 BlackBerry Torch 9800 |
This is going to be a bit of a rant! I apologize in advance. On Monday I called into my local Vodafone store, as my BlackBerry was due for an upgrade and left, very happy, 40 minutes late with the lovely Torch 9800 that you see on the left.
Once home, I settled down to the task of migrating my settings from the Storm to the Torch and all seemed well until I came to using my email. The whole point of having a BlackBerry instead of an IPhone is the legendary email integration. I kept getting over and over again the same message. BlackBerry has detected a new device, you must move your email account to access it. No matter how many times I tried installing and re-installing the necessary data, I ended up back where I started: BlackBerry has detected …. A quick search on Google soon convinced me I was not the only person having this problem. The search turned up thousands of results, and visits to various Tekkie sites soon convinced me that I was out of my depth. The problem seemed to be BIS, which turned out to be BlackBerry Internet Service, so I twittered them for help, and waited and waited only to be ignored. The BlackBerry forums were incomprehensible! |
In the meantime I emailed Vodafone UK, got an automated response and now feeling a little depressed, went to bed. The next day there was a response from Vodafone Customer Services with some suggestions and if all else failed a phone number to get further help. All else did fail, and I dialled with some trepidation. Within 30 seconds I was talking to a Vodafone engineer, and he calmly and unhurriedly spent an hour talking me through the problem and putting it right. It appeared that the BIS servers kept going down and couldn’t keep up with the verification of email addresses. He did it for me manually.
Is there a point to all this? Yes, there is. Good customer service is still important as the way you present your company to the world. I felt totally ignored by RIM (Research In Motion) the company responsible for BlackBerry. I think if I had been running a business and relying on the phone for email, I would have been very angry. BlackBerries are not toys. They are very expensive gadgets and it seems reasonable to expect back-up when something goes wrong. This happens rarely, BlackBerries being one of the most reliable phones on the market. My previous model was the Storm 2, with which I had only the odd hiccup. So please BlackBerry get you customer services working. It’s your reputation at stake in a market with a lot of good smart-phones out there!
Vodafone is a large company, and I should imagine receive their fair share of complaints, but for me their customer services were second-to-none. I got real five star treatment. I gathered from my conversation with the engineer that they were spending most of the time on BlackBerry related enquiries, trying to put this problem right. He did a first class job, and my opinion of their customer service has sky-rocketed.
The Torch 9800, by the way, is an excellent phone and lives up to its reputation as the best yet. My only gripe now? I noticed when trying to get help from BlackBerry that they chose that day to announce the launch of the Torch 9810 with HD video facility. If only I had waited! I don’t suppose we are ever satisfied.
