Category: Automattic

I’ve been looking at potentially buying a Dell Inspiron Mini 9. It’s currently retailing at £279. As I’m sure you’re aware, the “Nettop” market is pretty crowded with everyome bringing out their own version. They generally tend to range between £200 – £300 with those with bigger screens, batteries and hard drives on the higher end. The Dell one, however, doesn’t have any of these, yet is in that upper range.

But that’s fine, Dell are well known for their ability to haggle a good price with a customer who, after all, is interested in buying. So I use their online chat and get… nowhere. Not interested in any discount.

So I ring. After putting me on hold they go away and come back with a price – but only if I buy today – of £273. Yes, £6 cheaper. And that’s all they’ll do.

Rubbish.

And their website is slow.

So I’m now looking at the cheaper alternatives elsewhere…

Update: the same laptop was £253 before Christmas

Update, 22nd January: The original “£20 off” offer finished yesterday so I was keen to see if Dell has replaced it with anything better. They’ve been banging their drum on their website about how we should buy before the 21st to ensure we get this great saving. Well, they’ve now replaced it with, erm, a “£20 off” offer for the next week.

Today I received 3 emails from Tesco, the first at 5am. And only 3 days since I replied to them. A new record.

Thank you for your email

We would like to offer our sincere apologies for the delay in reply. Unfortunately, we have experienced technical difficulties which have resulted in a number of our responses not being sent.

All customer contact is incredibly valuable to us and we understand how frustrating this must be. We are currently working on these issues. You will shortly receive our original reply to your enquiry.

Thank you for your patience.

Then, 3.5 hours later…

Thank you for your email.

I just want to let you know that your email has successfully reached us, and we promise to be back in touch as soon as possible.

Thank you.

So, now we have 2 replies, neither of which say much other than to say they’re GOING to reply to me. Why do they do this close to when they do reply? Wouldn’t this kind of response be more appropriate not long after I’ve emailed them, to “set expectations”?

Now, if you remember, my reply was to go into detail about the IE 7 pop-up issue on their website. I didn’t have to, but I did. 3 hours ago I got my third mail of the day…

Thank you for your reply.

I would like to thank you for your comments regarding “The OK Button”

We find all customer feedback valuable as this helps us when we are looking at ways to make our service better. I would like to assure you that I have fully logged the points you have made. These will be directed to the correct area of the business.

Thank you for taking the time and trouble to share your views with us.

So, have they told someone? God only knows. However, the fact that they define it as a “view” does trouble me. I’m pointing out a god-damn failure of your online ordering system, you fools.

I did some testing of the site with Opera and Safari and that seemed ok. So, it only breaks in IE7. And Firefox. Which, by my reckoning, means their site works quite successfully for 33% of people, a figure they can be proud of.

Well, if proof were needed that Tesco were aware of my blog entry, just a day after my last comment, they sent me the following email…

Thank you for your email

We would like to offer our sincere apologies for the delay in reply. Unfortunately, we have experienced technical difficulties which have resulted in a number of our responses not being sent.

All customer contact is incredibly valuable to us and we understand how frustrating this must be. We are currently working on these issues. You will shortly receive our original reply to your enquiry.

Thank you for your patience.

Interesting. However, the “official” reply came today…

Thank you for your email.

I’m sorry to hear that you were having some problems when trying to shop at Tesco.com.

You are correct in what you say. At the moment we would advise that Firebox 3 is not compatible with our website. Fire fox 2 works reasonably well but not 3. I am afraid.

Re the OK button on the notes. Its because of the screen resolution you are using. A higher resolution would cure this. To get round it all that you need to do is press the tab key until the OK button comes into view.

Hmmm. I’m not impressed. My reply, which I think sums this up, is as follows…

Thank you for the reply.

However, I disagree with what you say with regard to the “OK button on the notes”. My screen resolution is 1280×1024 – perfectly fine. Besides, the issue was with a pop-up window, the size of which is defined by your own website. However, with the introduction of Internet Explorer 7, some of this room was taken up by the web address, which was previously missing. This was for security reasons.

I’m guessing your pop-up isn’t taking this into account. However, you have equally set the pop-up not to allow scrolling so “pressing tab” will not make the option magically appear.

What else can I say? They can’t blame MY setup for their pop-up not displaying fully. They should be testing better – they certainly don’t appear to test with FF3 or IE7.

As for the Firefox issue being down to Firefox 3, well, I’m yet unconvinced and will have to test the theory when I can. However, with 8 million people downloading FF3 on the day of release alone, I’d say a rather large proportion of Firefox users are moving over – for their site not to work on this version of the browser is a rather big issue. Even a message on site indicating that this is happening would have been far better than me wasting my time.

I’d also like to comment on this line…

Fire fox 2 works reasonably well but not 3. I am afraid.

Les (the name of the person who replied), it’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t work on Firefox 3. There’s certainly no need to be afraid. It’s really not that bad.

Could I humbly suggest that Tesco install spelling and grammer checks on their outgoing mail?