Thursday, January 19, 2006

Customer service is dieing

In the 80’s customer service hardly existed and when used was generally easy to get a hold of. In the 90’s customer service was every where but you got to wait hours on hold to receive useless responses from a customer service agent that could not do anything you needed. In the late 90s and early 2000’s customer service became accessible and useful, hold times were down to minutes if anything and the customer service agents could actually help. Now it seems that customer service is experiencing a sudden and unexpected death. Case in point, Vonage, whom I was and I stress the was looking into for VoIP phone service.

Their web site is well designed and provided easy access to all of the important information about their service. I found plans easily and was quickly able to narrow my choice down to two possible plans. I was able to find all equipment information I needed. So far so good, but I still had the lingering question of which of the two plans I needed to pick. Here is where things went down hill. I first clicked the contact link thinking that I would just email them, ask my question and get an answer from a person in a day or so. Once I get to the contact page I am presented with a set of drop down lists to select what my contact was about. So I select plans and then click go. To my surprise I am not presented with a web form but taken to the plans page. Frankly this was the moment that I decided that I would not do business with Vonage, if a communications company cannot properly define the term “contact” then I do not believe they are competent enough to provide the service I am looking for. Also this kind of run around assures me that if I ever have problems with their service it will be very difficult to get it resolved.

Out of morbid curiosity I decided to find out how difficult it might be to contact them through their site. So I go back to the contact page and choose the “Other” options from the presented drop down lists. Now that Has to bring me to a email form, right? Wrong. Instead of an email form I get a paragraph of text explaining that do to high volumes they cannot receive my email. What?!? Upon further reading they do tell me that there is an “"Ask Vonage" online interactive chat agent” in their help section. Oh online chat based customer service, I can handle that. So I go to the help section and click Ask Vonage, a chat window pops up and asks me what my question is. Cool, so I type in my questions and I get back:

“I'm sorry, it's hard for me to understand long questions like that. Please ask again using as few words as necessary. Also, it helps if you only type one question or topic at a time. “

Nice they have a bot servicing their chat based customer support. At that point I was done with them. I did not bother calling the provided 1-800 number, as they have already proven them selves in capable of modern communication, not what I am looking for in my VoIP service provider.

I hope this is an isolated case but I am afraid that it is not. It seems that human customer service is near dead and until A.I. can learn to stop repeating the obvious, our lives will be just a little bit more difficult due to technology.

Friday, January 13, 2006

Opera 9.0 to support the Opacity tag!!

I recently received an email from Olafur Arnason, in response to my inquiry to Opera about support for the Opacity CSS 3 Property in Opera 9, with a relevant link to his blog. From his blog "On the core side we have fixed many crashes and we have also added support for opacity.", finally the Opacity CSS 3 Property will be supported in Opera. This is great news as this is one of my favorite CSS 3 Properties. With this all browsers that I care about support opacity in one way or another. I cannot wait until opera 9 comes out. Now if we could just get the guys over at MS to stop dragging their feet on IE7!

You can see Olafur's full blog post here

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Video Download services reviewed

I am finally please to see the dearth of online video services popping up this year. That being said we do not yet have a perfect service, but we are getting close. The main players in this market are iTunes, Starz, and Google.

There are Six main areas I judge a video service by and they are:

1. Video quality. I think Video quality is of utmost importance when I am paying for video content. Unfortunately many services think that since it is coming over the internet I am willing to pay for sub standard video quality, these providers need to re-evaluate this assumption.

2. Start Watching Now. When I decide I want to watch some content, I am usually ready to watch it at that point. Some of these services get that and others dont.

3. Interface. When it comes to video content not one of the major players have gotten the interface right yet. They just do not get that I want a really, stress the really, simple interface to my video and when I play it, I want the interface to go away until I am ready for it again. Further more none of the major players have provided a 10 foot interface yet.

4. Purchase vs. Pay per View. Most of the services seem to think that everyone wants to own everything they watch or conversely never want to own it. I don't know about you but there are many things that I watch that I do not care about owning and vice versa.

5. Pricing. Some of the pricing on these services are a little out of whack and some is fairly close. Most services are one size fits all pricing, which I don't get. Why would I pay 1.99 for a 45 minute show and 1.99 for a 3 minute music video or short movie? Oh, and why would I pay 4.99 to rent a new release on a download service when I can get the same video for 1.00 at a RedBox 2 blocks from my house?

6. Content. Many services think that you either want movies or television, but not all. Content is growing but you still cannot get just anything your heart desires right now. Though content is limited by what the studios and networks are willing to offer.

All that being said up front lets talk about some specific services. I will save the best for last so let's start with Google video.

Google Video: I must admit before I go too far that I have not actually purchased from Google Video yet. The front end is so bad I cannot bring my self to give them any money. I can say that their interface is terrible, and there is so little information that you cannot make a decision on whether to buy or not. The first question that comes to mind when you click on a video is, "is the purchased video quality going to be a terrible as the preview quality?", and there is no answer to that question on their site. Oh and full screen does not mean maximize the window. So aside from having an interface that not even a mother could love and video quality that makes over the air channels look down right good, Google Video does have some good points. You can start watching now, assuming the purchased videos work like the rest of videos on Google Video. They have both Purchase and Pay per View on many selections and they have variable pricing. Google Video is also the only one of the services mentioned here that offer both movies and television, though I doubt any one reading this will have much interest in the movies they are offering. Their Pricing model could pull them to the front of the line, if they improved their video quality.

iTunes: Apple is supplying a competent offering here though far from everything I would wish for in an online video service. Their content has the best offering for television, but no movies. The iTunes interface is not ideal for video, it has been retro fitted into an interface that was designed for music and is there for not the best for video. As far as using it as a 10 foot interface it will never make it. The video quality of iTunes videos leaves much to be desired, the compression is just too high, so it can be bother some with shows like Battlestar Galactica where there is a lot of black. They only offer shows for purchase and a one price fits all pricing model. They have the defacto market for downloading media but will likely lose the video market unless they improve their offering.

Stars/Vongo: This is by far the best service available, though still not perfect. The Vongo interface is nice and well suited to a video service, though everything is till too small and complex for use as a 10 foot interface. They are in bed with Microsoft so I would not be surprised if a plug-in for Media Center PC comes out soon, to fix the 10 foot interface issue. You can start watching the videos you select usually within 30 seconds of selecting the video. The video quality is the best of any service I have ever looked into. Vongo offers a subscription and Pay per View pricing model but no purchase option. Though they do not offer any television at this time their movie selection is very nice. The biggest flaw with the pricing is that they do not compete with Block Buster, let alone RedBox with their Pay per View pricing, though I think the subscription pricing is a good value.

Over all I think 2006 is shaping up to be a very good year for internet video and I think the future is bright.

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