Commentary

Yahoo! The UK Needs An Apology? Again!

Yesterday morning, how was it for you? If you are lucky enough to work with millennials who dodge email and do everything over Slack and Google hangouts, then you may not have noticed anything unusual.

For those using the email services provided by the big UK telcos, however, yesterday was another day of mystery. While sites like The Register poke fun of anyone with a Yahoo address, the inconvenient truth is that they power BT, Sky and TalkTalk.

If a customer uses the email that comes with an account, they might not realise they are actually using Yahoo, only without the Verizon-owned brand appearing after the @ sign.

Things had been playing up for me earlier on in the week. As anyone with, in my case, a BT account will know, nobody seems to talk to one another. If an app on your Mac isn't picking up email, you call BT, which says that email is actually working and it must be your settings. These are, of course, the settings they suggest, and have been working fine. The app doesn't offer customer support, but just says if things aren't working, call your broadband or email provider.

Then give it a while and you realise the whole system is down, and Yahoo is once again the laughing stock of the media world and the subject of numerous irate headlines and many more angry messages on social.

It happens far too often, sadly. How often have you heard of Gmail being down across the country? With Yahoo, it is just not that uncommon.

Losing email is far more annoying that one might initially think. Not only do emails not come through, but when you are going about your business, there are no emails to call up to get contact numbers and addresses and so on.

I certainly couldn't call up a long number to tap into a ticket machine to get a rail pass yesterday, nor could I get an address from a message that, like all others, refused to appear. That made catching a train to a meeting rather complicated, to say the least.

Yahoo has questions to ask about security too, following recent scares that addresses had fallen into the hands of hackers. In fact, it had to confess to a couple of hacking episodes when it was bought by Verizon which brought down its valuation.

And yet, with all this, yet again there is nothing from Yahoo today to say sorry. Ok, so I've read in a couple of stories that a press release says the company is sorry. But where's the email apologising and letting people know their account is up and running again? Where is the corporation taking personal responsibility and building bridges with disgruntled customers it keeps on letting down -- many of whom probably only find out their Sky or BT email address is run by Yahoo when it gets compromised or just won't work.

Yahoo has become the poster child for everything that is bad in customer experience and customer relations, and it's a surprise the major UK telecoms companies continue to let their users down via the company.

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