Blodge

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It looks on the surface about as bad as you can get in terms of completely mis-handling your customer base, lying to consumers and losing their trust and respect in one single great big blodge.

A telco pushes an upgrade to users of devices on its network. That upgrade not only apparently has the effect of downgrading the service, but is widely reported to screw up the batteries of those devices, triggering a public outcry.

Then people start to look at this software, labelled, "Etisalat upgrade for Blackberry service. Please download to ensure continous service quality" to see quite why it has been such a disaster. And they start asking questions about quite why it was important to download a network performance upgrade to the clients.

This is what they find, according to DXBLouie (no relation to our pal Bluey methinks), posting his findings on the BlackBerry support forums: A series of Java files. Perhaps interestingly, they all install to a folder called SS8.

SS8? Who they? What do we find, for instance at SS8. com? A security and interception company perhaps? One with a newly opened local operation, too, it seems.

So the inference customers are drawing is that the telco knowingly pushed a security and monitoring application to their handsets without informing them - one that has crashed their handsets and caused considerable annoyance. Obviously, they're jumping to conclusions.

But now they're starting to ask questions about quite why it was that a telco thought it could stealth a nasty little monitoring application, without telling them, without asking their permission and without any 'by your leave' onto their handsets. You'd expect the telco to start facing questions about that...

It's going to be an interesting 48 hours, people...

The Machines are Taking Over

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Etisalat, the telephone company that likes to say 'ugh', has decided to come to my aid in what has been a workmanlike and drab start to the week and introduce a spangle of special fun into my life.

The Directory Enquiry Service (181 to you, mate) has been cut over to an almost but not totally non-functional IVR system. That's Etisalat's secret - not to be utterly useless, just almost utterly useless. It's so much more devastating to give the subscriber a glimmer of hope before dashing it, I find, than giving no hope at all.

Now when you call 181 you get asked to press * for English. When you do, it talks Arabic to you. This is pretty special stuff, but it's only a start of a special journey into the unknown. You are given a list of things you could want like hotel, restaurant or pigeon fancier's club. You have to either say one of these things or say 'other'. The system will then automatically misunderstand you. This is disintermediation at its best - to replace a human that rarely understands what you want with a machine that never understands what you want.

When you say 'other' you get asked for what you want. So you say, 'Dirigible Repair Specialist' and the IVR system, in a female Hal9000 voice, says, 'Do you want Peter's Patent Pringle Painters Llc? Yes or no.'

So you say 'No.'

And the IVR says, 'Which Emirate are you looking for?'

And you say 'Dubai.'

And then you get an operator who agrees that yes, the machine is totally useless and yes, everyone's been whingeing and yes, he can help you. He sounds amused. As am I.

I called back to get the scripts right for this blog, but I got a human this time 'round, who assured me that yes, she was human and yes, she could help me. She was quite affronted when I told her I had actually wanted the machine so I'd call back for it...

(The system now cuts to IVR when the operators are busy, but only for landline callers, BTW)

(PS: I'll let y'all know when I get the search hit for 'Dirigible Repair Specialist')

Warning! Phishing! Fraud! Shock! Horror!

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Etisalat has done it again.

Not content with sending a warning email to subscribers that contained the immortal words 'Etisalat will never email links' and that also contained (almost inevitably) two links, the telco that likes to say 'shou?' has now sent an email to its lucky subscribers further warning them of the dangers of phishing.

"Security Alert - Beware of Email Fraud Disguised as Official Etisalat Emails" trumpets the email subject line. Inside, we have a picture of a cursor pointer being snared by a barbed fish hook and the word, in red mind you, WARNING! Golly, they must be serious!

The email also contains the following words:

NOTE:Etisalat will never ask you for neither your Internet/Email passwords nor any other personal details by Email, Internet or phone. Please do not disclose any of your Etisalat services passwords to any person.

And then, inevitably, at the bottom of the mail is a link out to this online form, which asks for your name, username, telephone number and email address.

The Internet. A rich and wonderful place...

Weird Phish

Everyone’s favourite telco sent me an email. PHISHING WARNING! Hollered the subject line.

