Why i don't despise Orange
I have been an orange customer for probably 6 or 7 years on pay as you go or more recently as a contracted customer. In this time i have had countless problems with my phone, my bills, my tariffs, my indegestion etc and yes, these problems are irritating.Now it may seem at this point that i am whinging. Not so. For me, these problems were all resolved with a minimum of fuss, and generally with a good natured orange customer service representative. Just the other week i was going through some issues and i was speaking to a great girl who not only sorted out everything quickly and easily but also chatted about university, what i was up to that day, what she’d been up to etc. It was great. I admit that to get through to her in the first place i had to wait on hold hearing the ‘your call is important to us’ nonsense for about 10 minutes, but to recieve such good service at the end made the wait worthwile.
Now this post is really a rebuttal to Mr. Nate Lanxon’s complaints about Orange on his blog here: http://www.lanxon.co.uk/index.php/2008/06/16/why-i-despise-orange/ and i accept that for some, Orange’s service is not always up to scratch. For example, he (Nate) mentions the irritating aspect of being put through to foreign call centres. I believe that this happens when orange’s british call centres close after 6pm, so to other customers: phone before that time. Having said that, i was put through to their indian centre to resolve broadband issues and was able to totaly reconfigure my internet connection over the phone.
My contract itself is incredibly good, offering me unlimited texts, 800 minutes and a free top of the line phone for only £25 a month. And i believe that this displays some of the good service that orange can (but does not always) deliver. In fact, when originaly phoning to find out the date of when i was able to upgrade my handset, my (incredibly friendly) customer service guy not only offered me an upgrade there and then, but noticed i sometimes go over my text limit and so upped me to an unlimited amount, knocked my minutes up to 800 and knocked £5 off my original bill.
I am in agreeance (yes, its a word) with Nate that Orange’s customer service is lacking in quantity (i.e. amount of staff employed), but for the most part, i think they do a very good job. They recognise long term customers and treat them to deals and upgrades that keep the customers returning. They will have lost a valuable customer if Nate decides to switch to a competing company but this is a casualty of the ever changing mobile market, a market which is very much a perpetual battlefield in which there will always be heavy losses and many gains on all sides. There will also be those that should be nuked into the ground (im looking at you, vodafone).
I shall be staying with Orange.
