My 60 Seconds of Fame

This is such fun. I've just been asked by the Bracknell Standard newspaper to be a part of their 60 second interview. The questions are fun, light, and part of local community making. Some of them made me scratch my head, too


1. What is your favourite food?

2. What is your favourite holiday destination?

3. What was the last book you read?

4. What is your favourite TV programme?

5. What was your first pet and its name?

6. What is your favourite film?

7. What painting or photo do you have on your wall or desk?

8. Who would your ideal dinner guests be?

9. What car do you drive?

10. What is your biggest regret?

11. What makes you smile?

12. What was your first job?

13. What do you like about Bracknell?

14. If you won the National Lottery, what would you do?


Unless it gets spiked, it comes out next Friday

Continuing the saga of BT and the Master Socket

As one of my two loyal readers you may remember my saga with BT Customer Service(!) over my "Master Socket". I had thought it was all over. I'd been told "Oddly a charge may appear on your bill, but all you have to do, if it does, is call customer service and that charge will be cancelled.

So, when the charge appeared on my bill in January I was not at all concerned to see £184 + VAT at 17.5% for 5 minutes to change the socket. As a ee it was excessive, but I knew I was not going to have to pay it.

I called Customer Service, who duly logged the call. They made no promises, they just logged it.

Today, Sunday, at 10:30am I had a call from BT Complaints Department. "Mr Trent, you will have to pay this charge."

"I'm sorry, which part of BT are you calling from?"

"We are an NDM"

"An NDM? I'm sorry, it's a very bad line and I can hardly hear you." it was a bad line

"We are in India."

Good lord, I hadn't heard that! One up for outsourced offshore call centres in unaccented English there, then!

I explained that the notes on the account needed to be read because I had been assured that the charge would be removed. She put me on hold. And, 5 minutes later, she came back. "Mr Trent, the charge will be removed. Goodbye."

So, one up for the godly, several more down for customer service. But I am certain that this amount will reappear on my bill.

And why call me on a Sunday morning? That is intrusive.

Email Subscription List

Way down on the left hand side is an email subscription box. Why?

Well, it's way down because I put it too far down. So, thank you to both of you who found it! I'm going to try to remember how to move it higher up!

Meanwhile I'm putting it in this post.

I haven't majored on it that much because it has only just started to work properly, but it's a great way of getting this blog as a weekly digest, on Mondays in the afternoon (UK time)



You can always unsubscribe, and I NEVER use your email address for anything without your explicit permission, so it's safe.

Getting round the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations?

This is quite interesting and may be a new technique for getting round the PECR.

The cold call started by thanking me for "your enquiry on our website."

I had never previously been to their website. However the caller told me that there was an aerial picture of my house there with illustrations of solar panels.

The caller had my name, address and telephone number, allegedly from the website. BUT I have never entered it.

I mentioned this and they suggested it was a hoax. While this is perfectly possible, it is not probable.

My suspicion is that someone enters the data as if they were me, doing it under the instructions of either the company or of one of its calling agents, and that they do this in order to circumvent the TPS

In terms of true marketing this is pointless because it turns a warm sales lead into a cold call, but idiots abound in life.

Anyone else had anything like this? I'm alerting the UKIC, and I suggest you do, too, if you get such a call.

Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust takes patient care steps

It was a mixed blessing to meet the Epsom & St Helier NHS Trust. I met them when my mother was hospitalised throughout most of 2007 when she suffered from Clostridium Difficile (C Diff) that she acquired there. They and I have had an awkward relationship because of deficiencies in service - a relationship which culminated in a formal complaint - one I lodged in a spirit of co-operation in order to improve things.

They took it to heart and they created a training video of my "customer experience" which they will be using with all strata of hospital staff to show them how it can all go horribly wrong.

This is a brave step, shows huge customer awareness, and I wanted to take a couple of paragraphs to say "All is not doom and gloom on the Customer Service Front."

It's a shame that her heart failure following C Diff recovery let me meet the North East Surrey Crematorium, but it is very interesting to see how differently the two organisations handled me. What a shame my mother is not here to see it.

Epsom and St Helier will never be perfect, but they've listened and are trying. I like that. I like it a lot.

North East Surrey Crematorium goes off the boil

I'm starting to get bored with this organisation. Today I received the formal response to my complaint. As expected it was rejected.

To be clear, I did not expect it to be rejected because of its validity or invalidity. I expected it to be rejected because I expected it to be rejected. The complaint was heard by three elected representatives, people with arbitrary levels of legal and marketing knowledge. And what seems to have happened is that they have done hunkering down into a bunker instead of taking a correct and citizen facing view of customer service.

So I have sent the Clerk to the Board a note telling him that I reserve the right to sue the crematorium for damages in the county court with no further reference to him, and that I will be complaining, as is my right, to the Local Government Ombudsman. I didn't tell him that I will also be complaining to the Advertising Standards Authority. I very much doubt he realises that it is advertising.

I've sent the final papers to the UK Information Commissioner, now. The crematorium response means that they have all the documentation they need to investigate the complaint properly.

I keep checking with folk. "This is what happened. Is it acceptable?"

The almost unanimous answer is "Not in any way at all"

So, the complaints are in. And time has to pass.

Spammers, How stupid do you think we are?

The technique for spamming a Blog seems to be "Go back far enough and no-one will notice." People really think they will get links to their sites by posting unmitigated crap in comments.

Have they no understanding that the blog software emails the blogger with the comments and that we ~gasp~ delete them?

If you have something to say, something meaty and worthwhile, say it. If you link to your site as an example, great. If you paid some imbecile SEO company to spam blogs, think again. You just flushed the money down the drain.

Banks, customer service and marketing

Long term readers will remember that my mother died in October, and will probably have guessed that I am executor of her estate. I've just got to the stage when I have grant of probate and can tidy up bank accounts etc. This is when the banks show who is good and wants your business and who is bad.

ING Direct: Closed her account and initiated the BACS transfer to the destination account the day the formal request arrived. They were fast, slick, responsive, unofficious and will get my business again

Barclays: Friendly, but slow and procedure bound. The transfer is initiated today, several days later than ING, but the experience was generally OK. They might get my business in future

Abbey: Unfriendly. Useless phone system. They made me call another number where I ended up in a black hole for a while. The process "will take 7-10 working days". When asked why this was the answer was pretty much "That's how long it takes." Curt service agent, no appreciation of customer needs. This mirrors all the customer service Abbey has shown to me since the death, and I will not be using them again at all, ever.

Why they don't realise that Customer Service is Marketing I have no idea. But they just don't get it.