3rd Party Marketing starts to get kicked in to touch.

Catching up on the Sunday Papers and I see that someone at the Sunday Times also hates the bombardment of "Update Calls" on their Mobile.

The Good News is that it seems that the Mobile Networks have woken up to the fact that such actions upset the Customers and have started to take action! The story explains that the big three networks have started to attack those agencies that have set up call centres that are aimed at getting customers to upgrade/churn.

I guess this is one good point, would also have been excellent to see that having done so the Networks then put out a Press Releas to the effect that Company X just got canned by us because they are scumbags and not only do we not want anything to do with them we are taking them to court for missrepresentation. That way I would not have so many friends and family complaining that they have been stung by such cowboys.

It seems that Orange have got a grip over the past few weeks as I have not had as many calls as I was getting at the start of the year. I just wish that they did some form of outbound marketing that said that it was a scam in the first place and we would not have seen the thing mushroom to the extent that at one stage I was getting over twenty calls a day offering me a new handset when I upgraded.

Someone else that thinks Orange has lost its MoJo

Heading home on the tube today and I manage to read the G2 supplement to the Guardian. Charlie Brooker has decided that his new handset from Orange is just too much for him. His Samsung E900 is just too much. He finds the change in menus confusing, the features irritating and the making of phone call annoying. He tells us that he has the phone because he was sold the free handset from the now famous Orange Upgrade Centre that said that he got not just a free handset but also free texts at weekends for life!

My gripe is that as my daughters did well in the schools admission lottery I have two let them both have a mobile phone. In an effort to get some control over the whole process I opted for two pay as you go handsets from Orange. The girls are to get £10 per month credit billed to my contract with Orange. I went for purchase via my phone and so have had to deal with Orange Direct. The level of service that you get as a prepaid customer is somewhat different from that of someone who is an Orange Premier customer. I was told that the handset would be shipped Friday and would be with me on Monday. If it was a handset upgrade then we would have had the phones Saturday. So this lunchtime I called to see where are my handsets to be asked what made me expect that I would get them today it usually takes two to five working days. I asked if I had know that the service would be this slow then I would have gone into an Orange store and picked them up. Could I still do so I asked, yes but they could not refund the cost of the handsets until they were returned to the distribution centre. It was thus easier for me to just tell the girls that they have waited a year for me to get them a phone and another day was not going to kill them.

What makes me think that when I get the two phones the process of registering them and setting up Magic Numbers is going to be easy. The frustration level is rising to the point that I can feel the need to vent via email to a member of the Executive team so that he gets one of his employees to expedite.