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Telecommunication Customer Service Worldwide
imin8r writes "
Whirlpool writes that an
Telstra, Australia's largest Telco (who
also happens to own all wholesale access to ADSL in Australia),
had rejected an ADSL user's
application from a small ADSL provider, but subsequently accepted their own
ADSL application from the same user. The funny thing is, the smaller ISP sells
exactly the same service as Telstra as they are a Telstra reseller. Both
providers use the same line, same exchange and same equipment. However, the
story doesn't end there. When Telstra was approached by the aggrieved user
explaining what had happened, Telstra offered him a settlement to keep quiet.
When he didn't, they disconnected his already connected ADSL service. One of the
arguments for Telstra's bad track record with customer service is the fact that
they were previously government owned but are now partly privatised (and listed
on the stock exchange). As a result they own a lot of the infrastructure which
has been paid with by taxpayers money, but any new Telco players still need to
use a lot of Telstra's infrastructure. I'd like to know whether full
de-regulation of the telecommunication industry in the United States has
benefited customer service and also what effect it has had on providing
innovative services.
"
Then we said, "NYNEX sucks."
Then we said, "Bell Atlantic sucks."
Now we say, "Verizon sucks."
The name may change, but the suck remains the same.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Similiar horror stories here but on a much grander scale. My part of the world (Rural Massachusetts) had limited high speed options for businesses. T1 from Verizon started at $750.00 for the line (ISP was extra). Then the city fathers, etc. got together and convinced Global Crossing to come in (before they went belly up). Now T1 with internet from GC at most $500.00. Long Distance was cheap, etc. However, the last mile was still Verizon lines. Right before GC came in a customer order and had installed a verizon T1 in less than 8 business days. For the same service under Verizon (A subcontractor) that service can take MONTHS).
Fact of life, those who have don't want to share.
The guy lives more than 5 km from the local exchange, which is supposedly their rule for qualifying people for DSL.
He tried to get service with another ISP and was rejected because he was more than 5km from the exchange.
He then tried using their service and was accepted (for unknown reasons -- apparently some sort of favoritism for their own service). It worked fine, even though it was supposedly too far away.
He complained that they were giving themselves special treatment.
They said "Well, you're beyond our limit, and since you're demanding equal, fair, and consistent rules, we're turning you off."
I mean.. he really got what he asked for. He shouldn't have ever been qualified for DSL service (and the fact that he was shows something sneaky is probably going on), but they really solved it correctly by shutting him off.
I have SBC, so YMMV.
I called them to get DSL when I moved (within Cali). I went to DSLReports.com and saw where the CO is and how far away I am. I called SBC -- They told me I'm too far for DSL (yeah, right, I'm like 1/3 the max distance).
So, I called Covad (who uses SBC's last-mile line) and got 1.5/384 with them. SBC's customer service doesn't know what they are doing, and what's worse is they don't really care to know.
Their office hours are horrible (I mean, most huge non-monopolies have 24hr customer service), you can't phone in a payment easily, if you get online billing, you don't get a paper bill anymore.
And the sad part is they seem to be on par with all the other baby-bells.
Just my rants on my local phone monopoly and they
're lame customer service....
(although AT&T's local phone customer service is 10 times worse from what I hear)
- Rushdan
Wireless is the only way out of this mess. I have a wireless high-speed connection. It is a fine piece of technology. As soon as QOS issues are resolved for the long term, I'll put my phone service on it full time as well via VOIP.
This is not the phone companys' fault. By "this", I mean this whole mess of line and plant ownership. I can definitely see their point of view. At the same time, I can see the point of view of those who want to use that public(?) infrastructure to roll out their own services. I just don't see these issues with the lines and plants being solved any time in the next 15 years.
Wireless solves many problems. I know there are scalability issues, but I think these will be solved. QOS is another issue as compared to hard wire, but this will get resolved as well.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
which works because we've declared that is doesn't work and we can't have facts contradicting our official policy. Furthermore, your informing people of this unfortunate situation directly violated our "Don't ever say anything we dislike" agreement, quite prominent in the EULA you would have seen if the service had worked which it never did, despite the fact that it did.
In my opinion, deregulation has led mostly to the development of marketing.
