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Two Tales of Customer Service
I hate to actually admit it, but sometimes my company's customer service falls a bit short of what it should be. No excuses, it just sometimes does. This week I was again reminded of the value and need to service your customers at the bare minimum, the way they expect, and if possible, to exceed their expectations.
The Situation
Sometime Wednesday night, Verizon, the company providing my DSL Internet connection, suffered an equipment failure that cause me to loose Internet connectivity. So basically, when I got to the office Thursday morning, I had no Internet. And I had no Internet, until this morning ( Saturday ). This means that for all practical purposes, I lost two full days of work while 1) waiting for the problem to be resolved; or 2) working with technical support troubleshooting the issue.
The Bad Tale
Now I've been in the computer business for over 24 years so I understand when things break and require fixing. What I don't like is when I have to waste my time on what is obviously a problem that can't be fixed from my end.
While the support personnel at Verizon were friendly and attentive, they had a script to follow and by gosh and by golly, that was what they were going to do. Here is an excerpts of the conversation:
Mitch: before we get started, if I told you I couldn't ping the Gateway, would that make a difference?
A: [said something I can't remember and we started in on the troubleshooting the Westell 6100 DSL modem.
... [ in case you don't know, if you can't see your Gateway device's IP Address, you can't see the Internet, almost all cases. ] …
A: Ok, now I need you to go back to the command line and type: ipconfig /release
Mitch: Uh, you know that's not going to do anything, right? We just hard-coded the IP address for the computer.
A: Well, if I don't perform all of the steps on the checklist, I can't talk to the [second-level guy].
Mitch: Ok, ipconfig /release it is. Want me to run ipconfig /renew next?
A: Yes.
… [ an hour and a half of troubleshooting later ] …
A: Well, you may have a bad modem. We need to schedule a technician to come out. We'll contact you within the next 24 hours to let you know when that will be.
… [ and I still couldn't ping the Gateway ] …
This morning I came to the office to collect up all of the stuff I was going to need to work on today and just for Giggles, I decided to try to ping the Gateway again. Hmm, it kinda worked this morning and my computers have been in the same configuration that they were yesterday at 4:30pm when I left the office. Spooky. Applied Magic, even.
I guess the modem, feeling bad for wasting two days of my life, took pity on me and magically reconfigured itself and corrected the problem. Either that, or someone at Verizon finally got their head out of their ass and fixed the problem in the CO. Again, experience tells me it was the latter, and not the former.
I guess what really irritated me about the entire ordeal was the fact that I told two separate support people that I could not ping the Gateway and that both of them totally ignored the information and/or didn't pass it along to a more senior technician who might have been able to provide another opinion on the matter.
Right around the 24-25 hour mark, I finally got an automated message from Verizon that the problem I was experiencing should be fixed. Hmm. It was – and they didn't even have to send a technician out to replace my modem.
The Good Tale
The outage had lasted so long that my email was starting to bounce back to the senders. In my line of work, this is a bad thing. My solution was to temporarily reroute my email from my Exchange server, back to DiscountASP.Net, where the remainder of my domain assets are located. This would restore my personal connection to the World at large and I would be back in business.
Unfortunately, I could not find the documentation on how my Mail Exchange (MX) records were configured before I moved them to my Exchange server's address. So, I opened a support ticket with DiscountASP.Net, explaining my situation, and asking for clarification on what I needed to do to change the MX records back to their site so I could restore my email flow.
Less than 10 minutes later, I received what I thought was a case-creation confirmation email. But no; oh no; that's not what it was. It was from my new best friend Cedric, and here's what it said:
Your MX record has been reset back to original.
Thank you,
Cedric
Holy Cow Batman!
Cedric would have met my expectations by simply sending me an email with information required for me to reset my MX records to the default values for my account. He exceeded my expectations by actually performing the work himself thereby saving me the trouble. Yet another example of why DiscountASP.Net is my favorite hosting service.
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