In the last few weeks we have hit a couple of instances of Irish Banana republic public services.

We moved in to our offices and naturally wondered about how to get our bins collected. We have no room for a wheelie bin. We are on the first floor, we have no access to the back of our building and the front goes straight out on to the street. So we figured its no problem, we will get those stickers for the bags.

So we called Dublin Waste only to be told under the current rules we cannot use bags. Now bear in mind, we can see other people using bags. This was about six weeks ago.

After numerous calls by Naoise we were told we should use a private company, Greenstar. We called them. They didn't come out. Well ok they did but only after calling the guys supervisor on the fourth or fifth call. Then out he comes.

We generate about one bag of waste a week. The guy comes out and explains that we have to buy the bags 200 at a time and in total it will come to about €1500. Now ok, we are a business and I accept the fact that we have to pay for things but paying for four years of bin service in advance seemed a bit much to me.

To top it off at the same time we got a letter "demanding" the first "moiety" of our rates. I highlighted the two words on purpose. Firstly, they demand the rates. This is the first communication we have received about this "moiety". Given we can't even get our bins collected you can imagine how we feel about this. The second problem was I didn't have a clue what a moiety was, unless we are talking quiet man stuff here and someone is a "moiety fella". A quick search turns up the fact that moiety is the old french word for half. So these people who can't even collect our bins and demand our money can speak old French.

In the end Naoise got on the phone to Dublin Waste and threatened them with calls to politicians. The guy then says, while he was on the phone, that the inspector has just approved our request. Hmmm.

This has all happened in the same week that our telco left us without a phone for a week and now I have just been told I am getting no post at home all week as the postman is holidays and there is no cover.

I'm supposed to pay some VAT and PRSI now but I'm just not feeling it.

We have spoken internally about how important it is for us to keep customers.

With a recurring business model even if your acquisition of customers is slow, so long as you keep every customer you win, you can at least mark a date on the calendar when you will be in good shape. As soon as we have mProperty live we will be building in the customer service features.

Scott Carson, mentioned this on the Carsonified blog a while back and I agree with his sentiments. Build in your customer service features into your app and also empower your support people to use them. For example, we need to have a button for refunds in our back office and anyone who is dealing with a customer has to have the power to click on it.

Anyway, the main point of this post was Dyson. Seven years ago I bought a Dyson DC01, their first mass market model. Over last weekend it's main belt broke due to me not cleaning out some crud that got caught up in it. I considered buying a new one but I decided to chance giving them a call. Their phone system was quick and to the point, no shouting "One", "Two" down the phone. I spoke to someone quickly who took my address who agreed to send out the belts for the price of postage only. Considering this was a seven year old vacuum cleaner which only had a five year guarantee I thought this was great. I have since told several people how good they were about it. And I would definitely buy another.

So they prove the point up above. My seven year old cleaner will probably die sooner rather than later anyway, and for the price of one piece of rubber they have ensured I will spend about three or four hundred euro with them in the near future.