Yesterday I went to visit TBSITW and canine friend. We had a delicious lunch of sandwiches of newly baked wholemeal bread filled with their own shot roe venison, their own home grown lettuce, their own grown beetroot and bought butter and mayonnaise.
Come on, do you expect perfection and to have them living in a tent in a commune??????????
At any rate it was so good to catch up with all her news – she reads almost most of mine on my blog.
Yes, there are upsides and downsides of keeping a blog.
I used to be registered with Marks and Spencer as a shopper. But have had difficulty in signing on since I told them what they could do with their credit card. This was after they sent me an email asking for all my secure credit card details and passwords etc. I thought at first it must be a scam, but had trouble finding out the truth of the matter as their Customer Services is in fact their Customer Dis- services as they have outsourced it overseas, where I am sure the call centre staff are lovely people but it would appear that they cannot operate beyond their script. I don’t understand them because of the pitch and speed at which they speak. They don’t understand me when I ask them to speak more slowly.
Impasse.
I have now registered a new email address at hotmail and this morning went on to register as a “new” customer with my hotmail address.
In fact I now think I shall use my hotmail address for all my on-line shopping keeping my Outlook Express address for friends and family.
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Regarding unintelligble call centres, I had cause to contact Lakeland by phone this week, and got connected to an answering machine which told me - in French -that there was no-one to take my call, leave my number and they would phone back. I resorted to email, and the reply was obviously not from a native English speaker. And to think I thought that Lakeland was based in the Lake District in England.
Great idea, E. I have several email addresses, each for a different purpose. I have one which is always used for business/shopping/etc. that does not dump incoming emails into a "junk" file the way hotmail does.
If you're going to use hotmail as your business address, you will have to check your junk mail box every day to make sure it hasn't weeded out emails from some business. It's almost impossible to know what their email addresses are in advance and add them to your safe list.
Might be easier, in the end, to use your Outlook for the business and use your hotmail for personal stuff, because you will always know your friends/family's email addresses to add to your safe list ahead of time.
- M
To TBSITW. That is the weirdest thing I have ever heard. Shome mishtake shurely!
To Marcheline
I shall wait and see, but thank you.
I don't personally have that trouble with hotmail. Very rarely does anything go into the junk folder. Usually it comes into my inbox with a message like "you may not know this sender, mark as safe/unsafe". Maybe it's a different version of hotmail.
I have, so far, found the same as TBSITW.
Just curious - but why M and S or Marks and Spencer, but only T**** rather than, well ... T****?
I had wondered whether you wanted to avoid hits from people searching for ... T****, or to avoid giving them free advertising. But in either case can't understand why you'd want to distinguish between the two companies. So maybe there's a more interesting explanation.
As for call centres - over the last 4 or 5 weeks I have made 34 phone calls to an NHS outpatient apointments line about my elderly parent's NHS referral, to find out when they were likely to get an appointment. The calls were answered in the UK, which should have helped, but the staff were temporary, or part time, or completely inexperienced. The whole episode has wasted hours of my - and their time. And if it had been down to elderly parent to chase it up the referral letter would no doubt still be lost somewhere in the system. How do elderly people with no "advocates" manage, I wonder.
Wow - that makes me feel better now!
I want to stick up for a few call centres, but I heartily agree with what has been said here about "outsourced" call centres - they are AWFUL on the whole.
I work for the Environment Agency in their Contact centre (we do more than just answer the phone.
We are coached and monitored and encouraged to give the best possible customer service we can and coached on how to "go that extra mile" ie offer "added value" to calls if we can... offer a fishing guide to someone who calls regarding a rod licence, infomation about the lovely red tape when someone wants to become a carrier of waste etc.
I am passionate about helping my customers, and as a result get quite a few compliments that go on the "cool wall"
For all the call centres I have worked in (4 at last count) people have been commented saying they are so glad to realise Im not in India or any other foreign country, that I can help them effectively, and that I can communicate clearly ... even to deaf old bats!!! ;-)
Likewise I use hotmail for all my internet shopping etc and have a gmail account for my online presence which uses my internet nom de plume (smudge). Then my Outlook account is my personal one.
Also never had a problem with the junk mail folders- it's clear when there's something in it or if something genuine's been marked as spam and easy to rectify.
Liza
Ah as regards T****, that was because they appear to be awfully quick to sue and have done so. I don't wish to be on the receiving end of a suit when I am poor and they are rich.
The M&S one is one I have raised with them already.
I do feel the whole issue of outsourcing call centres is worth debate. In the short term it may save on costsc but in the long term it loses a lot of good will.
With the recent projected unemployment figures for GB, it seems to me a pity that all these jobs were lost, no doubt permanently, to other countries.
It is worth noting that I have no complaint about M and S stores as evidenced by the fact that I took the trouble to open a new email account so that I could continue to shop on-line there.
I have a general complaint about call centres being outsourced.
As TBSITW has said this must prove to be a very short-sighted measure.
Good point about T**** - thanks for explanation - I shall take care myself.
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