I've seen no improvements in customer service, billing accuracy or service. I have seen thousands of advertisements, marketing gimmicks and 'unbeatable deals.' Telemarketing and junk mail from telephone, mobile phone and internet service companies are at an all time high for me. It is no easier to get accurate information about services. It is nearly impossible to compare services between providers and find any appreciable differences. You can easily find numerous claims that one service is better than the rest and will change your life - with no evidence beyond the new ring tones you can get for your mobile phone.
For example, DSL Service. Deregulation has made it so that is exceptionally profitable (well...okay...maybe) for DSL services to be offered in Urban Centers, so that there are many competing companies offering service. On the other hand, live just 250 feet past the City Limits (as I do), and there are zero, none, nadda, companies willing to have the service go to you.
I'm beginning to wonder if we don't need a Telecommunications version of the Tennessee Valley Authority. For the American History Impaired, the TVA was created during the Depression to bring electricity to Appalachia, and other rural regions, and it accomplished it's goal of extending the grid to virtually everyone in America. Something similar could/should be done to encourage cooperatives or the like for Internet bandwidth.
I recently signed up for phone and DSL service from a local ISP, SoverNet. They said I'd have service within three weeks. Which is crazy anyway, that's a hell of a long time! But I figured, fine, the price was right and Verizon was asking for the same amount of a wait. SoverNet gives me a due date, it comes, I still have no phone. I call them, and they say that Verizon does all the actual work on the lines because they own them. They were supposed to come to my house, but for some reason they did not, and no reason was given. SoverNet says that there's nothing they can do, considering that they're a small, local company and Verizon is a "Baby Bell" with tons of money and lawyers behind them. They are under no obligation to actually do the work that they're contracted out to do. Since I wasn't going to be paying them any money, (going through a different provider) what's the hurry in setting me up with a phone line? And SoverNet said that I wasn't an isolated case, that they've been having trouble getting Verizon to show up and do the work they're supposed to do. At the moment, I still have no phone service at my house.
In conclusion, I feel that the government is who should own the phone infrastructure. Deregulating doesn't really work because the owners of the lines can still use their muscle to squash the competitors.
After it got privatised, things improved significantly for customers, but that's because they were so bad, they had no place to go but up (improvement). With private capital infussion, Telmex modernized its technology, hired more and more competent staff, and started offering new services. This sounds good, however it's really not.
The problem when you privatise something like this is that you get an "instant monopoly", and that's what Telmex is. With 95% market share for land lines, over 50% long-distance, and 70% cell phone share, all competitors face an uphill battle, plus they also have to depend on Telmex's infrastructure to provide their services. Telmex owns the land line infrastructure and, as such, is the only provider of ADSL service, leaving all other competitors at a serious disadvantage.
All in all, it would appear to be a bad idea to do this; a possible option would have been to sell the former state-owned company in parts, to avoid having a single point of control. Another would be having better government controls over the company (right now the federal telecommunications commision, COFETEL, is basically a puppet, unable to put telmex in check for their anticompetitive behavior). Because right now it looks like all competitors will eventually be out of business, either by bankruptcy or giving up on competing with a monopoly such as Telmex, and then the Telmex will probably have no incentive to keep innovating, which so far has been the only positive consequence of the privatisation. (ok, and they now install new phone lines in an average of 10 days)
British Telecom pull the same kind of dirty tricks in the UK.
I had a friend try to get Easynet ADSL - BT still do the end user installs and testing, they said his line quality was too poor.
So he phoned BT to come round and do an ADSL install for BT's own BT OpenWorld install, which they did.
He then logged on to his BT supplied ADSL router (via their web based interface) and simply put in his Easynet authentication details and he was instantly routed through Easynet (I actually watched him do this, and saw it worked fine).
He called BT and obtained a full refund for his BT service (on the grounds they are lying weasles).
There service (even commercial ADSL) is awful in any case, they do all sorts of rate limiting and obvious firewalling and stupid routing tricks (even on coporate accounts with externally accessible IP's!) and then lie about it for months. They denied flat out rate limiting P2P clients, until hordes of P2P users got together, did network through put reports and went public with it (thus forcing BT to admit they had been lying to comsumers).
At another company, I worked on a software development contract where they broke our routing for two weeks due to a routing loop are were too utterly stupid to admit there service was broken, even though of other users in the same subnet were effected and I sent them endless trace routes.
