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Facebook

FACEBOOK IS DOWN

RUN FOR YOUR LIFE.

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Review Thoughts

John Lewis gives good customer service

Customer service is king. Everyone has experienced at least one nightmare situation where you have a problem with something you’ve bought, and the company you purchased it from couldn’t care less. They ignore you, try to palm you off, or give a half-arsed excuse of customer service while doing the absolute minimum to adhere to the basic legal rights of the consumer.

While I am greatly predisposed towards complaining on this website (and there is a lot to complain about), never let it be said that I don’t acknowledge good customer service where I find it, and I found it this week at John Lewis.

In November 2010 I bought a cheap electric heater from John Lewis. It worked capably well for two years, and then this happened:

It suddenly died and the plug socket set itself on fire. If you’re wondering this was a De’Longhi brand heater.

Anyway, I happened to still have the original box and receipt, and posted on John Lewis’ Facebook to explain the problem. They replied pretty fast and asked me to email their customer services. Their customer services replied to me promptly to explain my email had been sent to my local branch. My local branch then emailed me to say they had my email, and would reply to me again shortly. They then emailed me again to ask for my phone number. I gave it to them and they rang me within the next couple of hours to ask me to bring the broken heater into the local store.

The next day I did so. They took one look at it and said they’d be sending it back to the manufacturer for examination and an explanation. In the meantime they offered me a free replacement of any heater in my local store’s range. I was conscious that I’d only spent £20 on the original heater, and not wanting to take too much advantage of them I picked a mid-range model that was £35. They rang this through the till (at no cost to me), and gave me a receipt and warranty for my new heater.

They then rang me 2 days later to inform me that the old heater had been sent back to the manufacturer and they’d let me know as soon as they heard back.

Now, obviously a heater spontaneously setting itself on fire is something of a safety hazard. John Lewis had good cause to worry that I might go into their store, guns blazing and full of righteous anger. Unusually in this situation I was vaguely aware that John Lewis were supposed to be quite good at customer service, but I’d never experienced it myself. I was content to sit and wait to see what they’d do after I reported the problem.

From start to finish my broken heater was replaced and sent to tbe manufacturer within 3 days. Pretty good work.

De’Longhi is another matter, and I will update this post as soon as I hear from them. Some form of compensation would seem to be in order, but insofar as John Lewis goes, I’m not sure what more I could have expected of them. Decent customer service really makes a change, although I’m just glad I’d kept my receipt!

One final note: I bought my heater on the 29th November 2010. It decided to melt down on 29th November 2012. 2 years TO THE DAY after I bought it. Freaky.

 

Categories
Facebook

WoW!! I Cannot believe that you can now see who is been stalking at your profile for real! SCAM

Unsurprisingly, and as usual, this is another Facebook scam. If you’re a retarded moron that actually believes ANY app can tell you who has viewed your profile, allow me to tell you absolutely categorically that this is impossible. Even with an API access token with full privileges to your account, no such information exists that an application could query.

It draws you in, because you’re stupid, and think that just because an application advertises a ‘feature’, it must be true. It’s not true. This claim is never true. If you actually install this piece of shit, it just spams the same link to all of your friends, and tries to get you to fill in dodgy surveys in order to ‘unlock’ the real information. The real information doesn’t exist. Even if it does give you a list of ‘friends’ who have allegedly seen your profile, the information is forged. Meanwhile you’ve spammed your entire account, probably managed to get your computer infected with some kind of malware, and reaffirmed to the rest of the world that you shouldn’t be trusted with a computer.

To reiterate: It’s fake. It’s always been fake. It’ll always be fake.

Categories
Facebook

New Facebook ‘Pages Feed’ is bad news for business.

Facebook have now launched the new ‘Pages feed’, allegedly as a response from businesses who were unhappy that not all of their pages posts were appearing on their fan’s news feeds. Facebook uses a complex EdgeRanking algorithm to determine which page posts are relevent, and when to display them to users. Historically only a percentage of posts get displayed due to the sheer number of pages the average user ‘Likes’. To display them all, at all times, would completely fill user’s news feed on a daily basis. In that sense, I’m sort of on Facebook’s side in wanting some method to filter them down.

Critics have accused Facebook of profiteering on this practice, claiming that it is compelling businesses to pay to promote their posts in order to ensure they’re seen by fans. As posts are typically only seen by 20-30% of a page’s fanbase, there is some merit to this argument.

And so we have Facebook’s new ‘Pages Feed’, which shows all posts by all pages that you’re a fan of. Great! Except it’s not great. The knock-on effect is that even fewer posts from pages are now being seen on the regular News Feed. By my estimate, my page posts are now only seen by 10-15% of fans. Not surpringly, Facebook users aren’t particularly motivated to click on a seperate feed in the sure knowledge that a majority of posts will be promotions or basic spam. So rather being being good for business and page owners, this is actually bad. Very bad.

The pressure is now on businesses to promote all of their posts if they want any significant number of their fans to see them. In my initial tests I need to promote posts for at least $5 or $10 to ensure they’re seen by as many users as they previously used to for free.

Yes, Facebook still need to implement monetisation methods to become truly profitable, but we’re not so stupid that we’re going to be sold a new ‘feature’ as a benefit when it’s actually quite the opposite.

Categories
Facebook Thoughts

[Bizarre] At 13, she publically did this EVERY day! How obscene!!

This is another standard Facebook spam like this one that implores you to click on a link to find out the shocking details of a story that doesn’t exist. Do the world a favour and don’t click on it, or share it or anything.

Other variations:

  • [DISTRESSING] At 16, she did THIS in public high school, EVERY day! How foolish!.
  • At 15, she did that in public high school every day! how terrible!!

Seems that fake girls will do anything at any age! :oP