AlertRank is no more...

The rather nice bolt-on for Google Alerts is sadly no more, I had a short email message in my inbox this morning stating:

"Our investors have decided that Alertrank has not generated enough of a following to justify maintaining it as a free site. As a result, we will be terminating the site on July 15th."

We've been using the service as an addition to the paid for monitoring that we use on a daily basis as it can sometimes pick things that get overlooked.

http://www.alertrank.com

It'll be a sadly missed service...

It's award time again...

Just a quick posting to say that the awards season is in full swing and that i'll be spending countless hours writing submissions and hopefully having my suit dry cleaned! Great visitor stats, increases in sign-ups and internal recognition is brilliant however, a nod from your peers at an awards ceremony can really help boost moral!

Good luck to anyone else entering, we might see you at the awards!

A surprise win for Twitter!

So, a quick update to the washing machine story... @gebu, who looks to be part of the french marketing arm of Hotpoint/Indesit, posted the instructions and manual on how to reset the machine within 3 hours, via Twitter! Brilliant!

The UK email service got back to me the following day... with the wrong information.

Customer service, I don't think so...

Time for me to have a mini moan about poor customer service, an annoyance for many people!

I had to move my Hotpoint washing machine this weekend and when I plugged it back in again the display language had changed to French! Although my knowledge of French washing terms will go through the roof i'd still like my language set back to English.

So, being keen I started to look online for the manual which I found pretty quickly, a 16 page PDF with no useful information in it at all.

So I checked online in the forums, plenty of people with the same issue but not a single response on how to fix the problem. Nothing from other users and more importantly, nothing from Hotpoint themselves...

Next, I thought i'd phone them (this is at 6pm on Saturday night) so I find the number for the information line but it's only open Mon - Fri 8.30am - 5.00pm!

My last resort... i'll email them. So, I sent off an email asking for help and I get the following reply: 

"We will respond to your enquiry as soon as possible. However please allow a maximum of 5 working days before pursuing a reply if you have not heard from us." 

Please don't chase us up for an answer until we've ignored you for at least five days?!

Now, I would class this as a pretty poor customer experience for me and i'm reasonably patient. What about the damage done to the Hotpoint brand by the unanswered questions on the forums, the lack of available documentation & FAQ's and the slow response to email enquiries? Poor online customer service is not really excusable in the times of automated monitoring systems and virtual advisors, especially from a company as large as Hotpoint.

Time to do things better Hotpoint... and will I get a reply to this posting?