He’s also drawn my attention to this official news release about Vodafone UK signing a deal with Poynt:

Poynt Corporation (TSX VENTURE:PYN) (“Poynt Corp.” or the “Company”), a leading provider of mobile local search services, is providing a preloaded icon for the award-winning Poynt mobile local search application (“Poynt” or the “App”) to Vodafone UK’s BlackBerry® smartphone customers.

Note the use of the word “preloaded”, which in this context also means “or added automatically for existing customers”. So it looks like Poynt is a legit icon that is being automatically pushed out by Vodafone to its Blackberry customers.

Poynt is legitimate but why isn’t Vodafone providing a better service?

That does leave two questions: (a) why are so many Vodafone support staff unaware of this and therefore either giving wrong answers or being unable to answer questions about it, and (b) is it really wise of a mobile phone company to push out software in such a poorly communicated way (in my case, I had no advanced communication from Vodafone that this was going to happen and, by the looks of it, I am by no means alone in that)?

So you can imagine the mix of curiosity, pessimism, diary-clearing and a ready supply of 6 pences with which I’ve approached my latest attempt to get an issue sorted.

The issue is simple at heart: an icon called “Poynt” suddenly appeared on my Blackberry Bold a few days ago. I want to know why it’s appeared, how to get rid of it and whether or not I should be concerned about the security of my phone. Unasked for software appearing on a device after all is often the signature of hackers and spam merchants at work.

The score so far is not good.

Vodafone UK’s Twitter team: clear, prompt and polite responses. However the best they’ve been able to do so far is to point me at a discussion thread in an online forum which consists of several customers asking the same sorts of questions and getting annoyed as the questions remained unanswered for weeks stretching into months, several Vodafone staff trying to pacify things by promising that they’re trying hard to get an answer and a final answer that is about a different topic all together.

In response to one of my questions they said the Poynt software icon came from Blackberry, but Blackberry’s Twitter team (also clear, prompt and polite) have certain it’s not Blackberry but it is Vodafone who are responsible.

Vodafone UK’s email team: oh dear. So far I’ve had a series of emails which mostly read as if the person sending them has not really read my previous email but instead reached for the first off-the-shelf answer about something else that seems vaguely relevant to one part of my email. Certainly the email team’s house style of ignoring a list of questions and sending a partial answer to only one of them still seems to be alive and well.

It’s a good thing too that the reply I received with a series of steps to follow was closely read by me as it looked to be directing me to delete a whole set of data from my Blackberry which has nothing to do with Poynt.

So the issue has now been escalated and we’ll see what happens…

But in the meantime if you too have had a Poynt icon appear on your Vodafone Blackberry and are wondering what is going on, here’s my best guess:

1. Poynt has been installed by Vodafone, not Blackberry
2. The Poynt installation was done via a servicebook update
3. There is widespread lack of knowledge about these servicebook updates in Vodafone and in particular a clear explanation as to what it is and why it is being pushed up is missing from the knowledgebase that their support teams use
4. There is no easy way to remove the Poynt icon but it can be hidden in the usual way
5. Poynt is a legitimate piece of software (and see also Vodafone’s advert for it)
6. Vodafone’s systems for deciding what can be pushed onto people’s phones don’t involve either a standard requirement to tell customers nor any standard procedures to ensure their customer service teams know what has been done

1. The Vodafone Sure Signal box isn’t suitable for use with mobile broadband as the maximum connection speed is very low.
2. At least as of February 2010, the instructions leaflet being provided with Sure Signals was wrong in its descriptions of how the lights on the box operate, so it could be functioning normally whilst (according to the leaflet) showing a pattern of lights that indicate an error.
   The two specific problems I encountered were that, first, the patterns of lights it says you get when plugging in the box is wrong. So if you get a completely different set of light patterns, that doesn’t mean your box is malfunctioning – it’s the instructions that are wrong. Second, the note in the instructions about what patterns of lights you get if you’ve got two devices (phone and broadband) connected and work is also wrong. So again if you try to connect two devices and get a completely different set of light patterns, that doesn’t mean your box is malfunctioning – it’s the instructions that are wrong.
3. You do not have to have a router to use with the Sure Signal.

The real mark of genius though is that several of these emails including a link to a mini-survey on what I thought of the email. Each survey includes a mandatory question where you have to pick from a drop down list the name of the Vodafone person who had emailed you.

I think you can guess the next bit, can’t you?

Yes indeed. On not one occasion has the name of the person who emailed me been listed in the drop down list.

So you have to answer the question. And you’re not given the chance of giving the right answer.

Genius.

Three times I’ve completed a survey and told Vodafone this in the comments box. I wonder if throwing in a blog post too might be enough to prod someone in to action…?

Paul from the second line technical was an absolutely star but the reason the phone call was quite so long it that we were trying to untangle why my mobile broadband is so slow when connecting via a Sure Signal box.

The background was a series of emails to and from Customer Services where the common themes were (a) inconsistent information about how Sure Signal and mobile broadband interact, (b) what sort of speeds you can get for mobile broadband via Sure Signal and (c) answering my emails in such haste / with such stock replies that the emails sent to me didn’t actually address the points I’d raised in my emails.

What seems to be the case is that there is widespread ignorance amongst Vodafone staff as to how Sure Signal and mobile broadband work together. Unfortunately, rather than therefore there being lots of people who say “I don’t know”, there are lots of people who give wrong or incomplete answers to questions such as, “What speed can I expect if my mobile broadband is being piped via the Sure Signal box?” or “Does the data I use count against the data volumes with my fixed line broadband ISP as well as counting against the data volumes for my Vodafone mobile broadband contract?”.

