Over the course of the last week, I’ve been forced to re-assess my opinion about something which is relatively trivial but which has got me wondering about how much I miss out on in life because of my own opinions. I have been guilty of judging many books by their covers and in this case it was a store by its adverts and my own assumption of its reputation.
Last week I decided it was time to take the plunge and upgrade my phone to the new BlackBerry Z10 and I was going to be fussy and only get it if I could have it in white. Immediately this limited my choice of network but that was ok because O2 had it and that’s where I wanted to stay. That was until they refused to make me a decent offer to compete with what I found on the Phones 4U website. The problem was that I didn’t really want to use Phones 4U because in my head they were unreliable and provided shockingly bad customer service. However, I ended up with no choice and I was going to have to change to being on Orange as well.
I was wrong. Phones 4U were fantastic, their online chat operator helped me put my order in and then when Orange rejected me, Phones 4U advised me what I needed to do. Then, when Orange had given me the wrong email address twice and not bothered to reply for a further 2 days once I had been given the correct information, Phones 4U rang me again. Sure they were after my business but I’m glad someone was; I had money to spend and whilst Orange outright rejected my “Excellent” credit rating as not good enough, O2 simply weren’t prepared to compete to keep me. Thank you Phones 4U for swooping in and offering me exactly the deal I wanted on O2. My new phone is on its way.
The advisers I dealt with from Phones 4U were all fantastic, really friendly, really helpful and did what they said they would do. The advisers at O2 were ok but constrained by their internal policies of not changing tariff prices and the advisers at Orange were hugely variable. Orange staff seem to vary across the spectrum of rude and talking over you, through disinterested and finally ending up at helpful. Well, that got me. I thought the networks all delivered far better service than these high street shops and I also thought the networks would do better deals as I was going direct but that was wrong too.
You may be wondering why I’ve bothered regaling you with this gripping tale of the customer service I’ve received when you really don’t care that much, but there are two points to this. One is to rant and just put it out there one more time how rubbish I think Orange are and the other is to remind people that sometimes our preconceptions are wrong. We may think we know the lie of the land but actually it doesn’t hurt to go exploring with an open mind once in a while because we might just find that elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. x
30 Something Dreamer 