Conversion Matters

The Terrible Tale of Tiscali Trauma

Adam — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:13:42 +0000

My girlfriend is at her wits end with Tiscali. They over charged her when she first set up her account with her and have been completely useless in sorting it out. Multiple people have said they would refund her, or she would be credited and she hasn’t been at all. It is completely unacceptable behaviour.

How can such a big company get away with such blatent “not-giving-a-shitness”? It’s a total joke.

They owe her a tiny amount of money compared to how much they must make yet they can’t even keep one customer happy. They also have the worst customer support system. No one seems to keep track at Tiscali’s end of what’s going on. Do they not have a centralised ticketing system?

The following is a copy of the back and forth between my girlfriend and Tiscali to highlight the uselessness of Tiscali:

Original message: Laura -> Tiscali

Hi, On receiving my last bill, in November, I realised there was £30 tv installation fee that I had never been told about charged to my account.
I called the billing advice line and they told me, that since I had paid phone/broadband installation of £30 previously, this was a mistake and would be creditted to my account this month.

I see it has not been as I have another bill, when I would expect there to be enough credit in the account to cover this…

I want this done immediately, not next month as I was told last time.

I have been nothing but messed about by your company, and everytime I have called, it seems like no one is doing what they say they will. My broadband installation was late due to the order aparently not being processed; I spent hours on hold to your customer services only to be passed from one person to another- none of which knew what was going on, only to be billed for the calls; then this £30 bill I had to pay when i was never informed about it- then never refunded when told it would be.
Overall very unhappy, and if you could do this one thing before the bill goes out, it would be appreciated.

Laura

Initial response from Tiscali -> Laura:

Dear deleted,

Thank you for your email, the contents of which have been noted.

Following our phone conversation regarding the additional TV setup fee of £30, I have escalated a request to our Billing Department to investigate this matter. If they approve, your account will be refunded by £30 which will go towards the direct debit at the start of January. The reference number for this request is deleted.

In the meantime, we would like to take this opportunity to apologise for any inconvenience this has caused. If you have a query on this or any other matter, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards,

Derek
Tiscali Customer Relations

Then Laura neither heard anything or received a refund so another email was sent:

Hi,

Was expecting further information by now re progress of this?

The bill is supposed to be going out of my account on the 7th January, and so far show no sign of being creditted.

Could you let me know what is happening asap.

Thanks

Laura

Tiscali then tried to claim they had already refunded her when in fact they hadn’t:

Dear Laura Sleightholme,

Thank you for contacting Tiscali Customer Support.

I apologise for any inconvenience this matter may have caused you.

Upon checking your query, I can confirm that we already credited your account £30.00 (inclusive of VAT) on 29 December 2008. Please check your bank to verify this.

If you have any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact our customer care team on 0871 222 3311 option 2. Lines are open 8am to midnight 7 days a week. Calls will be charged at 10p a minute from a BT landline. Charges from other telephone providers may vary. Calls from a Tiscali Talk landline will be charged at the lower rate of 5p a minute.

Alternatively, you can contact us through our website at www.tiscali.co.uk.

Yours sincerely,

Anna
General Correspondence Team

They hadn’t refunded so back Laura emailed again:

I can confirm that I definately HAVE NOT received this- neither in my bank account or as credit to my ticscali account (as expected) and have just paid another bill to yourselves.

Please sort this problem out asap.

Thank you

Laura

They then told her the credit would be applied:

Dear Miss Laura Sleightholme

Thank you for contacting Tiscali Customer Support.

Your concern regarding your refund request has already been forwarded to the Finance Department. A credit memo of £30 will be applied on your account. We are unable at this stage to advise you of the time frame involved. Please bear with us until then.

If you have any further queries, please contact us.

