This never gets old…

Has the process of developing and delivering software really changed?

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The long story about BT (British Telecom) customer service

I’ve been with BT (British Telecom) for years.  Eight years in fact.  And while most people tell me they a). are incompetent (google also has some interesting stories) and b). essentially cost 2x everyone else, my internet service has actually been “up” for nearly eight of those years (that I can tell) so I’ve been (perhaps stupidly) happy to pay a premium.  While there have been occasions when things have gone horribly wrong (like the last time they erroneously cancelled an order and disconnected me) I think the final straw has arrived.

[NOTE: I've never in my life - that I can remember - written a letter of complaint to or about company.  Sure I may bitch a little, but that's about it.  Just want to put this all in context  It's taken a lot of crap from BT to get me to this stage]

Let me explain.  Apparently sometime in June, while I was away on vacation and my house was completely empty, someone called BT and told them I was “moving”.  From what I can tell and they can tell me, all that the person had to provide was my phone number and address (which I guess is available on some system somewhere and probably on the Internet), then suddenly, a few weeks later all my phone lines and broadband/internet access was cancelled.  No notice.  No SMS.  No emails.  No letters. No correspondence of any kind. Just disconnected.

While immensely frustrating (given the effort it sometimes take to get connections), the fact that it seems anyone can basically disconnect anyone’s BT phone in the UK without identification, confirmation or correspondence is frightening. Worse, for those using Sky, Virgin et al that also depend on BT landlines, they too can be disconnected, almost overnight.

Obviously there’s something wrong with the process for disconnecting and/or moving house, and sure, mistakes do happen, but the customer service (until I found someone in the UK that took the time to look into it thoroughly) was horrible. Not just horrible, humiliatingly disgusting.

After 4 hours on the phone (international calls in the middle of the night because I was in Australia), going through a variety of call centers (mostly in non-English speaking countries), they successfully determined that it was in fact all my fault, the reasons being.

1. The account was not paid – even though it was on “direct payment from my bank account”.  Pretty weird as they eventually had to admit that last paper and internet statement from the previous 10 days showed £0.00 balance owing (and the account has never been negative!)

2. It was definitely me who told them that I wanted to move – but then they couldn’t confirm my new address to me… funny since I apparently requested it!

3. My internet connection and phone was actually fine – even though when I/they called my phone it said it was disconnected!

4. I’d given my account number and/or permission for someone to cancel my account – errr. no.

5. My bank had made a mistake. Err… no again.

In short… there was no coherent story as to what happened and no one could tell me why.  The stories (and excuses) actually seemed to get more and more convoluted with each new person I spoke with – and more frustrating. Ultimately it soon became clear that they themselves where confused as well.

Lastly I was told it was because of “other”, and no one knew what “other” meant as a reason for disconnection.

The Proposed Solution: Sign up for another 18 month contract, with a new phone number (as that is their current sales deal) – “it could take a few weeks to reconnect” – and I had to pay reconnection charges. Once that was reconnected they could then reconnect my internet “in a few weeks/10 working days”.  Right… someone, somewhere screwed up and I have to pay… errr… no way.

What amused me the most was that while “every phone conversation was recorded”, when I asked them to compare my voice to the caller that requested my disconnection their response was “it is going to take a while”. How long was a while?  Well… “several months”.  Of course “I could wait if I liked, or have a new connection/contract started immediately”.

After being disconnected three times and starting the conversation from scratch with each of the 8 or so people I talked with, I finally managed to find someone in the UK that could get things reconnected in a few days – probably won’t have the same phone number, but I could be reconnected.

To my friends that have told me time and time again that have switched from BT… I now completely agree with you – the BT customer service was simply beyond belief (until I found that one person… and spent over a $100 on phone calls).

If it was only possible to use a non-BT provider where I live (without also requiring a BT account), I too would switch.

[update: 10th July] After another hour on the phone, three separate calls and being hung up on twice, it looks to be finally resolved.  Hopefully I’ll have a new phone number (yes… my old one is gone), on a new contract (I have to work out compensation for this in a separate process) in two may be three working days.  They waived my reconnection fee (how nice of them).

Of course I had to go through the whole process of explaining once again that the disconnection was made in error, that my account was completely in order (Another system said I owed £0.00 and needed to pay that amount immediately before they could continue to do anything) and that I wasn’t moving house.  And… although it took two people three attempts to make the new connection order, it should be all good now.

It seems the secret was to “keep trying” until I could find someone that could understand English, comprehend what had happened and had the authority to get things fixed.  Shame it took nearly 6 hours and 11 people.  Being hung up on twice by off-shore call centers was pretty unfriendly and very annoying, but it was worth it.  For some reason when I now call I only get UK-based operators.

Not a great way to end a holiday.

