Trunk Media

First In but never served…

7 March 2008

I have been meaning to write a post about First In – www.firstin.co.nz for the last few weeks. First In is a site which has special deals of limited stock available for a certain timeframe. It is a similar concept to 1-day – www.1-day.co.nz a site run by torpedo7.

These two sites really are at opposite poles in terms of customer service and delivery.

A friend ordered an item on the First In website at the beginning of January; the product is yet to turn up despite the amount being debited from his Visa on the day of purchase. Any attempt to contact First In – including the cellphone of one of the owners (Adam Brown) has been fruitless.

Three emails were sent but never replied to, and two phone calls to the 0800 customer service centre resulted in messages being taken so that Adam could “look into it” and “return your call”. Having had no communication my friend is now in a position where the only thing he is able to do is to lodge a dispute with his bank and have them investigate, get a lawyer to write First In a nasty letter and hope for a better (or any) response or take them to the Disputes Tribunal. It’s tantamount to theft.

On investigation since his purchase I have found several forums with other people complaining about this exact same problem. In fact, they appeared on Fair Go in 2006. It seems that nothing much has changed since then.

Do yourself a favour and do not buy anything from First In.

In contrast I have used 1-day a few times as have a lot of my friends; I have never had a problem with them. The goods always arrive, usually within a day.

I do not understand how companies can get away with this lack of customer service and quite frankly robbery.

Posted in Marketing | 4 Comments »

Wake up Skycity Cinemas!

5 March 2008

The Skycity Cinemas www.skycitycinemas.co.nz website was redesigned a couple of years ago. I have always found the site clunky with an ugly, unintuitive user interface. I was surprised on going to their website the other day to see it has again been overhauled. Two complete redesigns in a couple of years – a lot of companies would love that budget!

Unfortunately the site doesn’t seem to have improved in terms of user-friendliness, indeed the site is just as unintuitive as previously and is actually a lot uglier. It screams early nineties mashed with a slow Flash interface for selecting movies. The drop-down menus are just nasty.

I actually don’t know where to start so I’m just going to highlight a few of the shiners.
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Posted in Creative, Marketing | 5 Comments »