Alternatively you can visit our comprehensive online Broadband Knowledge Base at http://www.tiscali.co.uk/help

Yours Sincerely,

Sanje
General Correspondence Team

Surprise, surprise they didn’t refund her:

Thank you for getting this somewhere- but in terms of timescale, I was promised that this would be creditted to my account before the bill went out on the 7th January. This didn’t happen, and I have no idea when I may be getting the refund. This is not satisfactory, and I am very unhappy with this.

If you could let me know asap when the money will be creditted.

Thank You

Laura

They then changed tone slightly and decided they would refund her minus the VAT, which seemed rather odd:

Dear Laura Sleightholme,

Thank you for contacting Tiscali Customer Support.

As per our records, the refund of £26.09, inclusive of VAT, has been applied on your account today.

We trust this now clarifies the matter. If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact our customer care team on 0871 222 3311 option 2. Lines are open 8am to midnight 7 days a week. Calls will be charged at 10p a minute from a BT landline. Charges from other telephone providers may vary. Calls from a Tiscali Talk landline will be charged at the lower rate of 5p a minute.

Alternatively you can contact us through our website at www.tiscali.co.uk.

Yours Sincerely,

Joy
General Correspondence Team

They didn’t refund her, they still haven’t refunded her, and frankly she has no idea what to do to make them refund her. This was the last email sent:

This is ridiculous. I have replied to this email twice; the first time I never received a reply at all, and the second, got a generic response saying check the website. This is completely unacceptable.

I want to know why I am not receieving the full £30 refund- I understand it is a VAT charge, but as you are returning the money, this should be refunded too. I was told previously I would be creditted by £30, now I’m being told I will only receive £26.09. I don’t see why when I paid £30, I shouldn’t get that back.

Also, where is this money being creditted to?? I assumed my tiscali account, but I have just looked and I have another bill to pay in Feb- therefore it has definately not been creditted.

Please could this be forwarded to management. I am very unhappy with this service. I have been messed around, told I have been refunded when I haven’t, then told I will be by £30, now only by £26.09, yet I can’t see any money from you anywhere.

I could not be more angry about this, the service with you from start to finish has been terrible. Not one thing has been done right, and every person I speak to/email says something completely different to the one before. I want a contact name, and want this sorted. I have wasted a huge amount of time and money emailing and phoning you, and this is especially not appreciated over the christmas period. If I could cancel the contract, I would do. Immediately.

Please sort this out asap.

Laura

Even before this particular problem Tiscali took a couple of weeks longer than they had said they would to install everything which left her house internetless, which is pretty traumatic for facebook-addicted students!

Moral of the story: if you sign up with Tiscali, which admittedly is pretty cheap, and the TV package is quite cool, pray to god you don’t have any problems or have to get in touch with customer support because they are truly useless.

I doubt this post will help speed up any refund but it may just help other potential customers make a more informed decision before wasting their time and money with Tiscali.

Another Crap SEO Tool

Adam — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:02:29 +0000

When I was travelling a while back I got an email fired to me about “a new, free tool for automatically analyzing URLs for a comprehensive range of SEO issues”.

I was going through my old emails (kinda - still need to properly sort them, anyway..) and I just checked it out.

What to say? What to say? It has a massive fucking ugly advert (in Comic Sans?) and it looks like something I would have tried to make in Photoshop 4 years ago.

Also what it analyzes is really boring and mostly to with speed of page.

Anyway it’s here if you want a look.

Who Is Justine Ezarek?

Adam — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:20:10 +0000

Disclaimer: Regular readers (do I have any?) may ignore this; I think you know what I’m doing..

Actually she’s no one.. Sorry to dissapoint.

You have just misspelt Justine Ezarik.

Who is Justine Ezarik?

She is often known as iJustine I believe? She is a life blogger/vlogger or something..

I don’t really know.. She’s someone for geeks to drool over as far as I can tell.

She’s is pretty hot I guess, so drool away..

I hope this was more useful than my twitter rant (I actually really like Twitter now by the way).

Are Madlib Sites Whitehat?

