My love hate relationship with O2
July 22nd, 2008 2
That’s the old joke right, they hate to love me and I love to hate them? Well, as Confucius say: Lot of truth come from crap Jokes.
By now I’m sure anyone whose called me or spoken to me in the last few days has heard me say “Yar, oh hi, yar, I’m speaking to you from my iPhone… *snort*”, and thought “T***”! But nevertheless I have it in my grubby mitts and I LOVE it! Yeah, OK, so the battery life isn’t great and it still doesn’t do voice dialing - but it’s mine… My precious!
Alas there is one big, terrible, steaming, huge, pile of festering turd - the O2 website. Never have I come across a web service so inept and terrible at every turn as the dog-shite that O2 are serving up.
My first encounter with the webshite was when I tried to track my order. I clicked on the link from the email they sent me, only to discover that as I was already logged in - my session had expired. So I was given the link to log in, which I did, but then it takes me back to the O2 homepage. From here there’s no links to order tracking, so you have to go back to the email and re-click the link. Which then tells you your session has expired!
In the end, the only way to access your order is to log out, click the link, copy the link, log back in, and paste the link… Nightmare.
The next was MMS. Everyone knows that picture messaging is Soooo last year, and that’s why Apple haven’t added this feature, but some freak still send me one. No problem though, you get a text with a web link and a code to type in. (Which could be better - like having the code in the url) but still… But, uh-oh, the link is dead! An Apache error occurs. I even emailed O2 “Support” about this - to which their answer was “we know, we’re working on it, but don’t ask us how long to sort it ‘cos our web team is clearly rubbish!”
I could go on, but suffice to say that for a company who is as big as O2 you think they could afford to spend a few bob on some decent systems and developers. The monkeys they’ve got working there now should be sacked, and they should get some actual monkeys in. They’d do a better job.
2 Comments (+0 in the moderation queue).
#1 On July 22nd, 2008 at 3:58 pm Kris said...
Yes I agree! o2’s website is proper crap! But I do have to say that as far as mobile phone companies go, I feel that o2 are by far the best. I like the fact that they actually answer your calls when you ring the customer support line and you get to speak to someone that is actually in the same country and can understand a black country accent. I find the network coverage spot on and I like it that they dont put crappy software on the phone or lock their handsets.
They certainly do need to work on their online customer experience. But to be honest mate if you bought a Blackberry your MMS would have been delivered straight to your handset and you wouldn’t have had to go trawling the o2 website at all. In fact, if you’d bought a 3 year old Sagem for £5 off ebay you’d have been able to view it on your handset.
#2 On July 22nd, 2008 at 7:41 pm Paul Lloyd said...
I agree with Kris. Their web presence has sucked since I can remember, and it’s only very recently that it stopped pissing silly browser sniffing alerts all over the place. But as to the network, having used Vodafone and Orange in the past, they easily come out on top.
Upon hearing the original rumors that Vodafone might be Apple’s exclusive carrier in the UK, all I could imagine was iPhoneOS X ‘improved’ with 4-bit colour icons and an ‘enhanced’ touch screen that would take you to Vodafone Live! every time you touched it!
As to the rest, it is a shame MMS is missing, but hopefully it will come in the next big update, along with other innovations like Copy and Paste!