BlykWatch - Paranoid diarist, Absinthe and a student that actually does essays

The first BlykWatch diary posted last week has been very well received, judging by the phenomenal response from a wide array of readers. I agree with reader, Tom, who emailed in saying that it’s excellent to ‘get an insider look into the service’. Since you can’t easily join Blyk (most analysts, investors and indeed, anyone with a passing interest in MVNO activities, is generally well outside the Blyk target age), it’s actually quite a challenge to experience the service.

Right then, here’s Ricky’s latest entry.

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Tuesday 5th February 2008
No brand messages today, however I did have a missed call from a withheld number (which is strange as very few people have my Blyk number). I suspect it was Blyk contacting me in regards to the issue of signal dropping. Whilst I was browsing the support forums, I saw another member post about similar signal problems to me. I sent another email to member care pointing them to the post. I await their response in anticipation.

Wednesday 6th February 2008
Firstly today I received another Heat MMS about Lilly Allan, this was very quickly deleted. I received that about 12:15 in the afternoon. I also received two emails from member care from ‘Gareth’, the first telling me at 12:25 that he was passing it along to their technical team but in his opinion it was down to orange signal. This annoyed me slightly as I stated in my original email that I had checked signal in the same location with a spare Orange prepay sim and I got full signal. I then received another email at 14:15 asking for further details requested by the technical team. They asked me to specify:

– Dates of when signal dropped
– Times of when signal dropped
– Locations where signal dropped?

Exhaustive.

I also received two phone calls from a withheld number and one answer phone message during the day. Yes you guessed it was Blyk! To be more precise my friend ‘Gareth’. I missed both his calls as I was in university; however his voicemail was simply repeating his last email. Sadly I am in university all day, and can’t really use my phone. So I have emailed customer care saying I do not have the detailed information they want but will keep a look out if it happens again.

As part of this mini blog I have been reading (and contributing) a lot to the Blyk forums, where I read about many members having issues with porting their numbers, SMS not being sent and even issues with customer care not being helpful. The thing I wonder is whether my issues are getting extra attention since I am publicly writing BlykWatch. So far I have received excellent customer care, yet on the forum ‘Joe Blogs’ does not necessarily seem to receive the same level of service.

This evening I was struggling to SMS to my friend on Vodafone UK. I had to resend it four times before it went through. I posted the problem up on the forum. Hopefully I will receive an email from customer care tomorrow about signal issues!

Thursday 7th February 2008
The worst day in Blyk’s history to date, today the free credit system ‘broke’. This meant for the early part of the day I could not make calls and I simply heard the message that I needed to top up. This also meant that whenever I tried to SMS I got an auto message back saying I needed to top up. The Blyk GPRS Portal is also down.

The situation in the afternoon and evening was that SMS were saying sent however I have since found out that they were not being received. I was quite annoyed as Blyk in no way made contact by email, sms or even on their home page about the problems. The call situation was fixed earlier tonight. I logged into the forum and found some big issues associated with the current problems.

I found out that people who had credit on their sim, had found out that their credit had been used up instead of their free messages and minutes. The Blyk helpline is still overwhelmed, and the forums are full of posts asking about the problems. So basically a lot of customers do not know what is going on and in regards to SMS are presuming that they are being sent. When they are not! Not good.

Currently SMS is still broken hopefully the sort this issue out ASAP.

In regards to the signal issues I mentioned about yesterday they emailed me back and asked for further details if it happens again.

Friday 8th February 2008

Well Blyk sms servers were down for about 24 hours, if Blyk was my main network would I think about switching… the answer is very simply yes. I could not risk having my main network that could go down at anytime. As Ewan said in his article the target audience of Blyk are entirely 100% dial tone intolerant, in the 7 years I have owned a mobile I have never experienced such massive issues.

However Blyk did send a sms to all affecting member, actually something I suggested on their support forum last night (did they read it or were they going do it anyway? Who knows?) I said it a few days ago and I will say it again: I have this feeling the ‘Big Chiefs’ are watching my account and my posts on the forum. I may be paranoid but Blyk appeared to make no public effort to tell customers what the problems were yet when Ewan emailed them he received the following reply.

