I’ve got a gripe against a certain mobile service provider. It’s not to do with my phone service but rather my dad’s which I organised and stuff with company in question. From day 1 there has been problems. Nothing that I would classify as major but more annoying and long term. For a start, their online porting form is stuffed. If your on pre-paid you *have* to enter data into a field that is irrelevant to you. Don’t you think it would be better to have an option ‘Are you porting from prepaid?’ and if you selected yes, blank out the field in question? Usability peoples!!! Secondly after finally getting the form submission to work, the mobile service did not port!!! instead I had no service for like 3 days at all!!! I myself have ported numerous times, first from Telstra to Optus then from Optus to Three, and I have not had a problem either time. The porting process was a few hours at the most (as it should be), not like 3 days!!! Thirdly from the start my dad hasn’t been able to receive sms, only send. But we only realised last week, after his friends at work asked him if he’d been getting sms’s. Which explained alot on why I never got replies from my sms’s that I’d sent numerous times. Then I contact their support and they say they’ll reset. It gets reset, but alas it can still send but not receive! In the process my dad and I have spent money sending random ‘test’ messages between our phones and others to see if it’s working! Made worse by company in questioning wanting to know if my phone can send sms… (which it can for that matter). My final gripe is that if company in question says they will contact you regarding the outcome they better damn do so. On each occasion since the porting issue I we have not received an email of any outcome! Rather the first instance involved randomly turning on the phone for days to determine if we’d finally got service back, and this time randomly sending sms’s. We got one email once, and that was to do with what to put in the form field (maybe their usability designers might want to think that one over?). But none for the others. If a company expects to get customers, and keep them thereby strenghting their marketplace presence, quality customer service might be one. Whilst sending an sms is less 25c and 15c respectively (my phone, my dad’s phone) and sending 20 odd or more is only a few dollars (probably less), it’s the principal of it. The company is operating as business – providing service to customers. Why should we as customers be paying ourselves to see if the service is working? Let alone why should we be testing it ourselves? I’d certainly be less pissed off if they actually bothered to give us feedback on the job status. Secondly, you’d think being a company providing a mobile service they could send us an sms going ‘this is __ if you receive this your sms service is working, please send a return sms to let us know’. Hence we don’t pay any more money testing it ourselves, and obviously if we don’t reply we never received the message in the first place hence the techs at the other side can continue on the problem!!! Not Good Enough!!! (I very well may have to head there soon)