tough thread
I must say.
What i do read inbetween the lines is the following.
Shawn has been doing excellent work trying to sort out all the niggles/issues, Iburst is now under new Management also trying to Fix problems from the past and looking forward with a positive attitude. (Services, New Products etc)
Unfortunately these 2 guys are now suffering the wrath of all the Old Clients that had suffered through various issues for the past few years.
Iburst is changing but will not happen overnight.
I've been with Iburst for the Past 5months, all i cans say is : Keep up the good Work.
True Napalm. I was thinking about it this morning. It's clear, also, that both Shaun and Jannie Van Zyl are liked here on this forum. I have no problem with Shaun (nor Jannie), especially since I am more and more certain that it was Shaun who, in 2006, listened to my appeal and gave me the refund. Then already people knew that he was the go-to guy around here. I was then using a pseudonym here, which I can't remember (!), and I am sure there's a post where I ask around for a telephone number or something that would lead me to calling him.
And, as you say, it is unfortunate that Jannie, as new CEO, has to bear or does bear the brunt of past customers' irritation and anger; so I was thinking that it is unfortunate that it
seems that he is a target of my anger.
So let me say this first, categorically: I remain entirely pissed off with the way
my story has gone, and I remain pissed off that that story is just one story in an overwhelming
plethora of similar stories, pointing to what we all
know is (I won't say
has been) accounting incompetence on an absurd scale. So, I am pissed of
not because my story is an individual oddity; I am pissed off because, on the evidence of ongoing wide-scale incompetence, an old story has quite unsuspectingly appeared on my blissful horizon. As I said before: a bad break-up has, 3 years later, been replayed,
for the second time, when you thought the first
replay,
2 years after the bad break up, was definitely the last
replay. It was on VHS, an old, obsolete format, that first replay. But lo and behold, they've transferred it to Blue-ray or whatever new format and here they are, forcing you to watch
another replay. No, to
re-live it.
But, categorically, I am pissed off with the iBurst that existed on 16 July 2009. Categorically, I am pissed with a corporation whose ridiculously bad habits had, in my experience, been in existence since 2006, and, based on reportage all over the net, here and elsewhere, had existed prior to that. I am pissed off because those bad habits touched me,
again when I had long ago exorcised its toxins (how many times do I have to make this point?).
Excuse my Tagalog, and forgive my crude sexism, but it
grates my tits (yes it does, and it shocks me that I am capable of using this phrase, which I have never used before) that this all happens then in a company which up until now, in the broader public's eye, had been run by a boss who had the absolutely naive but perverted gumption to write such godawful **** [faeces] as
Don't Panic. Don't panic, everything will be just super-dandy again, while, as I said, there have been an ongoing, loud
gnashing of teeth among Don't Panic's customers. People should get that point: bosses now, like politicians, want to be celebrities, and, it seems, they
don't give a f--k about how they
disempower the people whose hard-earned money ultimately pay their salaries. (Buy Ricoffee!? He should go tell
that to the f--king birds.)
That shows - are we surprised? - a massive, cosmological, light-year long
disconnect between company boss and customers in the case of iBurst. Disconnects between big companies and customers (or big organisations and their members) are not unusual at all, but in iBurst's case any sane person who knows and has experience of it has to admit that the disconnect is something special. And the
contrast between the feel-good twaddle that company bosses enthralled to their own misguided, quasi-philosophical pretensions like to dabble in, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the anger and disempowerment their customers
flounder in and of which bosses remain blissfully unaware - clearly wilfully - this contrast is a chiaroscuro that not even God, in his infinite wisdom, can have ever imagined. Night and day, black and white - these don't come anywhere near it.
Hyperbole yes, but I tell you, even if you are bored with hearing about complaints against iBurst, look at the comments on HelloPeter. Consider the contrast between people's disempowerment and desperation there, and the civil, joky, chummy-chummy exchanges between users and representatives of iBurst here at MyBroadBand. People who know where to look for information (like us on this forum) can gain some form of empowerment, and therefore relief, from iBurst's incompetence. But you cannot disregard the disempowerment of people simply because they don't know that here, on MBB, they can gain access to a helpful iBurst representative and even, of late, its new CEO.
Which leads me to these rhetorical and not original questions: Why can people not use and receive the same level of service simply from posting at iBurst's own site? Why do you have to raise a stink at HelloPeter first? Or be part of a coterie at MBB?
So, categorically, my complaint is not against Shaun. My complaint, as I've indicated above, is not against the new CEO
per se. But Jannie has responded to me and he is now the CEO of a company with an unfortunate history, of which I am just one individual who shares in that misfortune.
But his responses to me should be read in this context: he has been a long time member - under a different guise - at MBB. In other words, at MBB he is largely an MBB member, and not the CEO of iBurst. By this I mean that a history of his interactions here, prior to being CEO at iBurst, will govern how other people treat him and cover for him. He is, in short and in the main, among a group of buddies. That is the nature of these forums. It
produces a different persona.
I am not sure whether interactions between me and Shaun, and between me and Jannie, here on this forum, is appropriately business-like (by this I mean that it is different from say, talking across a desk in an office, business-like; it's a point about context). All in all, members here - and people who know to look here - are part of a fortunate coterie who
happen to have access to two iBurst representatives and who thus can have a greater fortune in getting their problems seen to quickly. But that does not erase the larger problems for the overwhelming majority of people who have experienced and still experience problems with iBurst.
So I am not convinced that their presence here is good or is a sign that things will necessarily change at iBurst, that the disconnect will be overcome. In terms of marketing research, I'm not sure how significant the sample at MBB of exchanges between members and iBurst is. But I would venture to say that the sample at HelloPeter is a better sample about complaints. The sample here at MBB may be skewed by the relationships between people; newbies may say harsh words, but in this thread, for instance, there have been several posts covering for iBurst.
But imagine the number of people who have not heard of HelloPeter, imagine that sample. One can often judge from the HelloPeter complaints that many people are perhaps older and not quite in the loop of technology. One can then infer that there must be another group of people outside the fortunates who know or have heard of HelloPeter. That ouside group is where real marketing research should take place. MBB is not the place for research if you want to expand your business. MBB members know to look around and will drop you like a hat if needs be. In any case, there should be no need for customers to go somewhere else than a company's primary location, brick-and-mortar or online.
That's some marketing consulting, for free.
But, one cannot help to muse that it seems that iBurst's business model
depends on ignorance. Many complaints at HelloPeter express a big disappointment in feeling being duped; it is clear even that customers were not of the sort who might look around and do some research before they decide on the particular technology they want to use to connect. It is exactly the kind of ignorance that marketing depends on. And my analysis is that iBurst remains happy to garner users from that demographic while not caring about them once they are users
locked in to whatever package.
Pt2...
Wow Rustum, you have the gift of the gab. (I'm not being sarcastic)
