This – the first blog post of our new blog – was meant to be all nice and warm and inspirational and New Year-y. But, I’m sorry, we’re starting with a rant.

I woke up at six on Monday morning to a few ‘I think your LinkedIn’s been hacked!’ messages - and by the time I got to the park (with dog), I was getting messages left, right and centre. A refreshing tsunami of goodwill. But what a ball-ache.

What made it worse – what’s made it a million times worse – is LinkedIn’s shit functionality and even shittier customer service. With a capital S, in both cases:

1. You can’t mass message people – or I couldn’t, for the life of me, find a way to do it – so I spent the entire journey from London to Stroud messaging everyone I’m connected with, apologising and asking them not to open the attachments in the message that I hadn’t sent them;

2. I did nothing else until 1:30pm – a waste of a morning, when I had prep to do for our 2020 kick-off meeting;

3. LinkedIn could not have given a toss. I pay them 20-odd quid a month and their customer service non-existent. You can’t phone or live chat with them; I had to wait 24 hours for the first response to my email and then they passed the buck and insisted it was my Microsoft account that had been hacked. I refuted that and had to wait another 24 hours for a response.  

Obviously, by then, I’d already been on to Microsoft and they couldn’t have done more to help – even though we couldn’t find any evidence of said hack. Superlative customer service and a much, much bigger suite of essential work products for less than half the monthly cost of LinkedIn.

So, LinkedIn, what exactly am I paying for you, other 20 InMail’s a month?  How can you plausibly believe the level of customer service you offer is acceptable? How do you justify it? Where – WHERE – is the value for money? Do you care that I now think you’re a pile of crap? (And it can’t only be me, can it?)

Conversely, Microsoft, I now have an overwhelming fondness for you that – remarkably – has almost negated the five months I spent battling with a Windows 7 powered laptop in 2011. Almost.  

Microsoft: 8/10 (would have been 10 but for that Windows 7 laptop).

LinkedIn: 0/10 (and I’ve cancelled my subscription).