Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

I’ve been curious about the Nokia N770 tablet since it was originally announced, and this afternoon I decided to take the plunge and order one. The ordering process was nice and smooth, and (unlike a lot of online shops) it allowed me to have my parcel delivered to the office. This is a real boon here in South Wales, where it’s typically a 30-50 mile round trip down to Cardiff (or Newport) if you have to pick the parcel up from the courier’s office. Ticked the box to have the tablet delivered sooner rather than later. Received the confirmation email very quickly. So far, so good. Turned out to be too good

Later this afternoon, I received this email from the folks who handle their outsourced supply chain:

From: Nokia <nokia@europe.pfsweb.com>
To: Nokia <nokia@europe.pfsweb.com>, STUART.HERBERT@gmail.com
Date: Jul 26, 2006 2:57 PM
Subject: your Nokia order XXXX

Dear customer, 

We thank you for placing your order on Nokia.com. 

Our security check has noticed some inconsistencies between the country
where your credit card has been issued versus the bill to country
specified under your order. 

We therefore kindly ask to provide us with all the references of the
issuing Bank of your credit card like the name of the Bank, the complete
address and the telephone number. This is what we do need to be able to
finalize the validating process. 

Please note that without any answer from your side in the next 5 working
days, your order will be cancelled from our system. We thank you for your
understanding. 

Thanks beforehand. 

Yours faithfully, 

The Nokia team

You don’t expect a major international company (or, in this case, their representative) to be asking consumers to send information like bank account details via the reply button, not in the year 2006 Fortunately, they’re not asking for the actual credit card number, but asking for the issuing bank details isn’t exactly risk-free either. And why via email? To place the order, you have to provide a telephone number as part of the contact details. If the telephone number isn’t there so that a customer can be called to query an order, then Nokia don’t need my number - and under UK data protection law, companies are not allowed to ask for information that they do not need.

The other odd thing is why are they asking me about my billing address? Why isn’t that being handled by their merchant bank’s system (which would be able to verify that yes, both my bank and my home are in the same country)? Makes me wonder if they’re actually handling card-not-present payments by hand, instead of via an automated solution.

Before I saw this email, I was really looking forward to receiving my N770. Maybe it’s the hot weather, but now my enthusiasm for this purchase has taken quite a knock. I can’t find contact details on Nokia’s website for a customers complaint department, so I’ve sent off an email to their customer services department asking for the right contact details, so that I can make a formal complaint. I’m sure that, by doing so, at the very best it means that I won’t be getting my N770 as quickly as I’d hoped.

By contrast, I placed an order w/ Amazon this afternoon too. So far, they haven’t sent me an email asking me for details about my bank, and nor would I expect them to It’s amazing the difference when you contrast a firm that understands customer service and online selling (like Amazon) against one that (so far) I’m not having the same high-quality experience with (Nokia).

It’ll be interesting to see what Nokia Customer Services say, and how long it takes for them to get back to me.