Lovely. I opened it. I mean, at least it wasn't a blasted text at midnight...

Phishing emails are them what pretends to be from a bank or someone and that get you to give up personal information so that the evil phishers can steal your identity, children, things and money.

“Etisalat will never email links” said the mail in reassuring green as it warned me of the dangers of phishing emails in stentorian, warning tones.

There then followed a series of six pointers for those wishing to improve their internet security.

You guessed it – item six contained... a link.

One For The Ladies

Of the many wonderful things to be found in the diverse and rich playground that is the Internet, this is one of my favourite things today. It was advertised on my phone bill and piqued my curiosity because of the whiff of egregious sexism it carried with it.

It's Etisalat's 'My Bouquet' service, a special range of offers for the little lady.

The advert on my phone bill offers the chance to win a pink Blackberry Pearl - because girls only like pink, don't they? Of course they do, lads.

But then we have the actual My Bouquet section of Etisalat's website (Interestingly, if you search eim.ae for "My Bouquet" it doesn't return the service as a result. Nice.), a true phenomenon of targeted marketing. For a start, it's got flowers on it - and everyone knows the girls love a flower every now and then! Especially those ones from Emarat, eh chaps?

"My bouquet is carefully designed to best serve the need of the women" Etisalat declaims on the site, which is illustrated with a (licensed, I hope!) picture of a sappy-looking Nancy Ajram. And how right they are! There are three bouquets, Lilac, Tulip and Orchid, which are perfect for the need of the women.

Lilac lets the women talk internationally for 1.6 hours. Tulip lets the women talk internationally for 5 hours and Orchid lets the women talk internationally for 8.3 hours. There are some reward point thingies and the chance to win that lovely, desirable and oh! So female! Pink Blackberry.

So there you go ladies! Now you can win a pink Blackberry and talk for a long time on the 'phone!

PS: I coloured this post pink especially for the ladies! This segmented marketing lark is a DODDLE once you understand your target audience, isn't it???

Etisalat Makes My Day

400 calls in search of a human later. Much listening to messages talking about 'our world class customer service' included...
"Hello."
"Hello."
"Hello."
"OK. Hello, our telephone is not working. We have checked and it is not disconnected, but you get 'not available' when you dial in and an engaged tone when you dial out. Our ADSL is down, too."
"You have fault?"
Repeat
"You can change the handset."
"This is a company. All our handsets are not working. And our Internet."
"Internet?"
"Yes, Internet. Look, this isn't a radio commercial. What's the problem?"
"You have fault!"
"OK. You fix fault then."
"Yes. In three days."
"This is a company. How do you expect us to work for three days no Internet, no telephone?"
"It is problem, yes. You pay Dhs150 per hour, engineer will come in two hours."
"What, so because you can't provide reliable connectivity to your customers to ITU standards, you're going to charge me Dhs150 an hour to pay your engineers to do basic fault reporting on a multiple line failure to our location?"
"What?"
"Yes. Please. We pay Dhs150 per hour. or Dhs 1,500. I don't care. Fix it now."
"OK. Engineer will come."
To be updated

...Update...
Pilot's log.
Stardate Dubai 10.30am

The engineer hasn't arrived. The problem apears to have fixed itself. We have Internet and telephone connectivity. Spock has gone down the shops for a packet of celebratory Caramel Digestives and Scottie is sobbing into his engineering manuals. I feel a strong spring urge and Lieutenant Uhuru's looking damn fit these days...

...Update 2.0...
I forgot to post this, but a strange man called the next day and was surprised to get through to us. That's right, he was the engineer.

Disconnected

The result of any search performed through Etisalat's seach function this morning: 'Cannot get connection'.

I know the feeling...

BTW: This comes courtesy of pal Derek. I wouldn't dream of trying to use Etisalat's search function myself...

Mobile

So now you can pay for your Salik using your mobile. Whoopee.

I don't need that service, thanks to the Dubai e-government payment portal, which crashed last time I tried to pay my Salik, a couple of months ago. It blew out the transaction with an error message. I tried again, same result. I thought I'd give it a go at 'third time lucky' but it just came back again with a failure and error message.

