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Archive From Thursday July 16th 2009: Update #136
This Update is normally published three times per week for opted-in subscribers only. Publisher: Rich Sale. Your comments are always welcome - to respond to anything you read here, please leave a comment.
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Well another Friday is sitting on the horizon and judging by the grey sky and rather close feel in the air we are in for another storm tonight. A large proportion of my working week has been wasted listening to some patronising woman telling me that my call is important to her and that I will be put through to the next available operator as soon as one is available. This is after working my way through a series of questions to prove my identity and to establish the best department to talk to. Then the first thing the ‘agent’ asks you to do is prove your identity.
Yes help desks and call centres have almost brought me to tears this week. I am in the process of changing my bank and I needed to sort out all my direct debits but I didn’t know all the contact information. So in my infinite wisdom I cancelled them all and then waited for each company to get in touch with requests for new instructions. I have since learned that this is not the best strategy to adopt because it can cause you to miss a payment and then you just get bombarded with calls and letters. But at least I got the contact details:)
So the process of phoning each one began and took the best part of a day to sort out 13 direct debits! Out of the 13 there was only one (the last one) that was a good experience. Friends Provident are top of my list for customer support - I phoned a number, someone answered in a polite way, asked what the problem was, took my details and sorted the new direct debit in less than 5 mins! She was most surprised when I actually thanked her for dealing with the problem in such an efficient manner.
Now unbeknown to me I inadvertently didn’t sort out a £1.50 payment to British Telecom (BT) for an extended email service. And all of a sudden my talk21.com email account stopped working.The bad news was that this account is used for my PayPal and other systems for getting money so I could be losing out big time if it was not resolved quickly.
Now my talk21.com account was given to me for free by BT many moons ago when we still had our first dial up connection. Unfortunately at that time they didn’t allow POP3 access to the talk21 server unless you paid £1.50/month which is what I did.
Now I knew that my email account was suspended because the system told me so when I tried to check my password. So armed with this I went to the BT help desk (big mistake) to try and find out who I had to speak to. In the end I picked a number and after several aborted attempts got through to India! Only to be told that I didn’t have a talk21.com account! They even told me that talk21.com didn’t exist anymore and that I could not have been using it for a couple of years. In the end after about an hour they told me they had reset my password but not to try to login for a couple of hours.
I waited 3 hrs (working on other things) then tried to login with the new details and still could not get in. I tried once more and the system locked my account for 12 hrs because there were too many failed attempts to login. In desperation I filled out a customer complaint form describing the problem and how pissed off I was.
1 hour later I got an email from them telling me that they had reset the password on my main bt.com account (nothing to do with emails) and kindly they had sent the new login details to my talk21.com email address. Yes the one that I can’t access.
I gave up and decided to wait at least 12 hrs before trying again. The next call went much the same way except that they kept on telling me that I had a different email address on their system which they could access OK. But what about my Talk21 account! I kept asking. At one point they hung up on me!
Eventually after making some noise I got put through to someone who started to shed some light on the problem. Because my talk21account was set up when we were using dial-up it came under a different system. I needed to talk to someone on the dial-up side of BT and I was given a number to call. I asked if I could move my email account all to be on the same server and linked in with my broadband account but this was not possible because there was no mechanism to do this. I had to phone the dial-up team.
I called the number and followed the options and it told me to hang up and redial another number which I did. Another call to my friends in India but this time to someone who understood the problem and who told me with confidence and pride that he, would sort my problem where others had failed.
It transpires that my talk21.com account was suspended because the £1.50 was outstanding. But it also transpired that I should not be paying the £1.50 because they should have moved my talk21.com account over to the btinternet.com system when I moved to Broadband about 3 years ago! But don’t worry the happy chap said, I will sort this for you now. And with flurry of key tapping he reactivated my talk21.com account and moved it onto the btinternet.com system so I no longer had to pay the £1.50 each month. He just said, there you go all sorted sorry it took me so long! and went off to sort out another problem.
I am sure there is a suitable moral to this story - but I am just flabbergasted that it takes so much effort to get things sorted with BT. I dare say that after suitable therapy I will be back to normal again!.
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Last time I quickly mentioned the MailWasher Pro system that I use to filter out all the spam and rubbish from my emails before I download them into my outlook. I had quite a few questions about the system from various people so I decided to make a small video about MailWasher Pro which you can see here http://www.nofussinternetbusiness.com/reviews/mailwasher-pro-review
Or if you want you can see the system here http://www.nofussinternetbusiness.com/mailwasher on the Firetrust site.
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I am still getting loads of questions about article writing and what to do. Now I have just covered this in the Affiliate Blogging Course so I will give you a sneak preview of the video that I did on article writing which you can see here. http://www.nofussinternetbusiness.com/affblog/Course-part8/course8.html
It would be great to have some feedback on your experiences, fears and concerns about article writing. It is still a strong traffic generator and great link builder.
Just reply to this with your comments.
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The next part of my FREE Affiliate Blogging course will be released on Tuesday. You can sign up here for free http://bit.ly/ZH5Dw.
The next newsletter will hopefully be on Sunday but I have to take my youngest son down to London for his Grade 2 Drum Exam which is at 17:16 (very precise timing). So I will be late back and the newsletter may have to be delayed.
Remember you can request information from me or request topics just by leaving a comment.
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So until next time
To Our Success
Rich
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