Greg in China

Chris Horton from GoKunming interviewed me a couple of days ago about chinaONEcall, running a call centre in Kunming and the challenges facing the telephone interpreting industry. The story appeared today.

Following the recent earthquake in Wenchuan County, Sichuan Province, chinaONEcall is offering free help for victims of the Chinese earthquake, and for anxious family or others needing to contact them or the victims doctors / nurses in the affected area.

Just telephone the service direct within China to 4006 88 66 99 or from overseas to +86 871 805 8503 , quoting “earthquake crisis” and the chinaONEcall team will do their best to help.  They operate a 24/7 interpreter service for travellers ( business or leisure )  and are making available their 15 strong team  to give interpreter support to those on this present crisis.

Please note we will do our best to help, but cannot locate victims, doctors etc as this will be done by the relevant governmental and aid agencies.

Today sees the launch of the chinaONEcall Blog to replace our long neglected News & Views page. I have backdated articles since February 2007 which should have appeared on the News & Views page and will be keeping it up to date more than this blog.

The plan is to not only include stories about chinaONEcall but also any information of interest about travel, business and life in China.

Articles will be written not only by me but by all of the chinaONEcall staff.

For the techy people its a wordpress blog using MySQL and PHP. The rest of the website uses MS SQL and ASP.NET but you wouldn't know by looking that the blog and main website aren't using the same system as the wordpress theme has been created perfectly by CodeScheme to fit in with the original website design by Williams Graphic Design and original programming by Blueberry Consultants.

However the thing I'm most pleased with is that I was able to set up MySQL, PHP, PhpMyAdmin and Wordpress on a Windows Server all by myself. What a geek!

The blog (still entitled News & Views) can be found at www.chinaONEcall.com/news  or www.chinaONEblog.com

This is a graphical representation of the structure of this website.

http://www.forreststevens.com/htmlgraph/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgreginchina.com

Isn’t it pretty? Try it yourself at http://www.forreststevens.com/htmlgraph/

This may be the first of many rants about various large companies and service providers in China. There are two large online travel booking services in China (well actually there are many more but these two companies supposedly have English service and can take international credit cards). They are Elong and Ctrip.

I believe Ctrip is the largest. However Elong has substantial investment from Expedia. Indeed if you type in www.expedia.com into a browser address bar from within China you are taken to this page, which offers you a route to Expedia if travelling outside of China and Elong if travelling inside China. So the two corporations are very much connected. However, to me it seems unlikely that Expedia have any influence at all over Elong’s customer service and payment procedures.

Buying air tickets online has never been easy in China. Tickets are usually delivered and cash handed over even when it is an e-ticket. It is now possible to choose e-tickets and to pay by credit card for most of the domestic routes. However, if you pay by international credit card you are subject to a surcharge of up to 3%. Paying by Chinese credit card is a laborious process as there is no real unified payment system just an umbrella organisation called China Unionpay which then leads you to the page of the particular bank your credit card was issued by (and this is usually only in Chinese). However credit cards in China will be the subject of a rant for another day.

I’ve long been a customer of both Ctrip and Elong although I’ve almost exclusively used Elong in the last year or so, usually paying cash for tickets because the credit card payment process is so antiquated. If using a foreign credit card they require a faxed or scanned copy of the cardholder’s passport, a signed authorization letter and scanned or faxed copies of both sides of the card. So unless you are close to a fax machine or scanner you can forget about paying by credit card. This is supposedly to combat card fraud although I know there are easier methods, described later.

Sometimes this system works and sometimes you get a phone call saying the payment has not gone through. Yesterday I was buying domestic tickets from Beijing to Kunming so members of my family could come to my wedding in May. Because I was not one of the passengers I couldn’t use my card to pay and didn’t have enough cash for 4 return tickets (more than 10,000 RMB). So I had to get my father to send me scanned images of his credit card (both sides), passport and signed authorization letter which I then forwarded to Elong.

I received a call from Elong saying the payment was not successful. Although I can’t be 100% on this I am almost definite that this is a flaw in their payment system connecting to get authorization from the UK rather than a problem with the credit card account itself. However I persevered and said I would get back to them with a new card shortly. I then sent them scanned images of an alternative card of my father’s to the email address listed in the authorization document. Nothing happened.  A couple of hours later I did this again. Nothing. Then again and then finally once more this morning. Still Nothing. After lunch we called them up and they were completely oblivious to the whole thing. It seems checking email is something they do only if they can be bothered. I decided to cancel the booking and try Ctrip.