So here’s what I’ve finally learnt, with the help of Paul:

• If you are using mobile broadband with a Sure Signal box, the data goes down your fixed line broadband. Therefore any congestion on the ISP’s network will have an impact. In addition, data downloads will count against your total downloads with your ISP.
• The connection speed will be much, much slower than that of your fixed line broadband. At first I was told that it would be a bit less (because some of the connection is used for managing the Sure Signal box) and also could be reduced if you have other devices using the fixed line at the same time (e.g. a desktop computer).
• However, that’s not really the full story. Both are true – but in fact the limiting speed factor is the design of my Sure Signal box, which only provides a 3G signal with a 384 kbps download speed.

In other words, far far slower than a mobile broadband connection from Vodafone should be.

So rather a shame that the person in the shop when asked “Does it work with mobile broadband?” said “Yes” rather than “Yes, but…”. Rather a shame too that the people in the Sure Signal support team, when having their own customer service meltdown with me, never mentioned this issue either even when checking that my portable with mobile broadband SIM had registered correctly with the Sure Signal. Also rather odd that none of the documentation I got with the Sure Signal box made this clear. After all, we’re all used to the small footnote that explains how your broadband speed may well not be the advertised headline figure.

Ah well. Given how hard it was for Paul to dig out the answer, credit to Paul for that but the conclusion surely is – don’t use Sure Signal for mobile broadband.

VodafoneUK is fed up of dirty homo’s and is going after beaver

In response though Vodafone have not tried to dodge around the issue and are responding to numerous people, saying:

We’re very sorry. A severe breach of rules by staff in our building, dealing with that internally.

Not a good position to be in, but credit for such a direct and open response.

Although sending numerous @ replies makes the Vodafone page look rather odd – same apology, repeated time after time, the reality is that @ replies are a really good way of ensuring that people see your response to the message they wrote about you. A general tweet disappears down people’s list of tweets very quickly and is unlikely to be seen by many of those who have mentioned you. Individual replies work best – and whoever is getting sore fingers typing away to send all the @ replies has my sympathy.

Hat-tip: Alfie

UPDATE: Vodafone’s fuller response is: ”This afternoon an employee posted an obscene message from the official Vodafone UK Twitter profile. The employee has been suspended immediately and we have started an internal investigation. This was not a hack and we apologise for any offence the tweet may have caused.”

It’s still a concern that approaching a dozen Vodafone staff have at one point or another got something wrong, including failing to follow their own procedures and wrongly taking money from me. I’ve either been phenomenally unlucky or they’ve got some very deep and widespread problems. But we’ll see how things go from here.

One ironic footnote I noticed today in the news. You may recall how:

At one point the technician said I could find the solution on the Vodafone website. He told me what page to go to and what to enter in the search box on that page in order to get the fix coming up top of the search results.

One problem.

The top two results on the search he told me to do were (a) Vodafone’s expansion in Ghana, (b) Vodafone’s expansion in Malta.

Fascinating for someone I’m sure, but not quite the answer to a missing web browser. (And no, the solution wasn’t number three, four or in fact anywhere I could see in the search results.)

Good luck Ghana. Good luck Malta. You may be needing it.

And so I smiled when I read this news:

The UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has contacted Vodafone over its controversial deal to buy the majority stake in the former Ghana Telecom, Ghana’s national telecom company.

The Financial Times reports that Richard Alderman, director of the SFO has spoken by telephone to Stephen Scott, head of Vodafone’s legal affairs last week.

According to the report the SFO has not launched an investigation into the deal, but is monitoring allegations of irregularities that have been made in Ghana.

The latest comes with my phone bills where – oh look – there’s a wrong charge for an insurance policy that I didn’t take out.

That’d be a wrong charge arising from a visit to their main Oxford Street shop where the member of staff didn’t follow Vodafone’s documented procedures and the Assistant Manager subsequently didn’t seem bothered about it until I pressed him on the point several times.

So the shop makes me queue for a long time, doesn’t follow Vodafone’s procedures, fails to provide information, contradicts what the Vodafone phone team says – and then wrongly charges me for the privilege of having had this customer service. Classy indeed.

And as an added twist, the fourth phone call of the day to Vodafone customer services gave him information flatly contradictory to what two other Vodafone staff had told me previously. Have my two accounts been merged in to one? Two Vodafone staff say yes; one says no. Place your bets as to what the next one will say…

(a) You provide someone with a free broadband internet trial; note the word “free”.

(b) You mess up in all sorts of way (see blogs passim).

(c) You therefore extend the period of the free trial; note again the word “free”.

And then (drum roll please…)

(d) You put a 6p charge on the account, you don’t tell the customer, you therefore decide the account is unpaid and you terminate the broadband service before the expiry of the extended “free” trial.

(e) You then take 30 minutes on the phone to sort this problem. When asked to pass the issue on to a manager to investigate what’s gone wrong with the customer service you tell the customer that there is a manager immediately available to talk to to them but instead put the caller on hold again.

(f) When rung again, you say that neither the manager nor the other person from the 30 minute phone call have recorded anything about it, you don’t have any records of any of the other previous problems available and all the details must be given over again before someone can take up any complaint.

And then (second drum roll please…)

(g) You then get someone else to ring back who again, er…, doesn’t have proper records of what’s already been said, expect the customer to rectify the situation by retelling all the details again – and twice tell the customer they’ve not provided information that they’ve already provided. Oh, and you also blame things on your earlier decision to split different records between two different accounts.

Classy.

It’s the outsourcing of record keeping to the customer that I really like. Why spend money on getting your staff to record information and share it with colleagues when you can expect the customer to do it for you