Once they refused to open a ticket because 'routing loop' was not a valid fault type in their help desk software!
The next time I complained it turned out they simply closed right away without saying anything or getting in touch (after pretending it was still open for days, which I later was told was not true, by BT) - it was closed with the comment - 'insufficent data supplied'!
They had a routing loop for two weeks, I'd sent traceroutes, time and date stamped for the last four days, they have source, destination, time, and the two addresses on their network that were looping the traffic, as well as a working traceroute to the destiation via another provider, what did they want me to do? Log on to their router and fix it for them?
In response I sent them a URL to a technical article on 'How to trouble shoot BGB routing loops on a Cisco router', just to make a point.
Anyway, ultimately, the company I was working for refused to pay for the service, BT sent a nasty leagal letter back, saying they'd take the company to court for non payment and said we hadn't reported any faults, and that we were lying. The company I was working for fortunately had kept copies of all correspondance (letters and faxes, as well as emails) and sent an even nastier legal letter back, and untilately secured a grovelling apology from BT (and they were able to cancel the contract).
They are an utter disgrace and oftel ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Disclaimer: I now work for Easynet UK, though I didn't at the time of either of these (in fact for the latter I was able to presuade them to swtich to Easynet).
The idea of getting different stories from Baby Bells (or other incumbents) vs. resellers is nothing new. Two years ago when I moved into my townhouse, the prior occupants had had DSL through EarthLink/Covad. Verizon was the local provider, and owned the switches and lines. Covad had the actual DSLAM in my local central office, and EarthLink of course sells service pretty much everywhere in the US, including in my neighborhood. When I tried to order my own DSL service through EarthLink, I was turned down - apprently Verizon told them, "equipment incompatibility". They said maybe my local switch didn't support DSL. I told them that the prior occupants had actually had DSL at my address, but it didn't make any difference; they swore that my line wouldn't support DSL. Later I was told I was too far from the central office, even though I was actually 5000 feet. This went on for some time.
After several more attempts, as well as going through Covad and calling Verizon directly (which did nothing - they just told me to call Covad), I finally discovered (through a friend that had a back-door into their systems - yes, seriously) that the *real* reason I had been denied service was because when I established local service, Verizon had switched the circuit from my house to the central office from a copper line to a fiber one. No amount of inquiry from EarthLink or Covad, or even my own calls, had been able to get them to tell me this.
I had Verizon switch my line back to a copper circuit, but even after this, Verizon *still* turned me down for service! That's right - they still told me (and EarthLink) that my line was incompatible. EarthLink finally told me they would not offer me service, even if I could get Verizon to declare my line eligible for DSL. The reason? It cost them $500 dollars per request to Verizon to establish service - I am not making this up, it was a sales VP who told me this. He told me essentially to go away, and try some other GSP. Of course, there *were* no other GSP's - other than Verizon themselves.
So finally I gave in and called Verizon Online. They too told me that my line was incompatible. When I asked why, I was told that I had a fiber circuit. I told the sales rep that I had had Verizon techs switch my circuit to copper, and they said they believed me, but that their computer systems didn't know that, so they still couldn't take my order. "However," the sales rep told me, "you *could* take your complaint to our Appeals Line".
Uhh... Appeals Line? What the heck is that?
Turns out that Verizon Online had encountered these situations before, and had set up an Appeals Line so that customers could have actual techs (rather than sales reps) manually re-evaluate their accounts for DSL service. So... why didn't EarthLink and Covad just do they same thing? "Oh, we don't make that available to our competitors; it's only for our customers."
In the end, the Appeals department looked at my account, and - shucky-darn, whaddya know! - decided that my line really *was* eligible for DSL after all. And that was that. After 4 months (!!) of trying, I had a DSL account established within a DAY of calling Verizon Online instead of their competitors.
That's what the FCC calls, "fair competition".
Of course, that was two years ago. Maybe things have changed... but somehow, I doubt it.
Bob
I'd like to know whether full de-regulation of the telecommunication industry in the United States has benefited customer service and also what effect it has had on providing innovative services.
No. The industry is now in the process of being regulated again. Many xSP's are in immediate danger of going under. The big Telcos quietly make it impossible for the independants to stay afloat.
Our government officials are in their back pockets and there is currently a lot of "back room" deals going on between FCC and Verizon, et. al.
