll follow up with more detail tomorrow ;)

By: Duncan Blair

Duncan Blair — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:59:14 +0000

Thought you (and your readers) might like a quick update on what has happened today as a result of your blog post. Our tech heads were hard at work, and they have fixed a couple of the problems that you highlighted.

1. There is now an autocomplete in use on the address checker, meaning no having to scroll through impossibly long drop down menus.
2. We fixed up the silly ‘required’ phone number, which obviously makes no sense when you don’t have one, or indeed want one.

So, not perfect, but it is a start.

I will also be in touch via email to arrange a little gift to say thanks, after all you spent some of your valuable time dissecting our sign up process, it is the least we can do.

And as for splitting the luxury hotel night between you and your flatties – the good news is that we have a friend get friend promotion launching in the next couple of weeks which means you can get more nights away just for convincing your friends to join Orcon too. Hopefully although we got off to a rocky start, we have since impressed you enough that you will be more than happy to do so.

Thanks again,
Duncan Blair
Head of Brand and Communications
Orcon

By: Nik

Nik — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:33:49 +0000

@Duncan: Thanks for weighing in. Like I said, the Customer Service was generally excellent – just a bit hamfisted in places. And perhaps a little overwhelmed :)

Looks like many of the problems we are experiencing are endemic to the New Zealand Broadband industry – see Carl’s comment – which is sad.

It’s awesome that you guys take the time out to communicate with your customers on Twitter, and taking the time out to come by and read my blog post.

I look forward to an awesome experience :)

By: Duncan Blair

Duncan Blair — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:30:09 +0000

Hi Nik,

I am not going to post a big list of excuses for this, because you are quite right, it should be better.

I just wanted to say thanks for highlighting some areas that we can definitely improve, I will be forwarding this to the development team to investigate.

Also, sorry for the problems you have experienced during the physical switch. Unfortunately sometimes things do go wrong for whatever reason when “Bob the Chorus guy” heads out to make the change. I am glad to hear that Braiden helped out, and will pass on your thanks to him (and make sure his manager is aware of what an awesome job he is doing).

Thanks again, and I look forward to reading about your great experience on our network once we do get you over.

Duncan Blair
Head of Brand and Communications
Orcon

By: Carl

Carl — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:44:35 +0000

Sounds like when I shifted house and set up telstra-clear, what a nightmare, 4 days no broadband, why don’t they make it simple, first speak to this person, ‘oh you need to download the file’…’well I can’t get on line!’, ‘then we send you disk’
‘why didn’t you send through the disk when I first organised this last week?’
“because we though you would download the……’ man what a pain.