Compensation for Xtra Customers?

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Posted Thu 23 August 2007 @ 8:05 a.m. by Sarah Putt

I’m off to the media launch of Yahoo!Xtra Bubble today to find out whether all the fuss caused by the weekend upgrade to Xtra services will be worth it. Considering the bad press generated by a 24 hour shut-down that was followed by three days of technical issues, I’m expecting quite a shindig to spin that negative publicity into golden reviews.

Ernie's just been on Radio New Zealand a couple of minutes ago along with Kevin Kenrick from Telecom. Kevin said that they could guarantee that no emails have been lost, and that the "vast majority" of customers can now get access to their email, but they cannot say that everyone does.

Telecom released a statement late yesterday to say that the technical fault identified on Monday night was resolved. They’ve also increased the number of staff at the contact centre to handle enquiries and are directing customers still experiencing problems to their website, as it's likely to be as a result of incorrect settings.

In reply to my question to spokesperson Lenska Papich as to whether customers who suffered email outages that disrupted their businesses and their home life (see comments on Downstream blog posted Monday), she has emailed this reply:

“Our priority right now is to get all of our customers up and running with Yahoo!Xtra Bubble. But yes we definitely want to put it right for affected customers so will be looking into this closely.”

Categories: Fixed line carriers | ISPs

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16 comments

• Cynic says:

  So it's launching today! I bet the Xtra marketing crew are sorry they called it "Bubble."

  Added: 23 August 2007, 8:11 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Kevin says:

  I want to know when Telecom is going to fix their email system. I still cannot send out smtp mail from my Thunderbird client after 4 days and trying every combination of new server settings you could. I suspect that there may be large numbers of other people in the same situation. And I wonder when Telecom is even going to acknowledge we have a problem. Let alone a time frame to fix it!

  Added: 23 August 2007, 10:07 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Cynic says:

  Obviously Xtra havent invited Ernie to the launch of bubble because they think he's a prick!

  Added: 23 August 2007, 12:11 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Jane says:

  I just can't get over the name Bubble.... As far as I am concerned, Bubble is the no so AbFab assistant, who according to Wikipedia is QUOTE: ... a charming disaster. She is completely incompetent at her job and often has trouble even remembering what her job is. UNQUOTE. Sounds remarkably like she was organising the server upgrade at Xtra this weekend to me.

  Added: 23 August 2007, 3:31 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Alan says:

  Extra staff???. Problems with ADSL connection. I tried on Monday night and was on hold for 33 minutes with no answer, on Tuesday morning for 1 hour then got a message to say the extn could not take this call and was cut off. On Wednesday afternnon I was answered after being on hold for 1 hr 15 minutes and then was told it was because of incorrect user name settings in the ADSL setup. Without making any changes on my modem suddenly the service started working. Telecom operator still said it was my modem at fault.

  Added: 24 August 2007, 11:25 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Alan Hesketh says:

  Yahoo!Xtra Bubble? It looks just like My Yahoo home page. What value is Xtra delivering to this partnership?

  Added: 24 August 2007, 11:33 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Sheryle says:

  I think my e-mail address may not be @xtra.co.nz for much longer. I also thought I had lost numerous business related e-mails until I finally managed to log onto my webmail (after about half and hour on the phone with the help desk) only to find that e-mails I had been expecting and waiting for all in the Spam folder!!!! Some of these had been sent on the Friday prior to the upgrade. Go check there for your missing e-mails once you have managed to log on!

  Added: 24 August 2007, 3:32 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Grumpy Greg says:

  After all the pain of Sunday - Tuesday when they finally got it sort of working - did anybody else notice that the Trubble mail page shows the Inbox and the Bulk folders as "empty" when if you open them individually they contain unread messages. I did till I fled to gmail! Agree with the comments above that Xtra have only subtracted value in this whole fiasco. What we had had a few problems but it wasn't broken till they tried to replace it incompetently with something inferior.

  Added: 24 August 2007, 10:22 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Wendy says:

  Why has XTRA made it so incredibly complicated? When we travel, all my husband wants to do is to check his email via webmail. He has NO desire to register for Yahoo Bubble or use Yahoo or download any of their software or have any part in it. ALL he wants to do is log onto his XTRA account. Can’t even easily lodge this complaint with XTRA – there isn’t even a general help desk email any more. Bubble/Yahoo doesn’t suit every user. Not everyone wants to “register” – my husband certainly doesn’t want to waste his time doing it. He just wants access to pure, vanilla email. I look forward to the workaround so my husband can log directly into his XTRA account via a straightforward, clean web interface without Yahoo. (And yes, we do use Mail2Web but it is sometimes painfully slow…)

  Added: 27 August 2007, 7:57 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Bruce says:

  I wonder if Telecom has heard of ITIL, or any good old fashioned change control procedures. Whats wrong with notifying users BEFORE the change is implemented, so at least xtras users would know what was going to happen before the event. Steering users to the bubble thing created mass confusion. Coming clean on the first day with a media release would have won some faith back in the company.

