Why Big Telcos Cant Keep Customers…
I always stay involved in the affairs of sales or leads that I generate personally at Convertec, a provider of VoIP origination, termination, DIDs, etc, so when my client asked me to get involved with Time Warner Telecom and the move (Very short notice move…) I happily obliged.
Since there would obviously not be enough time for a port to complete before the date this client moves (10/17/09), we opted to setup some DIDs and have Time Warner Telecom hard forward the clients DIDs to ours until the number porting completed.
I was provided with the contact info for the clients account executive and emailed inquiring about lead time on a hard forward. A few minutes later, I get a response saying that it would take five business days… Knowing that carriers often inflate service ready dates or timeframes on Move/Add/Change orders, I asked what the “real” expectation was as that seemed long for such a simple order on only a few DIDs.
After my response, I get the following. “As the leading nationwide provider of facilities based services, we pride ourselves on timely and accurate delivery of all orders. I’m sorry if 5 days seems “”steep” to you, but in my experience, this only seems the case when the carrier has set an unrealistic expectation with the customer.”
Now I understand there is a certain level of frustration attached to losing a customer and that it could be taken personally, but I felt it a low blow to respond that way, but not being one to simply let someone check me when they are out of step I felt obliged to cite my position with the following response: “I suppose it’s simply an expectations difference with regards to operational efficiency due to our smaller size. I only cite that as we work with Level 3, XO, etc on a consistent basis and its usually a same day completion.”
I never got a response to my “rebuttal,” but after sharing this exchange with some of my colleagues in the industry, it seemed an appropriate response to correct the account managers perception that all carriers take five business days to process a very simple order. I suppose this is why, so many people are making the exodus from the giants who have become so comfortable and complacent with their antiquated processes and policies.
Thoughts?
Network Neutrality and my letters to elected officials, media, and my local business community
As of late I have become increasingly aware that many ISPs and companies are choosing to openly violate network neutrality principals to stifle competition. The most notorious for doing this is Comcast, as they are doing it openly and in defiance of recommendations by the FCC last year.
If you are not familiar with net neutrality and its impact, I highly recommend that you read up on it here as it has major implications on the future of how we transact business over the Internet. In short network neutrality is the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally.
I have chosen to get deeply involved in this because of the wide implications that it has for small business as well as my business since we provide services over broadband networks to our clients. I started writing letters to elected officials including our President, Vice-President, Senators, and legislators today in addition to asking for meetings with those elected officials who will hear me. Read the rest of this page »
Time Warner… At it again. On 2 fronts!
I wrote about issues with our VoIP working with Time Warner Business Class a while back. Well, my suspicions have been confirmed. By using wireshark, I was able to confirm the receipt of an RST packet at the same time as the dropped call. What a load of BS if you ask me. Of course everyone from the bottom of the barrel rep, up to a tier 3 tech rep denies this and tell us they cant see any reason why a VoIP call would drop on their network.
Okay, here’s the lowdown. Of all of the complaints we have seen from our VoIP customers in December, only ONE was not a TWC subscriber. That one was on wireless and it was a blizzard outside with 40mph winds. Seems more than a coincidence that our clients on T1, DSL, and dare I say, wireless are having NO issues that would cause them to call into technical support. Anyone with half a brain can make the correlation.
To make matters worse, I hear that Time Warner is telling Viacom to pound sand on some dispute about royalties or the like. This will result in the blackout of up to 19 channels that Viacom owns at midnight tonight. I personally have TW at home, and the channels that may go black are some of my favorites. You can read the entire article at http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4BU0FT20081231 .
When I called about this and wanted to cancel if they didn’t come to a resolution they stated that I would be held to my contract and charged a fee if I cancelled even though I was not going to be getting everything I paid for. Moreover, my fee for services will stay the same. Call me crazy, but isn’t that nuts?
These guys did the same thing with Fox a year or so back and this threatened to blackout the Super Bowl last year.
***UPDATE*** So it looks like they reached an agreement with Viacom at the last minute, thanks for leaving us all hanging guys…
Fonolo… Looks like a winner!
Ive been hearing about this Fonolo thing for a while now, and while at first I thought it might be just another VoIP fad that would quickly fade, Im starting to see the light.
This thing has endless possibilities as far as im concerned. Not only will consumers have a quick way around those ANNOYING and seemingly endless IVR menus, but coming from the call center industry myself I really see an opportunity for this to be deployed to reduce costs and increase efficiency in those spaces.
Anyone ever tried to call Verizon (landline)? Its a nightmare. Next to impossible to get where you want to go unless you have 20 minutes and alot of patience. Fonolo changes all that and makes it easy to navigate to where you want to go.
I would pin this to be one of the big trends in VoIP and related technology in the coming year.
ooVoo, pretty sweet so far!
I was recently watching TV lately and saw quite the creative commercial where a man is in a boardroom giving a presentation and a ringing comes on, he initially ignores it. Again the ringing comes on, and he answers to see his young daughter pop up on the screen. They begin a short dialog, and then the little girl says to her father “make some money” and the boardroom erupts into a small laughter.
I though the console looked nice so I decided to give it a whirl. So far, Wow. Although the free software is ad supported, it allows for multi-presence video and audio conferencing and supports HD. You can Frame up to 30fps, do full screen, or see each individual (up to 6) simultaneously. We begun using it here in the office and outfitted our execs and management with a webcam along with our conference room and a remote location.
We had been searching for a video conferencing solution for some time, albeit not aggressively, and considered all the majors you might think of such as Polycom, Cisco, and sightspeed. We just couldn’t justify the cost of these solutions at the time. Now that we have seen the awesome power of this free conference system, we think that once we grow out of it, we could rationalize the cost.
I think that this is certainly worth a look, We have played with combining our eyebeam VoIP softphones with this and love the functionality so far. The built in audio is okay, but with the high bandwidth setting we use, we preferred to use our VoIP as we can control the QoS. Check it out at http://www.ooVoo.com
Vonage… Enough said.
The word “Port” or “LNP” makes me cringe a bit as it is, but when you put Vonage in the same sentence you had better have a stash of tums and xanax handy as I recently found out. An issue came to me that involved an issues with a customer who was porting their number to Vonage. I figured “simple enough: Ive handled the complex stuff long enough that it should be a quick call and email to the right person and voila! That was most certainly not the case.
Read the rest of this page »
Time Warner ISP issues since their debut of Digital Phone
It seems as if the Time Warner folks have been having some issues making their Data network “work” with their digital phone here in North Idaho. Ever since they made the launch, we have been plagued with downtime, interruptions, and intermittent service. Sometimes it lasts a few minutes, other times hours.
With hundreds of our VoIP customers using Time Warner as their ISP, it definitely causes concerns for me so I decided to make some calls to the folks at tech support. Of course the tier 1 and 2 agents had no idea what I was talking about, but once I got to a higher level person he eluded to the fact that their digital phone was causing “issues” with their data network… Read the rest of this page »
Telecoms push US House to tighten FCC regulations on competition
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Below is an excerpt from the Jurist regarding something that is close to me. I aggressively wrote members of of various committees at the house and senate about unfair competition and how the incumbents cant take the heat so they try and stiff the up and coming little guys with endless policy, mazes of people to talk to, and outright ignorance. Read the rest of this page »
My battle with the braindead goliath that is XO communications
Being in the telecom business it is a given that we have to work with several carriers in order to provide service to our end users. When we first started we only had one carrier to deal with who actually was the one to work with all the underlying carriers (XO, Verizon, AT&T, Qwest, etc). Now that we have grown, we have out grown that solution and established relationships with some providers directly. Read the rest of this page »
