Neil Lathwood’s blog on the world :)
I’ll be down at the internet world show next week exhibiting on behalf of the company I work for - UKFast.net
If you were planning to come down anyway then come and say hi, if you weren’t why not pop in and say hi. We’re on stand E142 and should have a pretty decent setup with a few things going on.
I’ve never been a big fan of companies outsourcing any part of their business to a foreign company to save money. The bad press it has generated since it became popular to do has been quite substantial but it hasn’t put companies off doing it to save money - and lose business. I mean, is it really that cost affective to shift say your entire support department over to somewhere like India to save on wage and infrastructure costs but in turn, more than likely, lose at least a handle of your clients due to the lack of support that they may now receive?
Some companies are now making a big deal out of advertising that they don’t send your calls to anywhere other than say, your local branch like the Natwest do. Having today had to deal with, only briefly mind, but that was long enough, a company who have outsourced their support centre to India, it left me thinking that I could never even remotely consider outsourcing the support team I have to India. After the two calls I made with little joy in getting the information I needed, I didn’t know what else to do! The first phone call that I had the luck of having to make ended with me thinking that you wouldn’t want that type of company managing or having anything to do with your company. I called an 0871 number to speak to someone in support to try and get a number redirect working, when I was told that they couldn’t assist because basically they didn’t understand what it was I was referring to, they asked me to redial and press the same option I had for the current call!!!
I stated that surely that would just get me back through to them again and was told, “maybe”?!?! Unbelievable - but I tried anyway 
So what happened, well I’m sure you can guess, I called, pressed 1 for support and got a lovely person on the end of the phone - from the same call centre. So went through the same thing as before to see if I got anyone else with at least some clue. Of course that didn’t work and I should have hung up a long time ago, or not even bothered to actually call them back in the first place.
To top all of this off as well, not only could I not speak to someone who understood our account and knew what I wanted or could point me in the right direction but the website for the company had zero contact details that were of any use or actually allowed me to speak to someone in the UK. Not what I would call customers service at all!
After being in a Ripe training day all day, David and I decided to see what Southampton had to offer in the ways of a meal and some refreshing beverages (non-alcoholic) of course. Having spent the best part of 45 minutes walking around the ‘City Centre’ it seemed quite apparent that the town didn’t have much to offer in the way of nice restaurants which was a shame.
We settled on a place called Bella Italia (a chain) which served quite nice food but nothing that I would write (blog) home about! After saying hello to a few other people from the Ripe meeting who turned up in the restaurant, we headed over to the Slug and Lettuce for a couple of drinks before leaving for our hotel room.
The nice thing I found about Southampton was the Parks located just on the very edge of the shopping area, we walked through these on the way for food and the way back to the hotel and it was nice and peacefull, no idiots around and I managed to snap off a few pictures of some of the local buildings and statues - I’ll upload these when I get back and if they are good enough quality!
Anyway, long and short of this post is - don’t visit Southampton if you want something to do for a few days - it doesn’t seem to offer it.
*edit: Oooops, I put down the award used to be called best business ISP, obviously that was mis-spelt and supposed to be best hosting provider
