xtra mail to Yahoo! mail change over sucks.

How predictable. Telecom shoots itself in the fot again and again. Shame I didn’t actually predict that the Yahoo!xtra to Yahoo! Mail changeover itself would be screwed up.

Situation:

Telecom internet customers are furious after being left without email over the weekend during a major upgrade of the service.

Reasons:

Change over communications sucked

The company says it is enhancing the overall service to more than 500,000 Xtra customers and had tried to notify people of a 24-hour webmail outage.

Gee – even I didn’t know about that, and I read enough guff when I blogged previously. And how did you notify folk? email? did it get junkified?

Change over usability sucks

He tried webmail again yesterday and was asked to go through a “whole rigmarole” of registering for Bubble.

Dumb dumb dumb. You have all the information you need, why re-register?

Change over approach sucked.

“This change appears to be a unmitigated disaster … [It] appears to be getting forced on us – it’s not optional to take it or leave it.”

Yahoo! actually knows how to do this –  Beta has been running for a long time now in parallel with traditional webmail. Yo ucan chose your interface. Why not offer a choice of either  xtra webmail or Yahoo mail to your customers?

 Change over support sucks

Mr Campbell said he spent almost two hours contacting the Xtra helpdesk only to be told by an operator that he should try again today. He was told hundreds had been calling with similar issues.

How hard was it to predict a big surge in help desk calls?

I’m lost for words.