Adam — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:43:34 +0000

I’m never really sure what to write about these days, so I figured it was about time I checked my logs to see what people were looking for, I mean hell, it’s what the gurus suggest (damn I was looking for a relevant link but couldn’t find one; still I’m sure that’s what they suggest)!

What the hell is a madlib site?

Madlib, or mad libs as Wikipedia refers to it, was a children’s game where you had to come up with alternative words and then fill in blanks in a story. Something like that anyway, I’ve never played it, I’m not American.

How does this relate to a website? The idea is usually implemented in such a way that one can spin large amounts of legible, legitimate (? - we’ll get to that later) content from a small amount of content.

So for example, the title of this post is ‘Are Madlib Sites Whitehat?’. If you wanted to ‘madlibify’ that title you may come up with something like this:

1. Are Madlib Blogs Whitehat?
2. Are Mad Lib Websites Illegal?
etc.

Now you could fire this through your madlib function and you have a load of unique titles for a small amount of input.

Take this idea further, and you can see how it could be used to create 100 blog posts instead of 1 blog post. Or alternatively, let’s say you have a massive database driven website, you might ‘madlibify’ what would otherwise be static portions of each page to hopefully get more pages indexed.

Madlib sites are almost certainly not whitehat

Nearly every method of content creation that involves some kind of automation is pushing or breaking the limits of what search engines consider to be legitimate, whitehat content.

I think it’s a pretty safe bet to assume that if a search engine engineer came across a blog of yours with 100 very similar posts they would nuke it regardless of how unique/readable/whatever the content was.

Depending on your goals, it may be a fine option, makes a change from the usual scraping at least.

If you are genuinly interested in a fully fledged system involving madlibbing/content creation/automatic posting/blog farms etc I’d take a look at datapresser.

Stop Fucking Comment Spamming Me!

Adam — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:34:21 +0000

Please. I’m trying to travel around Europe not moderate comments!

Do not try and edit a post as Google Bot..

Adam — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:52:43 +0000

It really fucks up the writing editor. I wondered what was going on just now…

State Of The Aggregators

Adam — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:50:48 +0000

I’m off to Europe for a month next week, and consequently I’ve been looking for travel insurance and it’s really the first time I’ve had to look for insurance - Aside from student insurance for uni!I figured it would be pretty pointless searching for ‘cheap travel insurance’ or something similar as all I’d get would be a load of hyper-optimised crap.Consequently I thought I’d give the aggregators a shot. I tried MoneySuperMarket, confused and something called SquareMouth.

SquareMouth

SquareMouth, weird name by the way, where who I looked at first. It was super quick getting my quote but they were ridiculously expensive? One was £307.80 ?!?! That’s almost as much as my month long interrail ticket!

So they ruled themselves out instantly.

The site reminded me of an OS Commerce site or something too, maybe a directory, I’m not entirely sure but it feels pretty dated.

Confused

I was pretty annoyed with the confused website.

Firstly, the quote form was in a popup. How unnecessary is that? I’ve got about 50 tabs open. I LIKE having it all in one window.

They also insisted that I had to give them my email address, “no we’re not spammers, honest gov”. Yeh so I’ll be expecting lots of ‘reminders’ about their ‘great offers’ and other crap.

The email thing was particularly annoying as the other sites I looked at didn’t ask for my address.

Their tab indexing was all over the place! Yeh so, maybe you should try tabbing through your quote forms next time you change the order of the questions…

Some people have a phobia of using the mouse - it’s trackpad at most here…

MoneySuperMarket

Onto the most offensive site but also the one, ironically I’m likely to get my travel insurance from.They have the most god-awful quote button I’ve ever seen. Did they get a 3 year old chipmunk in on work experience week? I could have puked a better button myself. It’s like < blink >BUY OUR QUOTE< /blink > but worse.

Check it out:

These pictures don’t actually do the badness enough justice, I can assure when it’s flashing every half a second it’s the worst eye sore.