Next day I had Dhs750 of Salik credit. The RTA blamed the e-government payment portal, the e-government people blamed Salik. Neither would contemplate (against the TOS, I believe, of Visa) a refund of the erroneously credited Dhs500. I sent email after email to the e-Pay people. Nada.

I also raised a complaint to HSBC Visa, who have been brilliantly silent on the matter since.

I remain a Salik millionaire. But I shudder to think what financial carnage could be achieved by the combination of RTA, Etisalat, e-Pay and HSBC, particularly bearing in mind that Etisalat will only discuss a billing problem once the bill has been settled and that the other three won't discuss a problem at all.

A confederacy of dunces indeed...

Spanked

Gulf News today carries, on page 41, a slightly strange advertisement for telco Du’s Unlimited Blackberry offer. The ad, which struck me as unusually weak in a market slopping over the brim with weak advertising, offers “unlimited wireless access to email, calendar, messaging and internet through seamless and secured office connectivity”. It features a sketch of two aliens looking amazed at a Blackberry, having discarded a number of other useless gadgets.

Unusually, Gulf News has also, on page 36, spanked the offer editorially. GN’s Nadia Saleem not unreasonably points out that the ‘unlimited’ Du offer is actually limited to 1 Gb of data transfer, after which usage is charged at Dhs 0.01 per kbyte (or, in other words, a cool Dhs 10 per Mbyte). When contacted about the fact that its ‘unlimited’ offer is actually limited (a slightly paradoxical thing, I’m sure most would agree), Du apparently told our Nadia, “someone might use the data access facility to download movies all day or use the mobile as a modem to transfer large amounts of data”.

Ooh! The rotters!

Firstly, the point is surely that in today's 'always on' world, the data volume is not the charged unit in the vast majority of internet transactions. Package prices are the way forward and the amount of data used in a given package is not germane. The internet is not circuit switched - you pays for the pipe - access not volume. Operators billing volumetrically for access are sort of cheating, really. Particularly when they have mobile IP infrastructures.

That apart, I personally received something like 250Mbytes of useful* email this month, despite being on leave for three weeks of it - and the month's not over yet. If I include the junk, we're looking at a mailbox of over 300 Mbytes and I haven't started allowing for internet access, streaming video or any other cool apps or toys. So it's actually conceivable that a heavy user would actually want 1Gb of access.

What’s missing here are a few words on their advertisement to explain that they don’t actually mean unlimited when they say unlimited. Perhaps interestingly, Etisalat, the big telco, doesn’t limit its unlimited offer.

I bet the GN advertising sales boys aren’t talking to our Nads today, though...


PS: I know I said I wasn't posting for a couple of days, but I couldn't resist it...

*Useful is a relative term.

Seat

If you've got a little time on your hands, make a cup of coffee, sit down and relax and take 15 minutes or so out to read this 10,250 word post from UAE based blogger and Etisalat customer service victim Sam. It documents his 43-day attempt to get his Internet connection upgraded from 1Mb to 2Mb.

It'll likely resonate with you if you've ever dealt with Etisalat or any other monopoly provider. It'll resonate if you occasionally cry into the void at the sheer frustration of dealing with call centre culture. It'll make you angry. It'll make you marvel at how he didn't commit any acts of violence, vandalism or inappropriate behaviour.

And, with a bit of luck, it'll get widely publicised and lead to a thorough-going witch hunt over at Etisalat towers. Because it's the voice of a frustrated, annoyed, ignored, disrespected and utterly impotent consumer being jerked around by people who represent disempowered, dumb, rote process gone mad.

Enjoy!

Grumpy

A very grumpy little pair of pieces in today’s Gulf News: the ‘phone company that everyone loves to shout at, Etisalat, has released a new block of numbers starting with the prefix 056 and hasn’t bothered telling anyone, according to the paper which gives the grievance front page space (alongside a report of the horrific crash that happened yesterday on the Sheikh Zayed Road outside the Grand Hyatt: a minibus jumped the central barrier and hit an oncoming car with the loss of five lives) and then repeats the story inside.

The source of at least some of GN’s grumpiness is given away in the story, “repeated requests by Gulf News for a comment from etisalat went unanswered”, and then GN gets its revenge, continuing with “Etisalat subscribers regularly complain about the poor customer support.”