One result is that now the Big telcos will be allowed to jack the equipment and infrastructure leasing as high as they want to. (they say "high enough to be profitable").
It has not helped the customer service one bit. The small ISP's have great customer service. The big Telcos are still as devious and downright evil as they used to be.
Example 1:
4 years ago I signed up for DSL. Long and Short: it didn't work. We tried for 1.5 years. The whole time the telco was charging me for the service with the understanding that I would be re-imbersed once they got it working. I had to keep the account open so they could work on it.
When the time came for me to cut my losses, they refused to reimberse me, and tacked on $2000 in fees. It took 3 (count them THREE) distinct Better Business Bureau cases to get my money back. Each time it was "oh yeah that is off your bill now", next cycle it would be back. Funny, the Better Business Bureau still says it has 0 information on Verizon, despite my 3 documented cases, which I won, all of which prove that Verizon is nothing but a predatory mega-corporation. They are organized crime in it's purist form.
At one point I was told by a Verizon customer service rep:
"You will pay for this. You are just like the rest of them, trying to get something for nothing. You disgust me."
The service NEVER worked! I never transferred the first packet through that DSL line. This was verified by their own engineers.
Example 2:
Last week my wife signs up for the Verizon unlimited long distance plan.
She called them to sign up for this plan, they went over a bunch of stuff and finished up with the rep telling her, and I quote:
"Ok mrs. xxx, everything is in order. You can start using your new long distance plan in 24 hours".
24 hours later I start dialing my cousin in San Francisco, from the east cost... then it hits me.
"Check your account status..." my internal alarm voice shouts.
Not only does the service not start within 24 hours, the account rep hadn't even signed us up! I called back, found this out, and signed up for the plan. The new rep tells me it doesn't start until the next billing cycle. You had better believe I will go through the same drill before using the service.
My point is, if I had just started using it and gotten a $600 phone bill, do you think they would have entertained the notion that the rep had given us bad information? No, I would have been screwed. They tried to steal from me again, as far as I am concerned. I was there when my wife signed up. I know she did it and how. I was listening.
Moral: Big Telcos in the US have gotten worse since deregulation. Now they are shutting the small telcos down, so it can only get worse. They do everything except reach into your pants to take your money. If I wasn't such a bulldog, I would have $4000 STOLEN by them from me in less than 4 years. The Mafioso and Russian Mob could probably learn something about doing crimes from Verizon.
I am not optimistic.
l8,
AC
And, unfortunately, suckage is not a zero-sum system.
Brill (yeah, I know, just bear with me) had a neat idea about conglomerate corporations. He was dealing specifically with media but it seems to apply to telco, too. He called it "antergy".
Generally whenever you get a company as large as Verizon, they talk about "synergy", meaning that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. They believe in the second law of suckodynamics, which states that delta suck ~ 1 / delta size.
Brill, OTOH, has pointed to several examples of antergy, where the whole is less than the sum of its parts (for example, ABC news refuses to run bad stories about Disney, but will cover Britney Spears' every move). This seems to be the alternate second law of suckodynamics, delta suck ~ delta size (there's an even more pessimistic version, which is simply that for any epsilon, delta suck >= 0).
Verizon in particular, I think, is a living monument to antergy, and a shining testament to the fact that Bell got broken up the wrong way. Rather than making several regional monopolies, what we need is publicly owned infrastructure and completely open competition for any companies that want to supply service on that infrastructure.
IANAA, but it sounds like maybe that's what the Aussies need too
All's true that is mistrusted
At least in the old days of AT&T if something broke you knew it was AT&T's problem. In my office I have to deal with four different companies. One company installed the internal system, SBC owns the lines, our "value added reseller" uses SBC's lines, plus we have another company for data and long distance. A few months ago our VAR decided to take us off of SBC's switch at the CO and put us on their own. Of course they sent out a letter saying that this would cause a 20 minute outtage but we should not notice a difference other than that. The problem was that their hardware couldn't handle the distance to the CO and kak'd most of our phone service. Of course everyone blamed everyone else and it took three months to get it fixed. What should have been an issue of "ok, VAR, you broke it, just put everything back to the way it was" ended up having me get all of the company's involved in fixing their part and basically setting up our billing and route programming from scratch.
I wouldn't say I'm a bad gambler but the last time I went to Vegas I even lost a buck on the soda machine.