The launch of the Yahoo!Xtra bubble yesterday was - perhaps unsurprisingly - a rather flat affair. The technical issues that have dogged the inception of Xtra’s Web 2.0 upgrade meant that the service had attracted too much of the wrong kind of publicity already.
This point was acknowledged straight away by Telecom’s chief operating officer for consumer Kevin Kenrick, who began the presentation with a run down of exactly what went wrong. He said it wasn’t until users began to register for the new services that they discovered a fault in the code. Then, the issue was compounded by the fact that there was nobody in the country able to fix it and they had to fly an expert in from Australia. He said it was the seventh time that Yahoo! had done this with telcos around the world and this was the first time the problem had occurred.
By the time the registration fault had been fixed, the amount of enquiries was backed up to such an extent that Xtra was scrambling to find contact centre agents able to deal with customers. Up to 400 agents from other service areas in Telecom, such as faults and new registrations, were transferred to the broadband division, and in Manila 100 new agents were recruited to help out.
Kenrick was able to say that yesterday they were processing 12 registrations a second. He still couldn’t give a figure on how many of the 500,000 Xtra subscribers were adversely affected, although he did confirm that next week they will be looking in the issue of compensation.
“The reaction we’ve had from customers who’ve been unable to send and receive email over the last few days just really highlights how essential it is. It is something that people use to manage their lives, manage their businesses, to interact with other people and as part of that you need to make sure that it is operated to the level that is required.”
Well, yeah.
What about the actual upgrade itself, the suite of products they’re marketing as Yahoo!Xtra Bubble? It’s got RSS feeds, Flickr accounts, upgraded spam filters, the ability to get 10 email addresses from one account, unlimited email, and all of it packaged in what to me looked like a very user-friendly interface.
In other words, it looks pretty good.