[update: 14th July] Awesome! My home line now works.  Amazing!  New phone number of course (my old one is gone forever – now to notify everyone ), but at least I have a phone that works now.  Unfortunately my Internet Connection doesn’t work.  Doh.  They said it would, but again, that was another department. So… another 45 minutes on the phone.  Oops… yet another mistake!  Apparently it “has to be a new connection – could take 5 days”.  Damn it… “but because of the errors, it should on tomorrow”.

[update 15th July] No Internet Connection  I’ll wait until tomorrow.  No need to work at home today anyway.

[update 16th July] Awesome! Internet is back.  Now to undo all of the new contracts I had to say “yes to” in order to get things running again.  No choice but to go through the official complains procedure.  Apparently this may take 12 weeks.

[update 23rd July] Received final bill for my previous phone number.  £14 credit!  I guess the “story” that my account was out of order was incorrect!

London Coherence SIG: Winter Edition: January 22nd 2009

[Updated] We’ve finalized the next Coherence SIG in London.  It’s to occur on the 22nd of January, at the Oracle Offices, 1 South Place, 6th Floor, between 2:00pm and 6:00pm. 

Registration is available here.  To register, simply click on Book Event, log in and the rest is easy.  BTW: If you haven’t previously registered, it’s easy and free!

Here’s the agenda.

1. JRockit Real Time, Mission Control and Coherence.
This presentation will provide a technical overview of JRockit, the monitoring, management and diagnostic solution called Mission Control followed by a discussion concerning the impacts on application performance and scalability – especially around Coherence.  This is a must see for anyone that is interested in the latest JVM technologies and memory management, including deterministic garbage collection.

2. Coherence 3.5: A Sneak Preview
The Coherence 3.5 release is only a matter of months away.  In this presentation we’ll dive into some of the core improvements and new features. 

3. Coherence Incubator Update
A lot has happened in the Coherence Incubator since it release.  In this presentation we’ll dive into some of the improvements and discuss the roadmap.  If you want to influence the roadmap, this is a great time to provide feedback.

4. Coherence Push Replication: WAN Patterns Revisited
In this presentation we’ll review the Push Replication Pattern, what’s new and the 10 common WAN application architectures.  A must for anyone wanting to know “how to do WAN”.

This time we have the “larger room”, but given last SIG attendence, register early so we don’t turn anyone away!

BTW: If you have colleagues in New York, perhaps they’d be interested in attending the New York Coherence SIG.

How (not?) to keep a small company afloat in tough times…

Nearly ten years ago I started a company in Australia with a group of like-minded innovative guys in pursuit of success and ultimately freedom.  We raised a bunch of VC money (over a million) and cranked out some super high-quality code.  We shipped several releases – on CD at the time – and captured about 10% of the market.  Then “dot com” hit.  We struggled.  We died.  However, it wasn’t that “dot com” killed us.  No.  We never blamed it.  It was our inability to think strategically in the market place and to keep delivering products that people highly valued and would ultimately hand over “their hard earned cash” for in tough times. While our product was good, we realized it wasn’t something that people “really needed” and it was something they could live without during such times. There were a lot of products in the market like this. Almost all of them died. Similar things are happening in the current global recession.

We prolonged our existence for a long time, longer than we expected.  It was painful, often very painful. Friendships and relationships were damaged.  Some completely destroyed.  But a lot of lessons where learnt. Some I’m proud of and some I’m not.  There were also some ideas that were simply stupid. I’m thankful we never implemented or attempted those. 

Here’s my top 18 things to do to survive in tough times.

1. Cut costs.   It’s all about being ruthless.  If you can’t quantify the contribution that something brings to the company, then it must go.  We cut back on a lot of things.  Company lunches, coffee, parking, all kinds of things.  We also reduced holidays, especially for ourselves (and thus holiday pay).  

2. Cut staff.  This is especially difficult in a small company when everyone knows everyone else – ie: it’s family, but this has to be done.  We cut staff.  Generally Last-In-First-Out.  I can still remember the first time I sacked someone – someone that was very good at their job and really didn’t deserve to go.  But we “let them go”.

3. Contract out existing staff.  If you can’t cut staff, perhaps they are better put to work doing something else to bring in cash.  It’s all about cashflow, so bringing in more is a good thing.  Both myself and a colleague started contracting for another company while running our own. Of course our VC “suggested” this and made it “very compelling”. By mere coincidence the “other company” was also being funded by the same VC, but it kept us going.  Working multiple high-pressure jobs ain’t easy though.

4. Work longer hours.  If you cut staff inevitably you still need to pick up some additional work.  We mainly worked 6 days a week and every night.  For me the day off involved sleeping – even when visiting friends and family I spent a lot of time crashed out on the couch. I’d avoid driving so I could sleep.  Ultimately we’d roaster people to work weekends etc.

5. Increase prices.  Seems weird but we found that after testing the market we could sell less but at a higher-price point.  Less customers meant less support (not that we had much).  We almost doubled our price.

