Are You Paying for Disappointment?
August 5, 2008
Anyone that has heard me speak at industry conferences knows that I am very specific on differentiation. What I warn others of — enterprise customers, prospects, carriers — is that in this day and age of the Internet anyone can claim to be anything they want to be at any time. Thus, when shopping for services you need to understand that websites, brochures and Powerpoint presentations do lie.
You may have already known this, but if not, most carriers position themselves as “different” — offering what they claim is on-time delivery, network reliability and customer service at factors better than Ma Bell. The uninformed Wall Street analysts then take this positioning and place a label on telecommunications services — they call telecom services a “commodity”.
Commodity? No. You can’t store bandwidth like corn, orange juice or hogs.
And as I often say: Telecommunications is a commodity based on lowest price per the experts up and until such time it does not work. Telecom quickly loses its commodity label when network failure(s) occurs. However, like the differentiation discussed above, in today’s deregulated market place you pretty much have choice, and you get what you pay for. In some cases, someone may be selling you on “network reliability”, and they don’t own 12 inches of fiber.
We at AFS try real hard not to conduct business with Ma Bell and rely on non-Ma Bell carriers. Silly us, we just don’t believe in funding our largest competitor. We sort of took the Communications Act of 1996 seriously and decided to be a true alternative to Ma Bell by actually building/owning fiber optic infrastructure. Oh! Such crazy days for us back then; we should have just co-located like the others or install a switch … hey, what the hell, we were young back then.
Because AFS isn’t everywhere (or proclaim to be so on our website, brochures or Powerpoints), we go out of our way to do business with our non-ILEC brethren. Case in point: we buy circuits from a non-ILEC for our internal communications needs. We have implemented an all IP solution for our internal communications needs and of course we bought from a non-ILEC which in its website, brochures and Powerpoints lays claim to superior customer service over the ILEC alternative.
So onto my point about disappointment. A few days ago, we had a major service issue. You won’t believe the response we got. We pay for service, not disappointment, but that’s just what we got from our provider. I’ll explain more next time.
Written by Dave Rusin - Telecom Executive
Posted by admin | Filed Under American telecom, Telecom USA, Telecommunications industry, Trends + telecommunications, Trends in telecommunications
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Totally agree… great post.