Losing customers, one flash site at a time

After about 5 years of service (or more?), my old D-Link 824-VUP router finally bit the dust. I really liked that router, its feature set and the hassle free operation. Electronics die from time to time, so I was all set up to buy another D-Link thingie to replace it.

Having my mind set on D-Link, I headed over to their website to check out what are the names and specifications of their current model lineup. I was greeted with a fully flashed web site which was mostly non-functional under Firefox and Linux. Links (or what I thought would be links) don't register the click, or nothing happens when clicked. Their flash product selector failed to work, so my only option was to choose a "Show All" and then imagine based just on product code under miniscule pictures what's what. It was impossible to do a side-by-side comparison of the specs and features of their current lineup and router models.

The D-Link website used to be a simple, straightforward and useful resource for those looking to get familiar with their product line. Though they didn't have a side-by-side compare feature, it was easy to open the specs for different models in different tabs and then quickly compare them thanks to the similar table-based rendering. No such luck this time - they went all the way wizzbang with that feature too, opening it up in a small floating div that has to be scrolled a whole bunch to get to look at its entire contents.

My documentation visit to D-Link's website was a very frustrating experience overall. I have no idea what their current product line is capable of, they failed to deliver that information to me. So I went ahead and bought a Linksys replacement.

While I tend to prefer websites that don't force me to load up megs and megs of flash presentations, I don't care much about flash's presence or absence as long as the website delivers the information it was put there to deliver. Linksys' website is also full of flash, but it is functional and you get to the information fast. D-Link's is full of FAIL all over. They pay to have a web presence, they pay to have all that flash animation wizzbang crap produced, and they fail at delivering product information to their customers.

Way to go, D-Link! It looks like you hired some real marketing geniuses that know it is way more important to have a fixed size swooshing flash applet as the entire website than actually concentrating on having easily accessible, indexable and straightforward information delivered. A search for your company's product code yields first links to Amazon and other merchants instead of your own product description page as a result of burying that page deep in flash. Way to go!

Google Sync for Mobile Phones

So Google announced support for kind of a partial ActiveSync for Windows mobile phones. Excited to have free access to a contact and calendar backup and sync service, I set ou to try it out. The Google Sync does not support email push, but in most cases I am more concerned about haveing a good and reliable backup for my calendar and contacts than having email show up on my mobile device the second it is received on the server side.

Well, the experiemtnwas a total failure for me. I don't know why, but when I had my Tilt set up to sync with a Zimbra server (which pushed email in addition to syncing contacts and calendar, btw) - the impact on battery life was something I could live with. With Google Sync, it drained my phone battery in just 5 short hours.

So naturally, I decided to back out of of Google Sync and unpair my mobile phone from the Google ActiveSync service. My Contact list is now blank, I have lost all Calendar entries, and online, when I click on Contacts in my Gmail account I get a "403 Forbidden" error. Same goes for when I am trying to access my online Calendar. This has all been full of FAIL so far.

Funny letter from Barclays Bank

When I relocated to the Northeast I was confronted by the reality of having only US Airways as a carrier that can get me out into the world from the two airports closest to me. So I got a US Airways Dividend Miles card from Barclays (which at the time was the only game in town if one wanted to accumulate some miles on a US Airways frequent flyer account). However, pretty much all the paper and email communications I was receiving from Barclays were a little off, in a sludgy sleaziness kind of way. Something was off, the guys hired by Barclays to write those things suffered from serious brain damage caused by too much corporate speak.

That, coupled with the very poor functionality of Barclays' card member web site and a couple of customer no-service calls, made me seriously reluctant to continue using this card. So when US Airways introduced a new Dividend Miles card from Bank of America I jumped on it and never looked back at the card from Barclays. Today I received in the mail the ultimate proof that Barclays ranks at the top sleazy bank I ever had to deal with. See if you can spot the corporate speak:

"In a recent review of your account, we noticed that you have not used your US Airways Dividend Miles Mastercard account for a long period of time. To help you better manage your credit accounts, we have closed your account. Thank you for allowing us the opportunity to serve you."

In this day and age it seems that most customers put a value on honest communication from their financial institutions, as they have grown weary of the corporate double speak. Somehow somebody forgot to tell the brass at Barclays about that. There are many reasons to close an inactive credit card account, but "to help you better manage your credit accounts" ain't one of those reasons by a long shot.

A bank in trouble, whose management might have a little brain left, might consider asking questions like "hey, why aren't you using your card? We'd like to collect the transactions fees, how can we make that card more appealing?". Alas, Barclays remained true to their first impression they gave me. Good riddance!

First Post!

Today was my last day at rPath, which prompted my need to open up this work-independent blog to supplement/take over the stuff I have been posting on rPath's corporate blogging engine.