Orange feedback can you help?

[Guest wilky]

I work for Orange and recently upgraded to the SPV. Cutting a long story short without this forum and coolsmartphone I would have been back using the Nokia 5210. Since getting on the straight and narrow 4 of my mates have been convinced to purchase the SPV and together we have de-certified, downloaded, broken and fixed the things with ease (eventually!)

The phone whilst I`m not going to pretend its perfect once you actually know what you are doing I think its a great piece of kit.

I then started to moan on at my mate down in Customer Marketing and he asked me to collate the feedback from my mates experience and myself. Whilst talking to him I also discussed the huge SPV community I have found since picking up the phone 10 days ago.

Finally I have reaced the point of this mail. He has asked me to collate any information, stories good or bad about the SPV. The service you have received, helpful hints the company has advised the NOT SO helpful hints you`ve been told. I`m especially after any experiences you`ve had if you have bought your SPV in the last 3-4 weeks.

So if you can post your dealings here. I don`t need mobile numbers or any personal information however rough dates and locations would help. If there is anything you don`t feel comfortable posting here please PM myself. Over the next 4-5 days I will collate all feedback anonymously.

Many Thanks

Andy Wilkinson

Orange Proj.

PS Please not I cannot help with indivdual problems but will attempt to assit/help in anyway I can.

[Guest mrjuglas]

Hi there and welcome to the community

I'm not too sure of the response you'll get on this... personally I would say that any experiences I've had with the phone have been posted on this forum as they happened and all the information is still there and available for you...

I can't speak for anyone else but I personally would not go out of my way to help Orange's marketing efforts, I feel I do enough already by carrying, using and showing off the phone... my perception is that in the forum Orange is 'them'... one suggestion would be that maybe Orange should have got involved with this forum a long time ago and it seems a bit late now, especially to be asking for something after not offering much...

[Guest Monolithix [MVP]]

Officially: Orange have seemed a little overwhelmed by this phone. The current CS support structure is nigh on useless for a phone as complicated as the SPV (try explaining the SMS straight to SIM probelm to them :/), the "read answers from a screen, if the problem doesn't match pass it on to the elusive level 2 support" just doesn't hack it with the SPV.

It was also unfortunate that the Dev website was delayed for so long.

Personally i think the "uproar" over certification and application signing would have been to much far less extent had this site been ready for the SPV's launch. However, bygones.

If Orange is to continue selling SmartPhone handsets a dedicated helpline or perhaps more promotion of the in-store "training" available to customers should be considered. Also, i bought my phone from The Link, am i still entitled to walk into an Orange shop and ask to participate in one of these training sessions.

The ability to walk into a shop, or call a phone number and speak to someone technically adept with SmartPhone would make life a lot easier.

Marketing, why has Orange done so little to promote the SPV? It's a ~major~ step in technology, however i have seen only one advert, in Computing Magazine, since its launch, nothing else. Why is Orange keeping this one so quiet?

Unofficially: I'm very impressed with Orange. They took a brave step in taking on SmartPhone first, and their competitors will no doubt learn a lot of lessons from their mistakes. But credit where credit is due, there would probably not the a UK SmartPhone today were it not for Orange. Their risk has benefited each and every member of this site. I think the correct desicion was made over application signing, i can see how difficult it must have been and MS made life no easier (ON or OFF, no intermediate choice...).

All in all i am very happy with the product, and the community built around it. Well done Orange.

[Guest superkingdave]

agree with mono...no other phone has been as big a Step forward as the spv has been...html web access on the bus! shame the promo is ending tho

[Guest Big Ron - No Longer a Mem]

Try asking the Techies on 156. But DON'T repeat the mistake made on my last day with Orange. A questionnaire to be filled in "online" by all employees. The preamble asked us to "carefully consider each question" - the questions ran to several pages worth. 156 in Bristol set aside 40 minutes to complete the task, and made it clear that they didn't expect it to TAKE 40 minutes. I took 45 minutes - each "low score" I gave was accompanied by a brief reason for doing so. And I got chewed out for overrunning the allotted time.

The BIG problems that have arisen:

-Derive from "new registrations" being insufficiently trained pre launch, so that they screwed-up a significant proportion of the contracts, leaving new customers without GPRS, without MMS and without the GPRS bundle. (which then led to wholesale overbilling)

-Derive from Orange being less than forthright about the degree to which they REALLY contributed to the phone's development. They claim (in Orange's pre-launch brieifings to staff) to have "developed it in colaboration with Microsoft". If that was really true, then Orange would be better informed than we obviously were. Depositions in Sendo vs. Microsoft (a case currently being heard in Texas) suggest that orange was a latecomer to the project, not a prime mover. Sendo complained bitterly that Microsoft was WAY behind schedule in development, and never did produce completed code. Customer experience with the SPV tends to bear that out - search the forum for "when's the damned software upgrade going to be released?" threads. The SPV just wasn't ready for release... but got released anyway.

- Derives from the way that tech support is run. They're geared towards "voice" phones, with a few specialists dealing in "using your mobile as a modem". A straw poll held back in February showed that Orange techies are LESS likely to own a PC than a randomly-picked member of the public, by a factor of four to one! New recruits who DO have technical expertise gained elsewhere seem to be the first in the queue to quit. They're frustrated by being restricted to "reading the script". - any information that's not "© Orange" is something you're not allowed to give. And while the "© Orange" stuff might be good enough to handle calls about "ordinary" phones, quite clearly it's NOT enough to handle the technical queries that even an idiot should have anticipated would be associated with a phone that runs Windows! Suggesting that this site might be a good place to look for answers was expressly FORBIDDEN by Tech Support management.

Armed with this information and a time machine, if you could go back to November 2002, delay launch until the software development had been completed, used the time to train the registration people, and hand picked 156 staff who DID own a PC and used the internet at home to act as the "first line" of enquiry for SPV owners, then many of the threads on this forum - mainly the ones complaining of poor service - wouldn't BE here. Which is a pity... the one part you could do without access to a time machine would be the last. And even that's too late. Orange picked the best 15 "new intake techies" back in January - the ones they thought could absorb the COMPLETE TSR course in record time, and fed us through it in a record-breaking five weeks. We kept asking outselves "when are we going to get to the difficult stuff?" At the end of five weeks, we realised that there WAS no "difficult stuff". We got no extra pay, (although promises of verying rewards were made - and broken - almost weekly) And of the 15, fewer than half remain. The rest have quit or had their probations terminated. The SPV makes demands that cannot be satisfied by people whose sole knowlege is "what's on Scholar". But Orange shows neither the ability nor inclination to hold on to staff who are capable of doing more than that. Without a careful rethink of how things are being run in Bristol, this foprum will continue to be littered with comments about 156 being "Muppets". It doesn't reflect on the TSR's - it reflects on their training, lack of grasp of technology and their management's attitude. "Muppets" is all they're allowed to be.

[Guest mike-oh]

ha ha. just reading this and the orange add with the kid training the staff has come on tele! How appropriate! It turns out that it's actually a fly on the wall documentary! :lol:

[Guest Paul [MVP]]

Locked at request of original poster.

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