You know, it’s a simple enough question -
“Why are the downloads from my Mobilcast/Melodeo application [provided by Three] of such low quality?”.
Mobilcast/Melodeo never reply anyway, so I emailed three.
The phone call you hear below is unedited – the third such phone call regarding this, even after I emailed customer services stating the problem and saying “please don’t ring me about this, just reply”.
I’m sure everyone will sympathise when I say that I find Indian call centres to be possibly one of the most unpleasant and frustrating things to deal with these days, and so I have managed to rid myself of all banks and companies which use them (explaining why I’m leaving too) except the damn contract with three (“please wait some moments [25 minutes] which I check the informations on these details and then
tell you to use the reset function of your phone even though a key is physically broken”).
Anyhoo…I started recording about 15 minutes after she first rang, and before my dinner had finished cooking. So, you’ll hear some cutlery action in the background. I kid you not, the whole phone call was as slow and unhelpful as this….and yes, she really does tell me to take the battery out while talking to her, and that rebooting the phone will improve the download bitrate/audio quality of podcasts…
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Have you had a worse call? It got me thinking – there is excellent wind-up potential here! Find some words they don’t know (“I have a problem with the zeotrope wangling functionality of my Nokia Discombobulator”) and see if you can make it amusing, and how much of their time you can waste. Them drop me an email with the file and I’ll add it here!
UPDATE! I had a reply from Melodeo shortly after posting this blog:
Jonathan,
I sincerely apologize for not getting back to you sooner.
I was alerted by your digitaltoast post. Thanks for not bashing us. We are a very small company — and I will be honest with you…
Mobilcast does not get the attention that it used to. We have been putting all our energy on our newest product, nuTsie.
You should check it out: www.nuTsie.com
As for your questions:
1) podcast and sync’ing – Looked like there was an issue with Pat Condell’s Godless Comedy — it was stuck in the trans coding phase. I have resolved this.
2) poor audio quality – This is carrier/connectivity specific — not much I can do here, I read your blog post about your experiences with Three customer service.
3) poor search results on mobile – I have let head of engineering know about this – I will continue to let this be known
4) downloader on mobile – same as #3. As this is a product feature, I will continue to harp about it.
Thank you very much for your patience, and I apologize greatly for the delay.
Good on them for answering…at last! And I believe them when they say that the audio quality is down to Three.
I lost my phone and I have been on the phone with three for over an hour to tell them it is lost and unsurprisingly….. I never managed to speak to their regular customer service person in India …. I was just on the phone for over an hour listening to their voicemail attendant and same idiotic songs played over and over again!!! …. Later, I tried again and this time surprisingly I got through after half and hour and I was then told that the thief who stole my phone had already made some premium rate calls of a £100 in the meantime and so I will need to pay for this…. This was what I was trying to prevent by calling the idiotic call personnel in the first place!!! … If they had picked up the phone, this could have been prevented!!!…. 3 is really a poor quality service which tries to cut costs and quality by out-sourcing and poor service etc…. If u want to be more honest about 3 any further, then I would have to start using vulgarities!