SofaKingCool

It has been 14 days since my employer Geko Direct announced I wasn’t getting paid due to “financial problems”.   It has been 7 days since we were all told to go home as the company was being put into administration.  Then today it was officially announced that the company is actually in administration.  It is at this point I will share with you the questions that have been running around my head.  So I think this might be a world first but I am going to interview myself about the whole Geko Saga.

Q. Did I see it coming?

A. No, the last I knew we were told that the company had been making a profit and our connection figures were looking good.

Q. What happened then?

A. I am not in a position to answer this as I was told the same as everyone else, the company is suffering from a cash flow problem and Geko were doing everything they could to sort things out.  Also due to the fact I worked in a satellite office in Stoke I was never actually briefed by the MD or FD (Dave or Vince) and was given the news via the Sales Director (also based in Stoke).  So this is still a question that is yet to be answered, how could such a successful company fail so badly!

Q. How do I feel about it all?

A. Pretty shit!  That’s the short answer, the long answer might include more colourful language.  I put my heart and soul into this job and feel that someone should have pre-empted this and done more to protect the staff and company.

Q. What are you doing now?

A. I am being kept busy with freelance web design work, I have had a couple of fantastic job offers but I am unsure if I want to go back into the mobile industry.

Q. Why haven’t you answered any of the questions?

A. Currently the company is going through the legal bits and bobs and I don’t want to comment until this is finished and the facts are revealed.

So that is my crap interview to myself, yes I understand that there were more questions such as who did I blame, and what “REALLY” happened, however I will keep that for another day.  I am not bitter about what happened, slightly miffed that only one member of the senior management team has bothered to keep me in the loop.  I suppose that is to be expected as I am so used to working my ass off, going above and beyond and getting no thanks whatsoever.

Anyway, I’m getting bored of negativity so I am going to say a few words on what good I took from Geko.  When I started at Geko I worked in an entry level position in a mind numbingly boring job.  I wasn’t about to sit there for the rest of my career doing it so I made it my own and hit the books, I learnt the industry, used my technical background to ensure that I learnt everything there was to know.  Most people turned to me with their technical questions and on many occasions I was given the task to sort out technical issues, crib sheets and self help guides.  I tried my best to balance the mind numbing job with the technical side but my heart was set on moving up!

I then moved into field sales and I’m going to be honest, I was pretty crap!  I couldn’t do the hard sell thing and preferred to take my time, build a relationship and work on customers one at a time which of course affected my sales figures, they were never rock bottom, but they weren’t at the level the company expected.  This wasn’t my biggest problem, I was still supporting the entire Geko sales force and sorting customers technical issues.  If I spent 2 hours on the phone, only 30 minutes would be spent doing my own job.  My day was split 70/30 with 70% of my time doing the support thing.   After some management changes upstairs things started to go wrong, I was still doing the dual role but this time I was getting disciplined for missing target.  So 1 verbal, 1 written and 1 final written warning later I was asked to go to Stoke to follow a sales/support role.  Of course I jumped at the chance, the sales director gave me what I strived for, a chance to shine and ensure that customer’s technical issues were sorted in house as opposed to just referring the customer to the network to sort things out.

The rest is written in the history books (and in these pages).  I have met some great people and learnt so much about an industry that is forever evolving.

RIP Geko Direct.

Geko Direct Limited 01952602260, 08707777701, blackberry, cheap, geko, gekodirect, help, Orange, scam

Oh how this message has haunted me over the past couple of hours.  The story goes something like this; customer pays for on site support, I advise customer to prepare server and create BES admin user, then I arrive.  Install the BES Express onto the Windows 2003 server, plug it in to exchange & AD, so far everything is looking good, yet the installation skips the MAPI option.    Anyhow, the software finally installs and I connect the device to the server to do a wired activation and set up.  I create a user and try to assign a user to attached device.  Then up pops the dreaded message  The BlackBerry Administration Service was unable to retrieve specific device attributes from the device that is connected to your computer. At first I believe this is down to the device being setup via BIS first, so a hand held wipe and cleanup is completed.  This solved nothing, so I checked the permissions of the admin account that was setup all looked well until I attempted to ensure that the account could log on as a service and realised that the right service manager in my computer differed to what I normally see, there was no local security option.

