When I called Orange they, as expected, put me through to retentions who then rather surprised me by saying that there was no problem adding data to my OVP Virgin tariff and that I could have 500Mb for £5 a month. That wasn’t quite as good as the other tariffs I had been looking at — it was the same price but less data — but I decided to give it a go anyway so he added it to my account.

As my understanding (from searching the internet) was that Orange had two separate classes of SIM only one of which allowed 3G data I explicitly asked if I would need a new SIM but the adviser assured that my current SIM would work fine so off I went to try it out.

Unfortunately, and as you’ve probably guessed by now, it didn’t actually work — in fact data didn’t work at all! So a few days later I found myself speaking to them again. This time I got a very helpful lady who immediately realised that the previous adviser hadn’t set things up right and she proceeded to send about six SIM updates to my phone and then wait while I rebooted it and confirmed that data now worked although I was only getting GPRS and not 3G data.

Once again I asked whether I needed a new SIM and was assured that I didn’t, and it must just be the coverage where I was that was stopping me getting a 3G signal so off I went again.

Fast forward two weeks and I still haven’t seen a 3G indicator once despite visiting a number of different locations so it is obvious that there is still a problem and I ring them again.

This time I get a slightly less helpful fellow who, after failing to find my phone on their database, says that they “don’t support it” and he can’t really help. When pressed that it’s not really about the phone as I know the 3G in it works fine on other networks and I just need my account enabling for 3G he finally admits that I probably do actually need a new SIM to make it work.

Of course it’s not that simple — they can’t just send me a new SIM unless my current one is broken. Even then they would only send me a 3G one if I had a 3G phone. I do, of course, have a 3G phone but what he really meant was “a 3G phone that you bought from Orange”.

So I went for the nuclear option and informed him that in that case I’d like to close my account and get a PAC to move my number to  a more helpful network. At that point he put me on hold and I started waiting…

Something like seven minutes of hold music later he finally came back — by this time I was sure that he was going to say that actually, after speaking to his colleagues, maybe they could send me a new SIM card. Unfortunately it was not to be and he just put me through to disconnections who, possibly for the first time ever, issued me a PAC without making any attempt at all to persuade me to stay.

So when my PAC arrives in a few days (for some reason they insist on sending it by post) it will be goodbye to Orange and hello to Three.

The OVP Virgin tariff has long since stopped being available to new customers, but existing customers have been allowed to keep it. Equally Virgin themselves have stopped offering the post pay option on their PAYG tariffs, except for users who have a SIM on their original PAYG tariff. As it happens I have one of those as well…

The net effect of this is that my average bill over ten years has been about £1.25 a month which means that even after buying two phones outright during that period I have come out much better than I would have done by being on contract with a subsidised phone.

I have recently upgraded to a 3G phone however, which meant I needed to find a new tariff as Orange apparently refuse to enable 3G data for OVP Virgin customers, presumably because they would quite like to get rid of them.

My original plan was to use my Virgin SIM and switch it to post pay mode to get full roaming. That would also give me data access, either at 30p a day (with a 25Mb fair usage limit) or £5 a month (with a 1Gb fair usage limit) which means that if you use it more than about every other day then you want to be on the monthly option.

This week however I discovered that 3 have introduced a SIM Zero tariff which operates in much the same way as the original Virgin tariff and the OVP Virgin clone of that tariff. It also allows 3G data, either at 30p a Mb (quite expensive!) or at £5 a month for up to 2Gb. The call costs are also in general slightly lower than the original Virgin tariff.

The SIM Zero tariff is fairly well hidden however – you won’t find any mention of it on the main 3 web site for a start. After some googling I eventually found this link to the 3 store:

http://threestore.three.co.uk/sim/?id=1183

Even the front page of the 3 store doesn’t seem to provide any direct route to that page — the best it provides is a link to this page for SIM only deals:

http://threestore.three.co.uk/simonly.aspx

Which doesn’t list SIM Zero, although it does list SIM Only Internet which is effectively SIM Zero with the £5 a month internet add-on.

So yesterday I ordered a SIM Zero, which really did go through the checkout as zero pounds and zero pence, not even any postage. Today it arrived — they even threw in a PAYG SIM as well just in case I wanted one.

Now all I have to do is get Orange Retentions to give me a PAC which could be quite fun…

Today the Open Rights Group has an article about electronic medical records which, talking about the well known case when Gordon Brown’s medical record was accessed improperly, notes an interesting feature of the Scottish system:

Bizarrely enough, I’m slightly reassured by this story: we know about incidents in Scotland only because their Emergency Care Record system is set up to notify patients when their record has been accessed.

Of course it then goes on to say how poorly the English system compares:

In England, you have no idea if your Summary Care Record (SCR) has been accessed or not.

So it turns out that not only can my idea work in theory – it’s actually been tried and has worked in practice.

I would actually go one step further and say that if a customer complains and you fix their problem, and you then find the underlying cause and fix it for the future, then you should also consider whether that problem has already affected any other customers and whether there is anything you can do to proactively fix it for those customers. Call it “Fixing everything three ways” if you like.

The reason I’m writing about this now is that my recent dispute with BT is finally starting to reach some sort of conclusion (though only after I wrote to the CEO and the executive complaints people got on the case) and, most unusually in my experience, they have taken some steps towards following the kind of process described above.

All too often a complaint to an organisation leads to the immediate problem being solved, and maybe some sort of token compensation, which is fine as far as it goes. What really makes my day however is when a companies response really shows that they’ve thought more deeply about the problem and taken steps to deal with it long term.