I can’t believe that such a massive, successful(?) company can employ designers/project managers who think that kind of button is decent and is going to help increase conversions.

What the fuck were they thinking? Have they just come back from 1999?! They might as well add a background .wav file or something too..

All things said and done though, their quotes were by far the cheapest and they’ll probably be getting my business.

500 Ways To Find Adam Taylor

Adam — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:05:55 +0000

Inspired by a post over here I present 500 keywords people have used to find this site for your general amusement and amazement!

adam taylor
setting up a blog
conversation matters
harry potter porn
adding google analytics tracking to 1shoppingcart
the big social media marketing myth
1shoppingcart google analytics
google analytics tutorial
conversion matters
google ecommerce
setting up google analytics
facebook dying
google analytics 1shoppingcart
google analytics ecommerce tracking
tesco compare
checkout conversion rates
google ecommerce tracking
seo trends
tesco compare advert
google analytics utm:t
harrypotterxxx
harrypotterxxx.com
adam taylor facebook
beginners guide to making money online
facebook is dying
google analytics howto
http://www.shepetivka.org.ua
is facebook dying
setting up blog
starting a search engine
harry potter porn”"
analytics _udn site
exclude social media filter
google analytics e-commerce tutorial
google analytics ecommerce
google analytics ecommerce tutorial
google e-commerce tracking
relative vs absolute links
tesco price comparison advert
adam taylor”"
checkout conversion rate