Ouch.

The GN story is hung on a single subscriber complaint, which is a tad thin if you ask me. Australian businessman Irshad says he's been given a new number and is facing constant problems with people insisting they’ve got the number wrong. The paper says that ‘apart from a press release’ there has been no attempt at raising awareness of the new number: that press release, as far as I can see, went out in August 2006!!!

Changing a national numbering scheme without any attempt at public awareness is an odd decision to make. Choosing to ignore media enquiries about it an even odder one, particularly given that Etisalat is involved, at least nominally, in a competitive market. The result would appear to be some unwelcome coverage given unusual prominence, I would submit precisely because the company has been ignoring the newspaper's requests.

You can only conclude that there’s a potent cocktail of stupidity and arrogance at work here and that’s surprising given the vast number of very positive changes that have been taking place over at Etisalat towers over the past couple of years.

This news is also bad news for a completely different reason: it’s the death knell for the Du test, because people are going to start asking for the ‘full’ mobile number including the prefix now.

Mind you, I have to confess I’ll be delighted if people start asking “Is that 050 or 056?”...

:)

Mafsoum

Mafsoum is a great Arabic word. It’s something of a meme in the company wot I work for, made popular by the Jordanians and a word all of us use frequently, and amusingly, in conversation. It’s very useful, one of a few compelling additions to Ten Word Arabic and, when used judiciously, it will scatter your enemies like shouting ‘I’ve got a cobalt bomb in this briefcase!’ would scatter a WEF Plenary. Because mafsoum means ‘schizophrenic’.

Isn’t that cool? Just slip it into conversation: “Enta mafsoum!” (you’re a schizo!) if you’re feeling like risking a black eye, or a sly “Howi mafsoum!” (he’s a schizo).

Why am I babbling about schizophrenia? (‘ere listen to ‘im: ‘es ‘avin’ a go at ver bleedin’ schizowotnots now!)

The fact that Etisalat is promoting a service, on its Weyak mobile services platform, that lets mobile users take pictures and upload them to their Facebook page surely is evidence of a most fundamental schizophrenia. On the one hand they’re blocking social sites like Orkut, Flikr and Twitter and even lumps of Facebook itself, on the other they’re trying to drive the adoption of these services!

Rather cack-handedly, if I’m professionally honest: a blunderbuss of SMS spam is probably not the best communications tool to use in driving adoption of a Facebook related service. Perhaps they'd have been better using... errr.. Facebook?

Is this evidence of an internal battle between conservatism and free thinking radicals? Is it a cross-company integrated strategy to build adoption to the point where the block is untenable? Perhaps it’s just good old fashioned addle-pated organisational idiocy?

Or just simply that they’re mafaseem!...

Cable

It struck me this morning how much this FLAG/SEA ME WE cable outage must be hurting our good friends over at Du Towers given that their network is based on Internet Protocol telephony.

Poor old Du. It must be galling for them not to be able to take over the whole market by slashing prices left right and centre and so not realise one of the main upside benefits of an IP network, while at the same time suffering from the down-side of having an IP network - being horribly exposed to service outages when people drop anchors on your international cable infrastructure.

One of the reasons why the whole country didn't flock to Du when it launched was that the regulator blocked any price competition - mad, when you have an IP based operator launching against a ruggedly circuit-switched incumbent. However, in a perverse sort of way, Du is being paid off for being a not terribly interesting competitor, because it's able to charge circuit-switched telephone rates for an IP network - an absolutely enormous profit margin.

That this state of affairs exists because the regulator is so interested in protecting the vested interests represented by former monopoly and still massively dominant telco Etisalat is undoubted. That it is also artificially halting progress in the market is also undoubted.

However, the fact remains that the Du network is utterly reliant on the Internet to carry its international traffic - and that the recent outages have enabled a quietly gleeful Etisalat to announce that it is helping Du out. Du's response is evident in today's newspapers, a faintly ridiculous slice of blablabla press release announcing that there were now 1.5 million Du customers, which Gulf News for some reason carried faithfully in all its Technicolour puke-inducing glory.