Incidentally despite claiming to have an English speaking call centre whenever Elong have called me they have only been able to speak in Chinese. On the odd occasion I’ve called them the conversation has started in English but then I’ve always had to switch to Chinese about 30 seconds into the conversation so that I can be understood.

Ctrip took the card payment online and within 5 minutes I had received booking confirmation. They didn’t require scanned documents, declaration letters or any such nonsense. The difference in the process was very simple.

Ctrip, like most online retailers outside China, requested the billing address and postcode/ZIP code, something that was lacking from Elong’s online payment form. I understand that companies need to protect themselves against card fraud but surely requesting the billing address is a lot swifter and less painful than a signed authorization letter, card copies and passport copies. If a card is stolen and used by someone else they have access to the card number, expiry date, security code and card holder’s name but, crucially, NOT the billing address. That is why most websites use this particular detail for verification purposes. Why oh why does Elong choose something so much more complicated.

And even if that weren’t enough verification most card issuers these days belong to ‘Verified by Visa’ or ‘Mastercard SecureCode’ which provide an extra level of security. I realise that online payment in China is in its infancy and that most of Elong’s customers don’t have international credit cards. The Unionpay system is hugely flawed and most people use escrow payments like Alipay or pay cash on delivery. However surely with more and more foreign tourists and expats with overseas credit cards it makes sense for companies like Elong to join the 21st century. It really can’t be that difficult for a company that size with investment from and co-operation with one of the largest online travel services in the world to do what much smaller businesses (including my own) do every day – take secure online payments.

So for now I am sticking with Ctrip as I was impressed by the ease with which I was able to make an online purchase with them.

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In a dramatic u-turn from the censorship of last week, the BBC News website is available in China for what might be the first time in 10 years. I'm not entirely sure of the accuracy of that statement but all I can say that when I first came to China 10 years ago news.bbc.co.uk was blocked and has remained so every time I've attempted to reach it without a proxy since…until a few days ago.

I wouldn't have noticed, as I usually use a VPN connection, if it weren't for this article on Danwei.

http://www.danwei.org/net_nanny_follies/bbc_unblocked.php  

I wonder how long this will last.

Interesting article by James Fallows about internet censorship (including how it will be reversed temporarily at a few select locations during the olympics for a few weeks).  Takes me back to when I was writing about this at University.

"In reality, what the Olympic-era visitors will be discovering is not the absence of China’s electronic control but its new refinement—and a special Potemkin-style unfettered access that will be set up just for them, and just for the length of their stay. According to engineers I have spoken with at two tech organizations in China, the government bodies in charge of censoring the Internet have told them to get ready to unblock access from a list of specific Internet Protocol (IP) addresses—certain Internet cafés, access jacks in hotel rooms and conference centers where foreigners are expected to work or stay during the Olympic Games."

Hi Everyone,

Until now my blog had been hosted on a server in the UK but its very slow to access from China. The ideal place for hosting a website that can be viewed at a reasonable speed from within China and from the rest of the world is Hong Kong – which is where my company's web server is. However hosting in Hong Kong seems to be quite expensive and I couldn't find a suitable deal for my blog. So I've chosen Singapore and New Media Express for hosting. Access from China is slightly slower than if it were hosted in Hong Kong but its quite reasonable (infact faster than some sites hosted in China) and Singapore is quite well connected to the rest of the world so it should load up quite quickly from anywhere. Anyway, we'll see how it goes. 

In the process of transferring the site I seem to have messed up the files for the theme, so you'll notice that the site looks a bit different. But I quite this new theme so I'll stick with it for now. 

Click here or above to see our videos

So much has happened since I was last on here and I just haven't got the time to get into it all but may try to when I'm a bit less busy

In the meantime in celebration of Chinese New Year all readers of this blog will enjoy a 25% discount on their first purchase by using promotional code "GREGINCHINAFEB8" – click here to sign up.

Our new look & feel website is up and running. Click here to see www.chinaonecall.com. 

Technically its not quite the finished product. Its an HTML copy of the ASP.Net site which will be up very shortly with the full functionality that's missing from the current one. But visually its not going to change much so please take a look.