google analytics filter domain
google analytics filter tutorial
google analytics filters tutorial
make money online beginners
make money online guide
the hottest seo trends
what kind of lingerie are you?
comparison adverts
ecommerce tracking
ecommerce tracking google analytics
ecommerce tutorial
google analytics and 1shoppingcart
google analytics ecommerce conversion
google analytics ecommerce tracking tutorial
google analytics ip filter
tesco adverts
google analytics”" 1shoppingcart
social media marketing”"
1shoppingcart analytics
captology
conversion rate checkout
e-commerce tracking
ecommerce conversion rate
exclude all traffic from a domain
facebook dying?
facebook status updates
filter ip in google analytics
google analytics conversion code
google analytics conversion tutorial
google analytics e-commerce tracking
google analytics funnel_g1
google analytics track conversion
google analytics tutorial ecommerce
how to compare adverts
improve checkout
online checkout process
optimising blogger
people getting bored and dying
potter porn
setting up a blog to improve seo
setting up a blogspot
social media marketing
tesco price compare advert
urchin analytics tutorial
using google analytics with 1shoppingcart
what kind of lingerie are you
the hottest seo trends”"
three layers of so what”"
three layers of so what”" test
what kind of lingerie are you”"
what kind of lingerie are you?”"
10 killer tips for search engine optimization
12 week marketing plan
1shopping google analytics
1shoppingcart google
1shoppingcart thank you page variables
1shoppingcart utm
26 week plan
absolute links
advanced google analytics tagging
advantage of relative links
analytics “”exclude all traffic from a domain”"
analytics e-commerce howto
analytics e-commerce tracking
analytics e-commerce tutorial
analytics filters
beginners guide to affiliate marketing
beginners guide to making money
benefit of relative link
blogspot optimising
can’t get google analytics to work
check google analytics filter domains
checkout processes
compare adverts
comparison advert
conversion analytics website 1shoppingcart
custom domain blogger 123reg
data analytics tutorial
david vielmetter
ebook domaining
ecommerce google anayltics
ecommerce tracking code on google
ecommerce tracking not working
example google analytics e-commerce tracking
exclude domain google analytics
facebook dying out
filter ip analytics
filter ip google analytics
filter out ip google analytics
filtering in marketing analytics
filtering ips from google analytics
get the conversion script in analytics
google add ons
google analytic tutorial
google analytics - ecommerce tracking
google analytics _udn=”"none”";
google analytics campaign howto
google analytics conversion
google analytics e-commerce value
google analytics ecommerce conversions
google analytics ecommerce not working
google analytics ecommerce variables
google analytics exclude all traffic from a domain
google analytics exclude all traffic from domain
google analytics exclude domain filter
google analytics exclude subdomain
google analytics filter
google analytics filter domains
google analytics filter example
google analytics filter ip
google analytics filters
google analytics on 1shoppingcart
google analytics paypal conversion
google analytics security risk
google analytics tracking code tutorials
google analytics tutorial conversion
google block you website
google conversion tutorial
google old ecommerce tracking
guide to making money
harry potter nude porn
how do i set up ecommerce tracking in google analytics
how to filter google
how to filtering out ip addresses in google analytics
how to make money online guide
how to track conversion
http://thestreetbuzz.com
http://www.money.co.uk/article/1000390-13-year-old-steals-dads-credit-card-to-buy-hookers.htm
is facebook dying?
link:http://www.seductiontuition.com/david-deangelo/ -site:seductiontuition.com
live messenger addons
make money blog
make money online beginner
make money online for beginners
money making tips
optimise blogger page rank
optimising blogspot blog for seo
pagetracker._additem not working
pagetracker._addtrans pagetracker._trackpageview()
perl
query-cache-type
relative vs. absolute links
search engine optimization social media marketing job
seo absolute links
set up google analytics
setting up blogger
tesco advert
tesco comparison advert
the complete guide to making money online
toolbar add ons
track domains for different websites in google analytics
tracking ecommerce in analytics
tutorial analytics ecommerce
tutoriel google analytics ecommerce
unwanted data
using google analytics with 1shopping cart
utm:t
123-reg”" +ftp +blogger
absolute links”" html dokument
adam taylor”" itunes
adam taylor”" site:co.uk
adam taylor”" uk
add a contact page”" to my blogger blog
bj wright”" seo
checkout conversion”" rate
david vielmetter”"
designed by adii. sitemap”"
down them all”" directories
down them all”" regexp
down them all”" repository
easypizza”" compare dominos
easypizza”" sucks
filter by domain”" google
google analytics”" “”e-commerce tracking”"
google analytics”" “”e-commerce”"
google analytics”" “”unique user”"
google analytics”" +”"how to”" +utm
google analytics”" and “”how to”"
google analytics”" commerce third
google analytics”" domain filter
google analytics”" domain tutorial
google analytics”" ecommerce 1shoppingcart
google analytics”" ecommerce https
google analytics”" exclude traffic from domain
google analytics”" tutorial
google analytics”"+”"1shopping cart”"
guide to making money online”"
harry potter porn
haven’t posted in a while”"
link baiters”"
mail”" application add-ons
rate for shopping carts”"
relative link”" +benefit
ryota masaki”"
sarah graveling”"
tesco compare”" advert
university of durham”" -duke
want to know more about ppc”"
% who abandon checkout
.net absolute link
11 guide to makeing money
123 reg blogger host
1shopping cart and google analytics
1shopping cart google analytics
1shopping cart script
1shopping cart tutorials
1shopping cart web analytics
1shoppingcart “”google analytics”" ecommerce
1shoppingcart ad ons
1shoppingcart blocked
1shoppingcart conversion
1shoppingcart digital downloads
1shoppingcart form passing variable
1shoppingcart google analytics ecommerce
1shoppingcart google anylitics
1shoppingcart is being blocked
1shoppingcart pass variables
1shoppingcart pass variables through cart
1shoppingcart passing values
1shoppingcart passing variables to your thank you page
1shoppingcart quantity price
1shoppingcart ripoff
1shoppingcart security issue
1shoppingcart sku variable
1shoppingcart thank you url variables
1shoppingcart tracking
1shoppingcart update
1shoppingcart variables
1shoppingcart varibles on thank you page
1shoppingcart with google analytics
1shoppingcart with google tracking
26 week marketing plan reviews
26-week internet marketing
5 top tips for starting your own business
:.co.uk seo & sem

Mad-Lib Perl Snippet

Adam — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:30:39 +0000

I bashed up a quick mad-lib perl class for use in some future scripts. If you don’t know what mad-lib is it’s basically a function that when given an input such as us:we:i:them:she:he will select one. Given a whole block of text with multiple parts to be ‘mad-libbed’ it can crank out many chunks of readable, unique content.