6. Charge for support.  We didn’t do this, but when we looked at things it seemed more profitable to ship a slightly worse quality product, with more regular updates, then have a higher license. Ultimately we decided that we didn’t want to build a company based on a support model.  We had a great reputation for quality and customer service.  So this was never a real option.

7. Open source it.  We didn’t do this, but it followed on from our conversations about #6.  Perhaps we could possibly extract more money from support than actually selling the product.  In fact, giving it away, complete with the source was a viable option.  What we eventually did was increase the period people could use the product in “trails”. ie: to get them hooked, and then send them an invoice.  People seem to pay invoices when they arrived.  During the “trail” period everything was branded with “trail”.  For people to get rid of the “trial” they need to pay.  This is what I like to call the “pay us to take the pain away” model.

8. Don’t pay suppliers (immediately).  Yup.  It’s a simple process and not something I personally liked doing.  We’d simply make sure we’d leave it to the last minute to pay suppliers.  As our VC helped us “understand”, we always stretched invoice payments to 90 days.  This way we could extend cash flow and effectively use our suppliers as short-term creditors.  It destroys supplier relationships pretty quickly, but can give you room to breath – or mean you can meet the next months salary payments.

9. Avoid paying suppliers full value or a previously negotiated value.  Another VC “inspired” cash flow management technique.  Call up suppliers and negotiate after the invoice has been received or when a payment is due.  Again, not something any of us would like to do, but still, something that extended cash flow.  eg: We’d say, instead of paying $30k for some service, we’ll pay $15k, or installments of $2k for 10 months.  Again it was all about cash flow and ultimately paying staff salaries.

10. Selling the IP. Much harder to do than we thought, but licensing our IP to another company seemed like a good idea at the time.  The challenge was however finding a buyer.

11. Selling the company.  Following on from #10, trying to package ourselves up as a going concern.We’d market the crap out of ourselves, get as many “hits” as possible, ensure we were #1 on all search engines and then show a potential buyer how good we were.  Again, the challenge was finding a buyer that believed this.  Obviously it doesn’t work… even today.

12. Selling parts of the company.  Much like #11, but instead attempting to find another VC to help out.  Of course, the next round meant you’d be “taken to the cleaners” on valuation and end up owning less and less of the company you founded.  We looked at it and said, no chance.  We’d end up with 1%.

13. Getting a line of credit.  If #12 fails, often a line of credit is provided as an alternative.  This is a high risk approach and usually a “last ditch effort”.  Essentially it means that the creditors become first in line to seize assets should you not meet a repayment.  The big challenge here was finding an asset that a creditor would accept as collateral.  Most creditors wanted our houses.

14. Reduce salaries. Not something that’s easy to do, but it can help out.  We reduced our salaries, and some months did not take any payment.

15. Forget about bonuses.  Pretty obviously really.  No cash bonuses.  Do anything else to reward and provide recognition, accept use cash. We actually didn’t give bonuses anyway, so unfortunately it wasn’t an option.

16. Loan the company money.  Yup.  We became creditors of the company, but at the bottom of the stack. I personally borrowed money to pay company salaries, while at the same time not taking a salary.  The founders too turns doing this for months.

17. Find someone to sue.  Yup.  This had crossed our minds, but we didn’t do it.  Ultimately this is a game of chance.  What is the chance that we could sue someone and win?  We had earlier discovered someone cracking and on selling our licenses overseas.  We simply had to consider, “was there greater reward in investing our time and resources in suing them and being paid” rather than building a great company?  Our answer was no. Of course in the past few years we’ve seen this model in the industry a few times. Companies can get desperate when sales are dwindling and they look for someone to sue, for any reason. It’s a game of chance.  Anyone can be sued.  Previous customers, competitors.  Anyone, for any reason. Perhaps they’ll want to avoid court, and simply pay up.  ie: it generates cash flow.

18. Under no circumstances tell the public how bad things are. Yup.  We carried a brave face for a long time.  In front of our staff, family, friends and partners.  It wasn’t easy, but we did.  Something I’m not proud of, but we lived the “success lie” for many months.

Ultimately for me one day I just woke up, looked in the mirror and was honest with myself.  I asked the question “Are we trading insolvent?”.  Why did this bother me?  Simple really.  Knowingly trading insolvent is a “go to jail” offense in Australia.  Another way to think of it is “am I flogging a dead horse”.

Importantly I also learnt it’s not a question you should generally table in a board meeting.  Wow… was that an interesting meeting.  But after my lawyers helped out, things calmed down.  A few months later, the company was wound up, people were paid what ever could be salvaged and we went our separate ways.

While the company failed, these lessons kept us alive for longer than imagined. It’s clear that these approaches are now being used in the current crisis.

Hello World

Welcome to my new blog and public inner-monolog.  I hope you find the content thought provoking and/or useful.