Eighty minutes of my life I'll never get back

Recently, our longstanding family email address was potentially one of those that the ISP's provider had taken a couple of years to getting around to admitting that their systems had been hacked and potentially compromised. The local telco provider obviously had intel that there were issues with their provider as before the hacking news broke they had been cheerfully pushing the message that soon they would be bringing their email accounts “home”.

Being a prudent sort of person, I diligently followed the advice that just to be sure, a change of password was advised.

Easy, one might have thought. Wrong. The online password change process simply would not work. It took me down several avenues, with dead-end road blocks. The most common one contained words to the effect “System is down. Try again later.”

After 24 hours and rising frustration there seemed little option but to ring the phone contact centre. Surely, I thought, given all the publicity around the issues they will have scaled up the number of call-takers on shift to meet the demand for assistance. Wrong again! The automated message indicated there would be a wait of somewhere between 1 hour 25 minutes and 2 hours 15 minutes. Got to be kidding right! But no, sure enough it took 80 minutes of my life, that I will never get back, hanging on the end of a land-line waiting for the music to stop and a human-being to come on the line.

Here’s the thing… once the very polite guy, somewhere else in the world, came on the line he patiently and efficiently sorted the matter. He explained that using our email address as the user name rather than the more technical account email address would never have worked. Yet nowhere in the online form field or the FAQ of the website was this fact mentioned.

Anyway, we’re back online now but a big downside of the changes made to our account was that within a short while the entire historical emails in the in and sent mail boxes disappeared. I’ve lost the will to live in terms of contemplating sorting that one out.

So… memo to service providers. If you increasingly rely on client self-help through online interactions you need to make very sure that accompanying explanatory material is clear, simple AND comprehensive. You also cannot expect customers to set aside more than an hour of their precious time hanging on the end of a phone line. Hell, no-one ever had to line up at a post office or a bank for that long even at Christmas. Uh Oh, that’s “so 20^th century”!

Now I am starting to sound like a grumpy old man… so time to stop writing....