A Frustrating Buddy

I have Buddy Broadband at my room, which requires a monthly top-up of 650 baht. I called their telephone line, and got a recording that gave several menu options. Eventually, I got to the Payment Options section, one of which is credit card. However, they don't actually allow you to enter a credit card number, they just tell you that you can do it. Not exactly useful.

They also say you can pay via the TV set (they offer IP TV) or the web site.

My IP-enabled TV just showed a screen with the words "Buddy Broadband", but would not do anything at all.

The web site did not respond, although every other site I tried did.

So I figured their web server was down and called their call centre. After a very long wait, a Thai girl who sounded like she was in her twenties, answered and asked me what my problem was.

I told her that I could not connect to the Buddy Broadband web site to pay my bill, but had no problem connecting to all other sites, like the BBC and CNN. I asked her if their web site was down.

She didn't give me a straight answer. Instead, she said, "Click on toon".

"What?" I asked.

"Click on toon."

"What's that?"

She said, "At de top of de skene, you haff fine, edit, few, favorite, and toon. Click on toon."

"Oh," I said, suddenly understanding, "you mean in Internet Explorer?"

"Yes," she said, "click on toon."

So I started up IE7, then clicked on Tools.

"Then click on Internet option."

Anyway, to make this shaggy dog story shorter, she walked me through clearing the Internet Explorer cache, cookies, etc. I told her I was using Firefox, and that I could access all web sites except Buddy's, but it seems she only knew how to do one thing. She obviously had very limited training.

Of course, after going through her gyrations, I still could not access the web site. I told her to tell her boss that the web server was down and someone should fix it, and then said goodbye.

Eight hours later, I tried again, the web site was back up, and I paid my bill.

I have had a similar experience with another Thai company, Thai Epay, which processes orders by credit card for Thai Culture Publishing. Poor training, little knowledge of anything, and relatively poor English skills or understanding of actual problems. It's frustrating for the customer, and gives a very poor impression of Thai expertise; it must also be frustrating for the poor call centre people, who must realise that they are giving poor service. Sphere: Related Content