At this point I had decided that the admin account might have been setup incorrectly so tried in vain to follow the steps laid out in the install guide with no success.  It was then I decided to go guerrilla on the server, I created a user (in AD users and computers), assigned a mailbox (in server manager), allowed the send as, receive as and information store permissions (right clicked AD users and computers) and sent the test mails via outlook web access.  Following that I un-installed the BESE and cleaned out the old databases.  After logging into the BESAdmin account I had just created I started the install, this eventually threw up the MAPI option which was missing from the initial setup.  With the install complete I added the users and connected the device to the server, then clicked the assign device to user button and hid under the desk.  Whilst under there I noticed that the handset was doing stuff so jumped up and saw that it had assigned correctly.

I then went about generating some activation passwords and sending them wirelessly to the devices.  A few minutes pass and we start to see users appear next to devices, Woooooo Hoooooo!

Not satisfied with “just” fixing it I needed to troubleshoot the initial install to find out what went wrong.  After scouring through the old server logs, I couldn’t see any failure points and felt like throwing the server in the bin.  Eventually I noticed something about the admin account that was created for the first install.

The initial account was what the customer used as the main windows account and was a Domain Controller.  This is what stopped the system working, how?  I am still working on that one but if like me you had this fault then check the following:

You log into server using the BESAdmin account, ensure that the BESAdmin account is a Domain User, ensure it is a member of the administrators group, give it send as and receive as permissions and finally check it can access and edit the information store.  On a side note, if you use the windows server 2003 manager and MS SQL then you do not need to check for SQL permissions as it is set to give full access to admins by default.

So if you get stuck and can’t see any possible causes just check the account permissions.  Failing that give me a shout and I will see if I can help!

A helping hand, Geko Direct Limited 01952602260, 08707777701, 2003, bb, BES, BESAdmin, bese, besexpress, besx, BIS, blackberry, BlackBerry Server Express, cheap, enterprise, geko, gekodirect, help, microsoft, no complaints, Orange, orange bis, server 2003, uma

Hey, as some of you may be aware there has been some stories and rumours floating around the interwebs regarding a winding up order that was issued against my employers Geko Direct Limited. Now I do have a working knowledge of these things so followed the online vitriol quite closely.  For those of you who don’t quite know the facts; there was a winding up order against Geko Direct that was dismissed utterly by the courts on Wednesday of this week. The interesting part was that it was the claimant who dismissed the action as it was not considered something they were able to pursue… The matter is now closed off and put to bed once and for all.

I must say when I first learnt that this had happened I took my concerns to my sales Director who shone a bit of light on the matter, advising me that a winding up order can be issued by anyone but it is the courts who decide whether the company gets “wound up“.  I then started trawling through the internet and finding what can only be described as an online public flogging.  I did notice some of the comments made online had rather familiar names and claimed to be Geko Direct customers but most of which turned out to be ex staff members with a grudge to bear.  With the research I have done I figured that a lot of the words online aren’t entirely truthful as genuine complaints don’t end up becoming Chinese whispers, unlike some of the comments on the web.  Once the news of a winding up petition was being proposed against Geko Direct the rumours evolved and has been interpreted as Geko being sued via a class action lawsuit, losing it’s dealer codes and even going into administration. We are a medium sized business and connect large numbers of new business every day, we continue to do this in a very saturated marketplace and even during an economy in decline and public spending at an all time low.  If the rumours were to be believed we would have been out of business a long time ago.

I have said before that there are genuine people out there with genuine complaints but Geko Direct is a company that will not leave you out to dry.  I have seen genuine complaints out there from genuine customers, this information has been passed directly to the managing director of the company to be passed onto the relevant departments. I invited people to post on here if they have a problem and whilst I cannot discuss individual accounts publicly I can certainly pass on your concerns.

I have worked in the support departments within Geko and know how much work goes into resolving issues, as a result we have a massive database of happy customers who keep their business with Geko and wouldn’t consider anyone else.  We have some of the highest retention rates in the industry and pride ourselves on having “fanatical” customer support.  Our head of customer experience Lacey has worked tirelessly to create a streamlined and dedicated department and has employed from within, some of the best minds in the company to ensure that every customer is satisfied.

During the time I have worked at Geko I have seen a huge shift in the way we do business, for those of you who remember this site as a social network you should remember the tag line we used “constantly evolving”.  This is something that Geko Direct is doing. we are more focused on the “customer journey” and the industry is so strictly regulated there is very little we can do to miss-sell a product or service.  Yes I am biased as I love my job, the people I work with and the industry, however the views and opinions expressed on here are my own and are not fed to me.  I truly believe Geko Direct is a fantastic company to work for and be a part of be it as a member of staff or a customer, so much so my brother has his business phones with Geko.  Yes I know we aren’t perfect during the 10 years we have been trading there have been misunderstandings and mistakes but we always work hard to put them right.