So I called my pal who has a Du mobile and asked how his service had been, rather hoping (I must confess) for a horror story to pop on the blog. But he told me that he'd had no problems at all, that service had been completely unaffected by the recent Internet outages.

As he chatted to me, he started to break up until he was completely inaudible in a sea of pops, clicks and gaps. So I'm not really sure if the Du network has been affected by the cable outages or that's just the service quality he's used to. And I don't know anyone else who uses Du to ask - even though there are, apparently, 1.5 million of them out there...

Beating the UAE Content Filter

Emirates Today led today with the story that a Saudi-based company is offering a UAE content filter beating package that installs a personal proxy for its customers. UAE telecom regulator the TRA has, predictably, said this is illegal and that people who use it will have their fingernails taken out and be bastinadoed with dried pasta until they cry.

OK. So I made up the fingernails and pasta bits.

But I found ‘illegal’ an interesting use of words. I think a telecom regulator can say that something is contrary to regulation, but can they claim it as illegal without the backing of an actual law to enact? I thought that something enshrined in statute was law and that the application of that law and precedent through the courts defined legality or illegality. And UAE law (I will rapidly say that I am no expert and invite anybody who knows better to please contradict/clarify this) wouldn’t appear to be particularly hot on the whole issue of cyber-legislation, let alone the application of any such legislation in the courts.

Although you could try applying the UAE publishing law to the Internet and the whole issue of what content is acceptable or not, you’d have a hard time squeezing that round peg into the square hole that is the WWW. As far as I’m aware, Etisalat’s proxy server and content blocking/filtering system was wholly unilaterally implemented and was not a legislated requirement. As others have pointed out in the past, the Etisalat filtering system not only filters content that would be considered offensive in a Muslim country, but also does a neat job of blocking Israeli sites (handy: you can’t actually get information from moderate Israeli voices or even research Israeli companies investing in areas that are of commercial interest to the Arab World), IP telephony providers such as Skype and, the great crime to my mind, a number of social networking sites such as Flickr and Twitter.

A digression. Given that the latter are core components of the Web 2.0 revolution that everyone’s bibbling about, I like to save up some anger about that whole decision that social networking is ‘dating’ and therefore unacceptable. I have pointed out before (not least when speaking at conferences) that the human race has been able to ‘get it on’ for some considerable time before Twitter was introduced. I don’t think blocking Web 2.0 networks will stop that boy meets girl thing from happening, do you?

Getting back to the point, then: although there are laws governing the creation, possession and sale of offensive content, and these define what constitutes offensive content in the UAE, I am not aware of laws that govern blocking competitive service providers or social networking sites. That would be a highly advanced (more advanced than anywhere in Europe, the USA or Asia) piece of legislation indeed. So there's potentially room to question the legal basis for blocking any of this stuff. I'm not talking morality or desirability: just the existence of a law. And, again, I’m not expert so please do take a pop if you know better.

So given the above holds water, you have to question the TRA’s ability to use the law, as it so readily threatens, to pursue people who sign up to this new proxy service. Of course, once content is physically present on a machine/storage in the UAE, other, highly effective and easy to understand laws come into play. But access alone… that’s a difficult one, no?

A small thought: the Internet is not blocked in Jordan or Egypt, as well as other Middle Eastern countries. Society has not crumbled as a consequence. Quite the opposite, both countries lead the region in ICT-based value creation and talent building.

Incidentally, the Emirates Today headline screams ‘INTERNET BLOCKER BEATER’ and is directly underneath an Etisalat strap advertisement that says ‘Wherever you go, we extend your reach’.

A nice piece of flat-planning and a beautiful last thought. :0)

Wot, No Posts?

No posts over the weekend. Phone company Etisalat cut off our Internet for non payment. It's a long story. Needless to say the entire episode involved the words unhelpful, process driven, automated and pillock.

Back online now.

One day someone's going to work out that great customer service is only possible when you empower your staff to take decisions so that they can go the extra mile to meet customers' needs. And when they do, my money says the last monkey to get to the typewriter will be Etisalat.

Although, strange to recount, I'm still not minded to go to du.