From Jonathan, Sales Director at Blyk:

We recently had an incident that impacted some of our members and the issue was caused as a result of an NSN issue to which they have made the below statement:

‘Blyk and Nokia Siemens Networks have seamlessly worked in good collaboration and there have been several upgrades and expansions to the network causing no trouble whatsoever to Blyk members. This time, an unfortunate human factor came into the picture and a procedure we’ve gone trough several times, failed – causing this incident. We regret all of the trouble for the Blyk members. Now the failure has been corrected and the Blyk service works again as it should.”

Because it was an isolated incident we’re communicating this to the affected members by sms and are posting an update on our forum.

Well I can tell you this now there has been nothing on the forum! Hmm…

There is just one other thing I want to mention tonight, If I was in Blyk’s current situation, what would I do? Well the whole network works on people wanting free stuff, I would give them some free sms and minutes to compensate for the problems. Why? I hear you ask, they have already apologised — well quite simply, I am a poor student, a few extra minutes and texts would make me think Blyk actually cares about its members and are willing to go above and beyond what is expected.

One last point no brand messages over the last 2 days.

Saturday 9th February 2008
I received two messages from Blyk today one from STA [STA Travel] and another from some called ‘Beat Stevie’. The STA was a simple a SMS asking if I was sick of deadlines and essays and telling me that I can leave it all behind! The funny thing was I was doing a big project for university (I know you are thinking yeah right!) however it was very true! All STA supplied was their telephone number, having only come back from Berlin a few weeks ago I did not respond to the SMS!

The next was from someone called Beat Stevie, invited me to watch their latest clip. So of course I replied and I received a MMS, it was a video of a coffin being burnt with absinthe. This was very odd and a link to a YouTube mini site. I had a quick look and I really did not want to spend a long time looking to be honest. They seemed to film things and put them on the tube also they seemed to be on Channel 4 as well. In my honest opinion I have never heard of them before, and I found the advert very distasteful, I felt that there should have been a warning before the sent the MMS. It surprised me that Blyk wants to associate itself with this sort of content.

Sunday 10th February 2008
No brand messages today. I thought I would talk about the Blyk support forum as there is nothing else to report. The forum is open to all members and is moderated by the customer care team. I check it daily and there are two major issues that come up all the time.

Firstly people have trouble setting their phone up; I see post, after post, after post. I think Blyk needs to send more help with its SIM packs. For someone who has a keen interest in phones I have no trouble, however it seems the average Blyk user isn’t quite capable of understanding how to setup their handset. I think Blyk should compile a list of known problems and remedies and send it in an email or in the post to all new members. The other issue is that some phones simply do not work with Blyk, the most obvious example are windows mobile devices even though they are MMS compatible. I asked on the support forums why do Blyk produce a list of known phones that do not work instead of telling users that ‘all you need is an MMS phone’. The answer I was told was that they could not do that. WHY? Hopefully they Blyk chiefs are reading this blog: Surely if you have a list of compatible devices, it will mean people will not order a SIM if they don’t have a phone that works, and this will mean less hassle for the customer care team? And I will not have to read about in the forum on every other post!!

Number porting is a big problem. 5 days OFCOM says it should take! Well not if you are a Blyk member, more like three months. There are still people on the forum if have not had this sorted out. On behalf of these people, Blyk sort it out ASAP please.

To summarise, well… what a week for Blyk! But this clearly shows some big issues in the service Blyk provides and has identified some key problems.

If you have any questions do not hesitate to contact Ewan who will forward them onto me. I will try my best to get the answer.

That’s all from me this week!

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Thanks Ricky!

Setting aside the ball dropping by Nokia Siemens Networks last week, it is really interesting to read how Blyk are responding to their customers. Although there’s quite possibly a focus on Ricky since he’s BlykWatching for SMS Text News, I’m very encouraged by the apparent prompt response of the customer care team. It’s only through tracking down annoying signal glitches and forwarding to the network teams for resolution that some bugs can be ironed out. It’s encouraging to hear that customer services are apparently active on the forums too. Listening and responding is critical for this audience.

I’ve some absolutely stonking data that I got with Blyk’s permission highlighting just how effective their offering is — I’ll post on this shortly.