Xtra's woes self inflicted

The sorry saga of Xtra cutting over customers to this new Bubble email service has been going on for a week now, leaving users drowning in a sea of dated spam.

Some customers have not been able to access their emails during the whole period and are unable to contact the help service due to long wait times.

Xtra and its parent Telecom deserves every bit of flak it gets. It gave the first warning of the impending cutover to customers with an email, that they were never likely to receive till after the cutover, at the close of the business day immediately prior to the cutover. Some customers got no warning.

Then the cutover occurred over a weekend, those affected could not send or receive emails and if they dared to phone for help and support a long wait (days) ensued. If help and support was eventually contacted, the support from Manila was next to useless. A technical fault was found early in the week with registration onto the new service and that just made things worse. Online help via the Xtra webpage early in the week was extremely confusing, with no clear explanation in plain english of what was going on.

This week, Telecom has the cheek to say that only a minority of 800,000 customers were affected, because only a few had contacted help and support. I suspect that either the others do not know yet that their email is non-functional or alternatively they have already said to Telecom/Xtra, stuff you!

The upgrade was to offer users a homepage with email, photo and data storage, Norton AntiVirus and other security tools.

This afternoon Telecom confirmed compensation would be offered to customers who lost access to their email during the weekend.

Telecom head of consumer propositions Adrian Littlewood told NZPA what kind of compensation would be offered had not yet been established, because it was the company's first priority to get all customers up and running.

Some users have been without e-mail for six days following last weekend's upgrade to the Yahoo!Xtra Bubble service.

Mr Littlewood said the majority of customers were now able to access their e-mail normally.

The change was un-warranted, un-notified and poorly implemented. It might have been much vaunted internally, but when you do not tell customers, irreparable damage has been done.

If you are going to do any change, how about putting full details, plain enough with pictures for the non-computer literate to understand, on your help and support pages. Most might follow that and be actually able to implement the changes, without going near a phone call to the sub-continent. Also when a tech fault occurs in the change process, actually tell the world that you do indeed have an issue and provide a clear detail on the issue. We can read in this english speaking country!

I know the the users I deal with have had enough of extremely poor help and support service from call centres outside of NZ and would prefer to deal with someone that can actually talk fluent english. The same users do want full warning of any changes that may upset the connection which they pay your company dearly for, not just some sales pitch late on a Friday afternoon with a half-arsed change notice!