customer satisfaction

[waider]

Having recently acquired some Sony kit, I decided to be a good little drone and register it.

First, I tried following the simple three-step instruction sheet provided with the product. Step one, click on the product registration icon on your desktop (this is after having installed their SonicStage product, which makes me giggle because it handles OMG files. OMG!), step two, enter some sort of profile info, step three, enter your serial number. Here's what happened: the site required me to register using an email address not containing a '+' (which I use for mail tagging). It then offered me a selection of products and suggested I pick mine from the list, except that it wasn't there. So I clicked the nearest one, then modifed the URL to change the model number to match mine, which brought me - without errors - to a serial number entry page. Which resolutely refused to recognise my serial number.

"Oh well," I thought, "at least I'm registered with Sony's giant mass of websites" - because that's what the first page of registration indicated to me. I could visit any Sony site, plug in my new userid and password, and it'd know me. Armed with this knowledge, I skipped off to the Sony US site (because the Sony gadget was bought in the US) and tried again.

It didn't recognise my login. Furthermore, on reregistering I discovered it'd allow me to use the same login as some other poor schmuck on the European site (someone else snagged 'waider' on the EU site, but I got the US one) and was happy with plussed email addresses. Kinda score one, score minus one, net zero. I fought my way through the flash-driven assware that is their UI and eventually got to the product registration. Click, click, er. We don't recognise your product, sir. It seems to have registered it, since I've got my Sony Points™ for the registration (twice, at that?) but it's consistently displaying an error when I look at my registered products. Oh well.

So today I was browsing the Global Support site, and saw a link to product registration. Figuring it couldn't hurt, I clicked it, and entered my Sony EU ID.

No go.

Sony US ID.

No go.

Sigh. So I registered AGAIN, getting another "waider" account to add to my vast collection, and it swallowed my data without complaint. I've no idea what this means, but I'm certainly TOTALLY BOWLED OVER by their site aggregation/consolidation...

Comments

[anavolena.livejournal.com]

how sad is it that i'm glad to know even big guys like sony have imperfect CRM.

[waider.livejournal.com]

I don't think imperfect even begins to cover this. It's the inital lie that my single sony login will identify me to all their sites that bothers me, never mind that I know how insane it is to attempt that sort of cross-division homogenity. More logins is less offpissing than being told I don't need more logins and then finding that I do.

Maybe it's now illegal

[mopti.livejournal.com]

I wonder if an EU law now prevents them sharing personal details obtained for bona fide business purposes in the EU with non-EU entities. I think I might remember (as one does in that annoying way) that there was a kafuffle on the fact that how personal data can be legally used different in the EU and USA and that this would affect companies legal abilities to share data internally. I could be wrong though!

Re: Maybe it's now illegal

[waider.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, but as I said the bigger deal for me was that they make out that this data WILL be shared, and then don't. wisn suggests that it's far more likely that someone was overzealous with the copy for the page I read, and then afterward couldn't get anyone to sign up across corporate boundaries - either for legal reasons, or more likely, for turf control reasons.