Thursday, August 27, 2009

Grumpy old man's thoughts on channel strategy

Companies who deal with the public have something called a channel strategy. One effect is that you can go online very easily to add stuff to your Sky TV package but not to cut it back. To do that you have to join a phone queue, press buttons, listen to the Four Seasons and finally talk to a specially trained crack salesperson who knows all your weaknesses and trains their finely honed neurolinguistic programming weapons on you until you relent.

I 'joined' Experian to get a copy of the file they had on me, but it seems I have to call them to cancel. They have a machine that read my email and spotted the word 'cancel'. So now I have written again, mis-spelling it - the automatic reply now says a human being will deal with it in a day or two. We'll see.

When we moved house recently I wrote to BT, but they ignored my letter and carried on charging me. I thought writing things down was the safest way, but apparently not. I called BT and was told 'der, we are a phone company you know'.

By the way, 'der' isn't a mis-spelling of 'dear' but my attempt at spelling that word teenagers say: derrh? de-ergh? Any suggestions?