#!/usr/bin/perl
package madlib;
use Moose;

## Fields for madlib objects
has 'phrase' => (isa => 'Str', is => 'rw');
has 'debug' => (isa => 'Bool', is => 'rw', default => '0');

## Function to select a random word from the phrase
sub madlib() {
my $self = shift;
if ($self->debug) { print "Phrase = ".$self->phrase."\n"; }
my @words = split(/:/,$self->phrase);
my $length = @words;
if ($self->debug) { print "Length of \@words = ".$length."\n"; }
my $rand = int(rand($length));

return($words[$rand]);
}

return 1;

=head1 NAME
madlib - A class to perform 'madlib' function.

=head1 SYNOPSIS
use madlib;
my $object = madlib->new();
$object->phrase("some:phrase:to:madlib");
$object->debug(1) # to get some debugging output
print $object->madlib();

=head1 DESCRIPTION
This class provides the ability to 'madlib' a phrase/string to create unique content variations.

=head2 Methods
=over 12
=item C
Returns a new madlib object.
=item C
Returns a random word from the specified phrase.
=back	

=head1 AUTHOR
Adam Taylor - http://www.conversion-matters.co.uk.

=cut

Won’t do much on its own but used within some other systems it could be quite useful. I’m thinking directory submission, social bookmarking etc..

(Yes it displays wonky; apologies…)

Creative Technique For Master-Link-Baiters

Adam — Sat, 10 May 2008 11:03:57 +0000

I was in the shower and an idea popped into my head, not something I’ve heard explicitly talked about before. I can only assume this is due to one of the following:

It could be a completely rubbish idea
It may be being used by sneaky people who don’t want it revealed
It could be a unique and creative idea not thought of before (unlikely but one can dream.. ha!)

Eitherway, I don’t have the required skills to test the technique so I’ll just talk about it and let other people decided whether it’s awful or not.

I saw a tweet by Lyndoman about a piece of link bait he’d written on the subject of credit cards that hit the front page of digg.

Then my brain went on a random path of thoughts, something like:

‘eh front page digg -> wonder how much he makes -> maybe he should bait and switch or use social media to promote his own affiliate sites; could make some nice extra dough -> hey, how about bait and cloak?’

Introducing Bait and Cloak

I imagine someone has already thought of this idea but it’s just possible that it has never been executed; the time and effort required to pull it off would probably off-put many black hats who might be tempted to try it.

What’s the frigging idea Adam?!

Everyone’s heard of bait and switch I assume: essentially writing link-bait and then 301 redirecting to another page. The problem is, if people notice, some of them get a bit pissy with you.

The bait-cloak idea’s simple:

Start a blog
Write quality link bait for 3-6 months on various topics: credit cards, gambling, travel etc.
Start redirecting the post to highly targeted, niche affiliate offers to googlebot (based on IP of course) and to people who arrive via Google.

After many successful front-pages, the domain should have built enough trust and authority to be able to rank for these offers.

Also this way people visiting from ‘citations’, or from Digg/Stumble etc. still see the linkbait but others see the affiliate offers.

Someone would no doubt notice eventually, but if you keep it quite niche/long tail you could probably keep this going for quite a while (long enough to turn a profit I reckon).

Give it a go Lyndoman or Graywolf - I know you love the link-bait and the shadier side of SEO ;).

Good idea/rubbish idea? Your thoughts welcome as ever..