  Added: 27 August 2007, 9:29 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Judy says:

  Quite agree with Wendy -the new system is a disaster -3 days without webmail then unable to log onto new system -1 hours waiting on the phone to get help on the fourth day -I saw from a newspaper article that Telecom employed staff in Manila as a contact centre overload-(no wonder the operator sitting in Manila couldn't give a continental about my problem). When I finally opened my webmail, to my horror, the Bulk( aka Spam ) folder had over 800 messages some dating as far back as 2005. On a quick flick through I found several very important messages both personal and business. Today I have had over 100 messages in the bulk folder -I have had to dredge through this disgusting tripe to extract legitimate mail.To add insult to injury my inbox contained some very obvious and disgusting spam. The steps to use webmail have increased needing a choice of Webmail or Domain first then the whole email address each time instead of just the user name.I am worried this latter may be a forrunner to adding yahoo to the xtra address - to my mind a significant downgrade of the address. Another issue -when deleting the vast numbers of spam from the bulk folder a window pops up asking if you want to delete and the option to tick if you do not want to see the window again-I have religiously ticked the box but it still appears each time I delete-more time wasted. I have emailed all my friends who are xtra customers and who I know never use webmail to check for missing messages. I wonder if there is any way to hold Telecom responsible for the extra hours now needed to check webmail as well as the normal download to Outlook All in all a disgraceful arrogant display by Telecom.

  Added: 27 August 2007, 1:04 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Irritated says:

  I am enormously sad that two things lock me in to dealing with Xtra. One is that I have advertising material for my business that directs people to my xtra account. The other is that I have a 12 month contract with Xtra for my current internet deal. Although I believe in customer loyalty and rarely change supppliers for any reason, Xtra Bubble is a disaster, and I would like to go back to the way things were. Yahoo has a long record of regarding anything that passes through their servers as their intellectual property. I have confidential client information passong through my e-mail. I have large quantities of intellectual property that I have generated also passing through my e-mail, and although it is copyrighted, I have concerns. I did not like having to join Yahoo to be able to read my mail online, and I do not like having a web mail page which is multi-purpose and slow to load. I very, very much want the old service back. It was 1000 times better.

  Added: 31 August 2007, 6:59 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Sherwick says:

  We are now getting 200 plus spams a day. Still 20 to 30 each day into our inbox after three weeks of training the filters, and we also get about 20% of our real emails - including CUSTOMER ORDERS and BOOKINGS - sent to the spam/bulk mail folder. Very time consuming and frustrating to try and keep up with this every day. WHY IS THIS OUR PROBLEM XTRA? We had no trouble before Yahoo arrived. Everything was working just fine - as it had done for the last 10 or 12 years. If we had wanted to belong to Yahoo I could have joined them without Xtra's help - BUT WE DONT! I have contacted Xtra twice - all I get back are the standard "have you tried this of that?" responses. Of course I have - I've checked every link and tried every suggestion on their various web pages. Still the Spam floods in. The new spam filters are hopeless - BRING BACK THE OLD ONES XTRA!!! We were overseas when "Bubble" arrived - that locked us out for four days. Very grumpy customers lost orders and some very upset family members who has e-mail accounts with Ihug, Orcon and Gmail so didn't know what had happened to our email service!!! Spent a lot of money in internet cafes trying to gain access to our e-mails - all to no avail!!! There was nothing wrong with the old service for our business. It worked - WHY THE CHANGE XTRA? No notice - no customer survey, NO OPTION. Unless Yahoo/Xtra re-introduce the same level of e-mail service we were getting before the change we are off elsewhere. A VERY PAINFULL Change-over it will be. Over 500 in the address book and about 5,000 customers. But we just want a reliable email service none of the other "kiddie stuff". We are a Business. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING XTRA? Fire the person who thought this deal would be good. Fire the person who decided not to tell customers it was coming. Fire the person who still hasn't told us what any of the advantages might be. Fire the person(s) who should have fixed it by now. OR AT LEAST TAKEN US ALL BACK TO WHERE WE WERE WHEN IT WOKED Oh yes and while you are at it - Fire the person who sold my good old Kiwi sevice to some smart talking Yankee. Am I sounding very GRUMPY - YOU BET!

  Added: 7 September 2007, 9:48 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Super1Shot says:

  Yahoo xtra,webmail, Where has it all gone ,I still can't log into my account and retrieve my mail as I need to download a software program that claims will take only a few minutes .Well amazingly enough it says while downloadind 4hr48minutes.where do you get the few minutes from xtra??? I recently had my computer serviced Some of the download updates were going to take 6hrs ,now here is a strange thing as when we decided to log onto Clear net low and behold download only takes 2hrs. Now telecom what have you done to the lines that slowed them down ? next question Telecom .Are you slowing the lines down so as to get people onto broardband? I for one am moving very soon to Clear or Kol Regards David . Super1Shot

  Added: 6 October 2007, 11:28 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Howard says:

  It has been some time since we had yahoo Bubble forced upon us. I am still having troubles with legitimate emails being identified as spam even though I have followed the instructions to put sender in contacts list and mark emails that sender not spam. It is OK for a few days then problem returns. This happens even when I send a Bcc of an email to my self as a check. When sending to others who are also with Xtra emails have taken a week to be delivered. When I have contacted xtra, their operaters haven't a clue and try to feed me a bunch of lies. Was told they had no other reports of this happenning, Have been told my emails were potential spam. When I ask what that was supposed to mean I was told I was obsessed with trying to find fault with their system. Told there was nothing wrong. Later I phoned and did get a heplful operator who inspected my account and found there was indeed something wrong when she tried to send emails to and from my address. She didn't know how to fix it but devised a tempoary work around. Are most xtra operators trained to not admit there is a fault, to lie and to blame the customer?

  Added: 19 November 2007, 5:07 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Paul says:

  See the Dominion Post article: http://www.stuff.co.nz/4288518a28.html The troubles continue...

  Added: 28 November 2007, 10:28 a.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

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