Nothing cosmic, just another reason you should be using a small responsive internet company rather than one of the incompetent behemoths with a big advertising budget.
Date: Tue, 09 Nov 1999 16:19:49 -0500
From: Jay R. Ashworth
Subject: The saga of my morning
I had a bit of fun this morning... the saga is below. Hopefully you, and perhaps your readers, will find it comprehensible, rather than compost. I've also submitted this to Taco at Slashdot... in addition, of course, to sending it to the fine feathered folks at AT&T.
Can you tell I'm a tad annoyed?
For what it's worth; are we really still at this stage in the development of the internet? Or customer service?
Cheers,
-- jra
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Alice in Worldnet-land, or A Trip Through The Firewall...
This morning I sat down to attempt to satisfy a simple request for one of my clients. He's an AT&T Worldnet dialup customer, and since he has a dedicated DSL link at his office, we thought it might be nice if he could use that to get his mail instead of having to dial up from the office, too.
Simple enough, right? In fact, technically, it ought to be automatic; this is after all, the Internet. How the IP packets get from one end to the other isn't supposed to matter.
Well, after about four layers of annoyance, I found out that it wasn't that simple, and here's the story of why.
First: let's go to Worldnet's web site and see if we can't find a support phone number. No luck.
$ whois att.net
Got myself a toll phone number. Called it. Not Worldnet, but here's a tollfree number.
Called that. "AT&T Managed Internet Services". 4 menus. Front liner. Three explanations. "Hang on, while I relay to [the second liner]." "Hang on, while I conference in [the second liner] [because I can't understand your problem well enough to explain it to him]."
Explain to the second liner. After three tries, both gentlemen having been told that I thought there was a firewall in the way, and exactly where my traceroute died, [second liner] finally figures out that that is, in fact, the problem, and "there's no way around that".
Great. "Who", I ask him, "can I complain to about this poorly thought-out AT&T Worldnet policy?" He gives me an email address, "@siteltech.c-o-m"... as if I don't know how to spell "com".
"Oh, are you a Sykes Enterprises employee?" [see the Compaq fiasco on Slashdot a couple months ago, if you don't get this question... :-)] "I'm sorry sir, I can't tell you that."
Oh, what; you'll have to kill me?
In any case, I called the (toll) number and extension he gave me; "we don't use that extension, and no, sir, I'm sorry, I don't have another contact number for you for AT&T Worldnet."
Go to att.com. Gee, here's a form (have I mentioned that I greatly prefer using my mail program to send people mail? Feedback forms should be burned at the stake...) to send comments to the board of directors of American Telephone and Telegraph.
Cool.
So here are those comments:
1) Why can't my client access his mail even if he's doing it from some other network connection? He's still paying AT&T for his account. I'm pretty sure none of his paperwork includes a disclaimer saying his mail service can only be contacted from an AT&T dialup connection. And spare me the "relay proofing" red-herring. There are other ways to deal with this than making the service partially inaccessible; everyone else manages it.
2) Why does it take the support people 8 tries to figure out what the problem is?
3) Why can't the support people tell me to whom to address my displeasure with the policy decision that, of course, they can't do a damned thing to fix?
4) And last, why do we seem to think that it's acceptable these days to hire out our customer service _and prohibit these people from responding to a direct question about whom they actually are employed by, on pain (at least at Sykes Enterprises) of being fired if they answer honestly? This is uncomfortable at best, probably unethical, and possibly illegal. Compaq likes to do it too...
This is the 90s, and this is the Internet, and it's no longer acceptable behavior to brush off any customer, because you never know whose ear that customer has pointed at it... or how many.
Just ask Intel.
Cheers,
-- jra
Jay R. Ashworth
MicroSys Associates
jra (at munged to prevent spamming) baylink.com
Wednesday, November 10th, 1999 danlyke@flutterby.com