Maybe more companies do in fact do this sort of thing but just don’t communicate it to the original complainant – even Joel’s article doesn’t really suggest that you should do so. I think that telling people what you’ve done produces a lot of goodwill however – it is much nicer, and inspires more confidence for the future, to receive a reply which says “It seems the problem was caused by … and we’ve corrected your account and are working to resolve this” than the more normal “I’ve corrected your account” type response.

To go back to the recent example with BT the current status is that they have explained that the second call (after I was supposed to have been added to their internal opt out list) happened because of a failure to transfer information properly when migrating customer accounts to a new system. That’s great – they’ve explained the problem, plus they say they are working on fixing it and in the meantime they have made sure I am opted out on the new system. They even volunteered the fact (which I didn’t know) that the adviser who handled my initial complaint about the second call had failed to fully opt me out on the new system.

Of course there are still issues around the fact that both calls were made while I was registered with the Telephone Preference Service and that two letters over the course of two months to their “Complaints Management” team went unanswered, and I am pursuing those with the executive complaints people.

Perhaps the best response I ever received to a complaint I made however was from AA Insurance. In 2007 when I was looking to renew the buildings and contents insurance for my house I wound up going with the AA after a bit of shopping around. I completed all the details online and everything seemed to go smoothly. After a few days the buildings insurance details turned up in the post (the AA acts as a broker and had placed the two polices separately) but when the renewal date was reached the contents insurance details had still not arrived.

On phoning them to ask what was happening I got a fairly disinterested customer service person who said they had no record of my application for the contents policy and all he could do was to setup a new one which (due to the kind of dynamic pricing insurance companies tend to operate now) worked out to be slightly more than the original price. I eventually paid under protest and went off and wrote a letter to their complaints department.

Within a few days I had a call from somebody who not only admitted that it was all their fault but explained that he had spoken to the people running the web site and they had dug through the logs and worked out exactly what had happened and how one policy had gone through and not the other – essentially what he was describing (though he probably didn’t know it) was some sort of race condition in the software. He further said that they had identified a small number (four I think) of other people it had affected. Obviously he then arranged to refund the extra I had paid, plus a few pounds to cover my expenses.

And that remains the single best example of how to manage a complaint that I have ever come across – obviously they missed the ball slightly by not empowering the original phone operator to deal with the matter better but at least eventually somebody took the problem firmly in hand and really dealt with it properly.

All we have to do now is persuade more organisations to behave like that, and have it become the norm instead of the exception…

In fact, he admitted, the only real constraint was the existence of an audit trail that could catch people out. Of course audit trails only work if people are actually reviewing them and are in a position to spot discrepancies and investigate them – in a system the size of the NHS care records system I imagine this will be a task of mammoth proportions and the actual risk of any individual being caught will be negligible.

As it happens this is an issue of some personal relevance because I recently received a letter notifying me that my SCR would shortly be created and uploaded to the central database and offering me the chance to opt-out. In fact the leaflet enclosed with that letter alluded to the current lack of security by starting the discussion of who would be able to access records (at the top of page 7) with the words “When the new system is fully up and running…” thereby revealing to anybody paying close attention that proper security is not yet in place.

In particular although your records are only supposed to be accessed by people involved in your care there is nothing to actually enforce that other than the audit trail, as the CfH representative was eventually forced to admit in the radio interview. Even when proper security controls are in place certain people, such as emergency department staff, will probably need to have fairly broad rights to access anybody’s records so the audit trails will still be important as the main constraint on at least some users.

One other feature of the SCR system is something called HealthSpace which is a web portal where people can view their own records and it occurred to me that this provided an interesting opportunity for crowdsourcing the problem of monitoring the audit trail in an effective way.

The idea is that, first of all, in addition to providing access to your records the portal would also provide access to the audit trail showing exactly who had accessed your records. On top of that you could add email alerts that would inform you whenever your records were accessed, or perhaps just when a new person who had not accessed them before accessed them for the first time.

The advantages of such a system should be obvious – firstly there would be far more people monitoring the audit trail than the NHS could ever afford to employ to do it. Secondly each person would only be monitoring a small piece of audit trail – a piece that they would be familiar with (so they would know who they would expect to be accessing those records) and in which they would have a direct interest in detecting and reporting any misuse which it revealed.

Interestingly I note that the NHS Care Record Guarantee does say (commitment 11 on page 9) that “You will be able to ask for a list of everyone who has accessed records that identify you, and when they did so” although it doesn’t sound from that like they will be automatically available through HealthSpace or that any sort of alert mechanism is envisaged at the moment.

In any case I have personally decided not to allow my records to be uploaded until the current security regime is improved – if you want to do the same then information on how to do so, including the form you need to give to your GP can be downloaded from the care records web site.

The really shocking news however is that they seem to have figured out time travel – the Sunday timetable looks like this:

Proof that NXEA trains really can time travel

Pay close attention to what happens to the 22:22 from Liverpool Street when it reaches Broxbourne, and more importantly while it is there…

At the end of the working day I was still waiting, and starting to think that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea when, at about 7pm, the LOVEFiLM web site was replaced by a maintenance message. Six hours later when I went to bed it was still there and I was definitely starting to think this may have been a bad idea.

Tuesday morning came round, and the web site was back and, a few hours later, some films got allocated so I sat back and waited for them to change to dispatched. Once again the end of the day came and there was no sign of any further change.

Wednesday morning arrived and I was already resigned to having to wait until at least Thursday to receive anything when I noticed that, mid-morning, a dispatch date had appeared. Not paying any attention to the detail I assumed they had just been dispatched and would probably arrive the next day.

The pleasant surprise was to get home and find them on the mat – when I looked the dispatch date was in fact Tuesday, but it didn’t get shown on my account until Wednesday morning.

So far then LOVEFiLM seems to be teetering on the edge – not obviously excellent but not obviously crap either. Time will not doubt tell.