tl;dr

Dear Sir or Madam,

As your own advertising has been only too keen to point out, the iPhone 3G is one of the most significant new devices O2 has launched in years. After slow initial sales of the original iPhone, the price cut and sales boost have built huge pent-up demand for the 3G model. You were clearly aware of the scale of this demand, as you put in place a pre-registration process for potential customers to be alerted by SMS when preorders became available. Indeed, that SMS said “Demand will be very high, so it’s first come first served”.

It is therefore with astonishment and disappointment that I am forced to contact you to register my disgust at how incredibly badly O2, as an organization, has bungled your customer services during this highest of high profile launches.

I switched to O2’s SIM-only contract nearly six months ago with the intention of upgrading to the iPhone 3G when it was released. I registered my interest on the O2 website within hours of the product announcement. I was on the website and attempting to preorder my handset within an hour of receiving the SMS advertising that sales had begun. Unfortunately, as my purchase was an upgrade of an existing account, I was forced to use the upgrade website and not the one for new customers. I have read that the website for new customers remained operational, as did Carphone Warehouse’s website. Sadly the upgrade website did not fare so well.

From 9am to 4pm I made dozens of repeated attempts to fill in my details on the site. I was repeatedly presented with errors as your servers were clearly incapable of dealing with the load they were placed under. This was O2’s first failing: you clearly had an idea of user numbers, as you sent each potential user of the site an SMS, and yet you still failed to ensure there was enough capacity in the servers. In the past I have performed scalability analysis for such high profile ecommerce websites as ThomasCook.com; I know full well that designed scalable websites is not a black art. If a website I had specified had performed as badly on launch day as yours did, I would have resigned immediately.

Eventually, at around 3pm, I managed to make the website direct me to https://upgrades.o2.co.uk/failover/ok.html, a page which told me that my order had been received and that if there were any problems with my details I would be contacted. Shortly afterwards the website changed to a “no stock” notification. However, I had no confirmation number of any kind, no delivery date, and even after several hours I had not received an email from the site. Suspicious, I contacted your customer service department on 0870 600 3009.

After requesting my call be escalated to a manager, as first line support seemed to have no information at all, I was informed that you had actually sold out of all the iPhone 3G stock at around 11am so there was no way that I could have a valid order. It seems that the website continued to give out seemingly valid orders for many hours after stock had actually run out; it also seems you have only secured a laughably small stock allocation. This problem was very widespread; the manager I spoke to in your call centre said she had dealt with 41 phone calls in the last hour from people in the same position as I am. As far as I can see, your failover cluster did not have any sort of online stock level fulfillment against the main live server, and hence had no ability to know it was double selling stock. Meanwhile anyone who wasn’t an existing O2 customer was able to buy up that small amount of stock from the “new customers” website without any technical problems. Essentially I was at a disadvantage because of my customer loyalty; surely this is not good business?

The final customer service blunder came when I asked the manager in the call centre to try and confirm my order details, just in case my order had slipped through. She informed me that your call centre staff could not see details of the iPhone orders placed on your web site, and that the only way for me to check was to see if the money had been taken from my bank. How were these staff supposed to do their jobs and support online sales without any access to the information coming from the website? It frankly baffles me how poorly thought out this entire process seems to be.

The iPhone 3G launch should have been a high point in O2’s financial year, and it was certainly a device I was greatly looking forward to owning. Instead I have wasted hours of my life today battling your poorly designed systems in a futile attempt to persuade you to take sell me an expensive 3G device — on top of a report in this month’s PC Pro magazine that, in addition to having the worst 3G coverage of any UK network, O2 also has the worst 3G network speeds.

Sadly, I now feel like a complete idiot. I would invite O2 to please give me some explanations for what went wrong today and a reason why I should not simply request my PAC at once and migrate to T-Mobile, whose mobile data service and customer services departments are more than an afterthought.

Yours faithfully,

Richard Gaywood

Edit update 2008-07-08: I have now had a reply from O2.

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