I like SpinVox, I think its core voice mail service is excellent and probably how excellent it is the reason why I find it so infuriating when I'm prevented from using it.
It seems to have developed this annoying habit of turning off conversion, ie just acting like a normal voice mail service. I didn't even know this was an option.
I've posted before about how infuriating I found their IVR interface, well it has improved but not enough for me to pay a monthly fee, as I do, to have my voice mails converted to text messages.
Today's tale of woe started with me forgetting my phone. Not a biggy as I was office based today so I could just wait for the messages to arrive as emails.
+44xxxxxxxxxx Just left you a voice message that you need to listen to and conversion is off.
Not again!
So I go to the web site to see about turning it back on and am greeted with the most astonishing home page 'upgrade' I've ever scene. 6MB of marketing masturbation culminating with an impenetrable home page that took me ages to discover where I needed to sign in.
Finally get there and discover that Firefox hasn't remembered my PIN from last time. Bit of a pain that I haven't got my phone but no problem I called home and clicked the forgotten PIN link as the phone was ringing.
It didn't work.
Not only didn't work it didn't tell me it didn't work it just did nothing. No feedback, nothing. So I hang up the phone, count to 10 and fire off an email to service@spinvox.com.
This was at 11:48, I've still not heard anything.
I was sharing my woes with the people of twitter and agreed with @whatelydude to be patient, but my patience has worn thin. Poor guy was earning his social media dollar today with the majority of twitterers coming out against the new SpinVox home page.
Finally I got home around half six to my phone and called the IVR service but apparently there were no new messages! Seems that the messages I'd been notified about had been marked as read and I would need to trawl through all my messages in order to get to the new ones.
Ridiculous.
I pay for this service.
It's just crazy that a company having raised $200M can have such an abysmal web interface to it's service. Let alone the random switching off of the functionality that makes it useful.
So SpinVox, the next time you get carried away with a funky new way to brand your service just syphon off a few of those dollars into the core service development team's budget.
Focus on making your service work and put the crayons away for a while.
UPDATE
Contact by a product manager instead of customer service who saw my twitter comments. Who arrange for customer service to call me.
Turns out that the switch off conversion is a billing issue. They're taking the money from my card but something's failing passing that to my account. They've given me a complimentary account for the moment until they can find what the problem is.
It's just a shame a Product Manager had to come to my aid rather than the customer service team who I emailed.
Are SpinVox drinking a bit too much social media kool-ade and not concentrating on the basics?
3 comments:
More like they're reading too much "how to blind your customers with stupid flash effects" rather than "Don't make me think"
http://www.amazon.com/Think-Common-Sense-Approach-Usability/dp/0789723107 (Great read)
Hey Adam,
I'm glad Matt was able to get in contact with you to help resolve the service issue you were having.
He and I have since spoken at length with the Customer Service team and, for whatever reason, we are unable to find your original customer service email.
We're not sure why this is, but I'm hoping this might go some way as to explaining why we didn't get back to you as quickly as we would've liked.
I hope you get back to enjoying the SpinVox service eventually and no doubt I'll see you on Twitter sometime soon.
Cheers
James
Thanks James, curious about the email.
Post a Comment