2011 is a new year and with cellular technology moving quicker than ever, it is a great time to move away from the networks directly and allow your account to be managed by someone who knows the technology and understands your business.

Again I must stress that the views and opinions expressed in this post are mine, this blog and the content within does not represent Geko Direct nor do I gain from posting.  I do this because I want to.

Geko Direct Limited 01952602260, 02, 08707777701, administration, bb, blackberry, cheap, complaint, geko, geko direct limited, gekodirect, help, microsoft, news, no complaints, Orange, petition, ripoff, scammers, sued, voip, whocallsme, winding up, winding up order, winding up petition

Wow, what a fantastic month it has been for traffic on my little blog.  Whilst checking the in depth stats about who, what and when my site is being hit I discovered quite a few interesting facts.  Firstly there has been a great deal of interest in who I am, more than 30 referrals from various Whois sites all searching for the domain details.  Well let me tell you, I am Robert Adams, I live in Telford and there is a real picture of me in the about me page.  I work for Geko Direct as Head of Technical Support and love my job and employers!  That’s me!

So after a bit more administration and digging, I found around 5-10 referrals from domain tool websites all relating to the keywords and ad campaigns this site runs!  It seems to me that someone wants to learn how a small time blog can get great results for certain keywords without paying a penny.  Well if you want to know what I do it is pretty simple.  I write relevant posts and enter relevant keywords with a bit of back linking, all basic stuff but put together with some clinical methods.

There was one more thing that made me smile, I seem to have had a large amount of referrals from a particular porn site which kind of tells me whoever was researching me got bored and decided to entertain themselves elsewhere.

Once again and as usual, Geko Direct do NOT pay me to keep this blog updated, they do not have any input nor do they instruct me to post.  The views and opinions expressed here are my own and nothing to do with my employers Geko Direct, nor do they represent the views and opinions of the Orange Network or its partners.

Whatever happened to the pictures on every post?

Shouts:

Geko Direct: www.gekodirect.co.uk

SemRush: www.semrush.com/uk/info/sofakingcool.org

WhoRush: www.whorush.com/

Orange: www.orange.co.uk

Geko Direct Limited 01952602260, 02, 08707777701, bb, blackberry, cheap, geko, gekodirect, help, microsft, microsoft, news, Orange, scam, scammers, uma, voip

Yup!  Complaints.  We are a business with a massive customer base and are growing steadily and as a result we can occasionally get things wrong.  I am an employee of Geko Direct and know from first hand experience the massive effort that is involved in making the customer experience a good one for the end user.  We have a highly skilled and dedicated team who work in our after-sales department, in fact there are more people working in the support departments than sales!

I must add at this point that I do not get paid for making these posts, are completely my own opinion and are not “vetted” or pre approved before publishing.

Recently I have seen an increase in staff leaving Geko for one reason or another and a random spattering of unfounded complaints appearing on various business review sites.  Having access to the Geko Direct database I have run quite a few of the names used in these complaints and the results shocked me!  At least 70% of the names yield no results in our systems?

Whereas there are genuine complaints out there on the web, they appear to be the same person copying and pasting the same complaint on lots of sites in order to damage Geko Direct’s business.  Geko is  regularly audited by external parties to ensure compliance to Ofcom regulations and GC25 in particular.  Before any deal is connected the call is listened too and scrutinised by an audit team.  They check for tariff miss sell, cost miss sell and ensure that everything is explained fully to the customer.  We are not allowed to be ambiguous about anything and everything MUST be spelt out.  Only then is the account passed to our operations team to be connected and dispatched.

If you have a complaint, first take it to your account manager, if that fails speak to our after-sales team as it is them who WILL be able to sort your problems out.

On the subject of complaints, just google any mobile phone dealer and count the number of complaints, google Geko Direct complaints and you find 1 page of the same person before the results start quoting the Garmin Geko?  A company doesnt achieve one of the highest accolades from Orange and last 10 years even through a recession by ripping people off!

If you feel that you need to complain feel free, just add your real name to add some credence so if ever someone from Geko reads it they can respond directly to you.

Whilst I understand that this post isn’t going to stop the disgruntled ex staff members continuing to post their rubbish on the web.  It will however add credence to the genuine people out there.

Should you wish to add a complaint here it will not be edited or removed unless you are not a genuine customer or just want to practice your bad language.

A helping hand, Geko Direct Limited 01952602260, 02, 08707777701, account, account manager, aftersales, bb, blackberry, business, business partners, cheap, complain, complaints, Coolio, customers, geko, gekodirect, news, no complaints, Orange, scam, scammers, specialist, uma