Response times in service.

[Joeboy]

SWMBO and myself bought a tidy wee 55" TV for the Turkish house last week. Response time from purchase to fitting was 5 hours. I then bought into a 12m/bit Internet contract to wake the smart TV up today. Under two hour response time from query to fitting. The contract is about £9 a month.

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That'll do, not going to bang on but that's pretty much the standard here....
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[Oldgreybeard]

SWMBO and myself bought a tidy wee 55" TV for the Turkish house last week. Response time from purchase to fitting was 5 hours. I then bought into a 12m/bit Internet contract to wake the smart TV up today. Under two hour response time from query to fitting. The contract is about £9 a month.

That'll do, not going to bang on but that's pretty much the standard here....

Does make you wonder why customer service in the UK is pretty universally dire. The only time in recent memory that I can recall getting very good service was from a company that had given unbelievably poor service a few years earlier, and that was SSE. They really did pull out all the stops to both fit a smart meter quickly, turned up at the exact time they would, did a neat job and when the thing wouldn't work they came out and tried changing several things before giving up and fitting a new E7 meter.

As for the £9 contract, just had an email from Plusnet telling me that our broadband and phone (although calling it broadband is a bit of a stretch) will go up from from £28.57 to £41.75 per month in November. They claim average broadband speeds using their service of 36Mb/s. Fastest I've ever seen on a speed test has been about 12Mb/s down, 4Mb/s up. Most of the time it's around 9Mb/s down, 3Mb/s up. That's faster than it used to be when were were on ADSL (we're now on FTTC VDSL). In the ADSL days we were lucky to get 4Mb/s download speed.

Why do you think Turkey has so much better services like this?

[Joeboy]

SWMBO and myself bought a tidy wee 55" TV for the Turkish house last week. Response time from purchase to fitting was 5 hours. I then bought into a 12m/bit Internet contract to wake the smart TV up today. Under two hour response time from query to fitting. The contract is about £9 a month.

That'll do, not going to bang on but that's pretty much the standard here....

Does make you wonder why customer service in the UK is pretty universally dire. The only time in recent memory that I can recall getting very good service was from a company that had given unbelievably poor service a few years earlier, and that was SSE. They really did pull out all the stops to both fit a smart meter quickly, turned up at the exact time they would, did a neat job and when the thing wouldn't work they came out and tried changing several things before giving up and fitting a new E7 meter.

As for the £9 contract, just had an email from Plusnet telling me that our broadband and phone (although calling it broadband is a bit of a stretch) will go up from from £28.57 to £41.75 per month in November. They claim average broadband speeds using their service of 36Mb/s. Fastest I've ever seen on a speed test has been about 12Mb/s down, 4Mb/s up. Most of the time it's around 9Mb/s down, 3Mb/s up. That's faster than it used to be when were were on ADSL (we're now on FTTC VDSL). In the ADSL days we were lucky to get 4Mb/s download speed.

Why do you think Turkey has so much better services like this?

The UK has been in decline for such a long time. 80 years maybe? Here in the near East they are in a growth phase on a long comparative timeline. The Turks are game to make money and don't have that 'the state will catch me' attitude. That's the least of my thoughts on it. Would bore you banging on... off out for a pint and a pie then up to Aiyden for a new visual experience tomorrow.

As an aside, a remarkable 77% soc in the stack at the end of today's sun.

[Oldgreybeard]

So, does it just come down to businesses in Turkey being keen to provide good service as part and parcel of their competitive offering, I wonder?

I have wondered if part of the UK's general problem with service industries is that there is nothing much to discriminate one from another. Many, probably the majority, have poor customer service standards, and few, if any, seem interested in improving. A good example of this would be my efforts over recent weeks in trying to pin down electricity tariffs. No suppliers I've tried to contact have actually managed to answer my basic questions about pricing and whether or not I could switch to them. Most either failed to respond at all, or if they did respond they weren't able to provide an answer to one or other of my two key questions.

