My point of view MATEY and thats yours when i pay £425 for a phone I expect it to do what is says on the box does my phone work NO =TRUTH what you think and others i could not give a DAMM=TRUTH.
Opinions are like arseoles everyone has one.
TRUTH

To answer you question: No. They don't ever fire people because of their incompetence. They fire highly competent employees based on locations etc., but it seems that once you're a Nokia employee, there's no way to lose your job other than working at a site that's being closed down.

Exactly 7 minutes before I read this thread I wrote yet another mail to Nokia "Care"... I'm trying to get help because Ovi Sync doesn't work for me. I've had this problem ever since I discovered the service, and after I found a lot of users on the web describing exactly the errors I get, I decided I probably can't figure it out on my own. So I wrote them. That was in May.

We keep exchanging mails ever since. They say: "Take out your battery, wait 60 seconds, type *#7370# to reformat your device, re-flash the latest firmware, everything should be fine. Oh, you will lose all your settings."
I say: "Oh, thanks, I did that just the other day, I'm working on a fresh and clean device now, I'm getting the same error. May I point out that many users report the same error with various models, and that all users say that other SyncML services work for them? Could it be there's a problem with Ovi?"
Then they say: "Take out your battery, wait 60 seconds, type *#7370# to reformat your device, re-flash the latest firmware, everything should be fine. Oh, you will lose all your settings."

We're having this senile-couple-type of conversation for 6 months now.

I know this is pure incompetence on the other side. I've given up on it, as I've given up on anything that has "Ovi" in its name. But it doesn't have any consequences. There's no mechanism there that handles complaints, no process that takes care of endless mail threads etc. ... it's like two girlies from the neighborhood opening a store for knitware, not knowing they'll have to pay taxes one day. Absolutely overextended by the burden of reality.

Now this is one of the things that drive me mad because I'm working in a customer service department. My employer is among the 10 biggest companies in my country. We did fire people because they did a lousy job (not as bad as the people at Nokia, but still...), we did try hard and even harder to meet the demands of our customers. We're not there yet (we never will be), but when I look back I can see what we changed for the better. And our customers see and appreciate it. But as I said, it was tough, and we fired all of those who weren't willing or capable. (To be honest, many of them we didn't fire. We tried to find jobs for them where they wouldn't have direct contact with customers. The managers had to go for good, though.)

I feel a certain kind of anger when I compare our situation (and the fate of those who had to leave us) with the seemingly sugar.sweet paradise that is Nokia Care. Where you don't have to do what your job should be: care. Where this doesn't have any consequences... because if it had, maybe some day one of these execudroids there would teach his staff to read the mails the receive. Then, as a second step, they could try to find answers and reply accordingly. Maybe they'd also someday discover the wonders of internal trouble ticketing and how it could be used to... oh my dear, I'm dreaming again.

So-called journalists keep telling you it's capacitive vs. resistive or S60 vs. Android that makes Nokias market share decline. Maybe it's just the ignorant, stupid, indifferent answers you get from their customer "care".

And this is just one example.

The only thing with Nokia is that no other company (except SE, maybe) has such brilliant phones. I still feel they're worth all the trouble. My >2 year old Nokia can do more than all these Androids and iPhones today... (and much more than the N900, sad to say)

Nuknuk, you can't expect them to not ship the occasional dud.

True but a mic problem come on ,Nokia are proberly having them built on the cheap hence made in KOREA, the n97 was a let down aswel,l the best phone i had was the N82 .

In large corporations you will find a large proportion of management are completely incompetent.
Sometimes I wonder how we make it through the next day...but we do somehow, probably all the guys at the bottom making the sun come up (as it were)

This is not meant to be a Nelson-type "ha ha", but I had the exact same experience. I left my name and number a month ahead of release at the Helsinki flagstore. I had gone in there to testdrive the N900 multiple times and the guy presenting the device just casually mentioned that "if you want, you can leave your information and we'll contact you the day we start selling - you'd be among the first".

Luckily for me, I saw right through that promise - perhaps because I'm a finn and sort of decoded what he said as an empty promise - so a couple of weeks later I ordered it online, with the distinct feeling that my *promise* of money, that comes through entering my cc details, weighs a lot more than just a casually left phone number.

I ordered on Nov 12th and received my N900 on Nov 23rd. I am doubtful wether I'll ever hear from the flagstore.

Maybe I got wiser from the gigantic clusterduck that was the iPhone release in Finland. I was in line for a whole month longer than my colleague and yet I pre-ordered several weeks ahead of him. It was just random and the reaction was the exact same as I imagine yours was: "Oh, you were treated poorly, ok, well I can try to find out what place you are at in line, if you want?". Finns don't often do apologies and rarely groveling towards scorned customers. The repercussions of incompetence are often inversely proportional to the size of the company.

blah

The Nokia store and the corporation are probably two very seperate entities under the same umbrella. Would be hard to figure out who is really at fault there.

True, but as a customer, I really don't care who is to blame. I just want to see some real effort to corretc it, not just vague "it's somewhere, we don't know anything, let you know some day when we got it".

That's probably one big issue for a large corporation. I wouldn't wonder if one would go on an internal back-and-forth blaming for some mistake and forget that the customer couldn't care less about who made the mistake inside the company. The do care for the company somehow making effort to corretc that it.

The flagship stores' primary function is branding. If they don't have adequate contact with marketing, things are even worse than I thought

That's a strategy that's known to work. The Austrian Federal Railways, once a government-run monopoly, was split into countless small companies. One owns and runs the stations now, a different one is responsible for the tracks, then there's even two that operate the trains (cargo and passengers), ... and more.

Yet they all operate under the same brand.

When you go to the information counter in a railway station and ask for details about a train, they tell you that they have no idea because they are responsible only for the station. They can tell you where the toilets and the restaurants are in the building, but not if the next train to Vienna has a dining car.

That's the way to ruin a brand, I can tell you. People go nuts over this.

If Nokia is doing this, too, then we know why they're losing customers.