If you’ve been following me on Twitter then you’ll have seen my recent frustration at the delays in shipping a pre-ordered N900, but this post isn’t about that. This post is about the Online Store itself… What better place could there be to buy a new Nokia handset?
Quite a few, it appears (for the moment - see below).
A picture paints a thousand words… and it seems a shipping notification tells a fair few too:
The shipping note from the Nokia Online Store begins...
Yes, 12 days after my original order an email asked me to call to ‘confirm my order’. It had:
been quite some time since you placed your order with us
Strange… it was less than 2 weeks (a credit-card related rule, it later transpired…), but sadly the only pre-order update I was to receive during this process.
I e-mailed instead of calling (mostly) on principle (this was an online order), but also because I was thousands of miles away on holiday and dislike roaming charges. Being ignored for a week taught me a lesson… so I rang. But I couldn’t confirm the order (they’d made a mistake in the original listing). It couldn’t be fixed, so I had to re-order…
Great - a long call for me and a lost affiliate payment for the site I clicked through.
But it was bottom of the shipping notification that really made me wonder…
...but this is my favourite bit. There's almost no more space for any more wrongness.
The tracking link is broken, the telephone number is… well it’s not a telephone number and the customer service e-mail address doesn’t work. Is this really the way a multi-billion dollar company should communicate with its customers? …and this after a month’s delay from the promised shipping date without any updates, explanations or revised estimates.
The only good news in this story was a call from Andrew Connell, Nokia’s soon-to-be VP Online Sales & Care Product Sales. He acknowledged the problem and agreed to investigate, explaining that a number of changes were being made to the store at present which might have caused this ‘absolutely unacceptable’ communication. Significant improvements were underway, he said, to bring the store up to the standard of the best online retailers and to give particular recognition to Nokia’s biggest fans such as those who pre-ordered devices…. there’ll be news in the new year.
This doesn’t excuse the current poor performance, but Nokia are definitely listening and thinking big. Roll on 2010…