Be interesting to understand the reasons for the difference, as the UK has plenty of businesses supposedly competing with each other, and yet very few of them seem to believe that customer service may be a key factor in attracting new customers.

It reminds me of a small garage near us. They aren't that cheap, but they are stacked out with work for weeks ahead, as they bend over backwards to provide good service. They don't engage in any of the usual social media guff, surveys about how well they are doing, etc. They don't even have a website, unless you already know of them then you most probably aren't going to find them. When we got an EV I was reluctant to trek miles to get it serviced, so popped in to this local garage and asked if they could service it.

I got an honest reply, which was that they had never seen an EV before, but that they would send one of their technicians on an EV course and get back to me. They kept their word, and a couple of weeks later called me to say that they now had an EV trained technician and would be happy to service our car. What's more, they offered me a discount for being their first EV customer and invited me to stay and watch the service (place was crowded, seems everyone there wanted a close look at an EV). I've since taken the car back there for another service (unfortunately at their normal rates) and had just the same cracking service.

The contrast with main dealers that I've dealt with before was stark. All the main dealers I've ever dealt with seemed out to charge as much as possible for the least amount of work.

[Joeboy]

Well, that is astonishing, drove up to the eyeclinic this morning. Had an early lunch, into clinic for midday. Prepped, operated on and back in my room by 13.30, feeling great! My view from room.

[Bugtownboy]

How long do you stay in Joe ?

[Joeboy]

How long do you stay in Joe ?

Overnight, a quick check tomorrow morning at 9am then I'm outta here. It has been a very simple process for such a miracle result.

[Bugtownboy]

Excellent - hope everything as good as the last procedure. Has Mrs JB got another eye to be done or was it just you ?

DS over Christmas isn’t it ?

[Joeboy]

Excellent - hope everything as good as the last procedure. Has Mrs JB got another eye to be done or was it just you ?

DS over Christmas isn’t it ?

SWMBO is standing by until Spring for eye 2, her choice as current eye is still bedfing in. Dec is for No1 son to see if he is within parameters for lens replacement. Had a quick look out of eye while a dressing being changed and it's great.
Tomorrow begins the improvement process which can last 6 months. I would advise anyone with poor eyes to give this some thought. Panoptix trifocals these are.
https://www.google.com/search?q=aiyden+ ... IgAQ%3D%3D

[AE-NMidlands]

My query about exceptional service or response times (compared with here) is whether it is based on an unregulated economy. Like the gig economy here, people are forced to respond instantly regardless of personal circumstances and yet have no security. I also suspect that where prices look exceptionally low it is because there is no tax funding proper (western-European style) infrastructure like healthcare or welfare state provision, and competition/one-man bands means no real investments in pensions etc. either
I held off saying this until now, but the Turkish coalmine explosion sort of exemplifies it:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... nderground

There have been a number of high-profile mining disasters in recent memory, drawing questions about whether the state has done enough to protect workers in a dangerous industry.

The head of one Turkish mining union told the local Cumhuriyet news outlet that increasing safety measures after disasters was insufficient. “The important thing is to value people while they are alive,” he said, referencing two major mining disasters in Turkey in 2014. “There are mines all over the world, but these disasters always occur in mines in Turkey,” he said.

A prolonged fire inside a mine in the town of Soma in western Turkey in 2014 caused the worst mining disaster in the country’s history, where 301 miners died from carbon monoxide poisoning and at least 162 others were injured.
That incident drew widespread public outrage, amid questions from families and observers about what they said was insufficient government oversight and lack of safety precautions at the facility.
“Prosecutors found that the mine company had been informed of but apparently ignored clear warning signs of dangerous gas [firedamp] levels and rising heat in the mine, all of which contributed to the deaths,” said Human Rights Watch. Prosecutors later said a second deadly mining incident in 2014 that killed 18 people was preventable.

Which reminds me, we lost Daw Mill colliery here due to an underground fire when HSE had apparently been warning of the risk for months but been ignored by the owners who thought it was unnecessary over-regulation...