What a Disappointment
August 8, 2008
The names have been changed to protect the guilty. Read the back story at “Are You Paying for Disappointment?”
Just days ago, our non-ILEC service provider had a major software glitch which inhibited traffic between Washington DC and Atlanta — even on a diverse route. In telecom vernacular, this was a major service affecting outage for anyone on this route.
Because we are 100% IP (a/k/a “convergence”), when these circuits went down, we had zero connectivity and zero productivity company wide.
The disappointment: Our Vice President of IT called this carrier by cell phone to tell them that the outage had us totally disabled, not partially, but totally. The response we received: “Your SLA is for one hour.” This is something I would expect to hear from an ILEC. What a disappointment.
What I can say with 100% certainty, a response like that to an AFS customer by an AFS employee is a career ending response.
The problem we have is that the non-ILEC larger carriers think they are “big” amongst the munchkins when in reality you can add up all their market caps, and they are less than half-the size of Qwest. Or add up their revenues, compare them to 2.87 trillion dollars in global annual telecom revenues or the 1.1 trillion dollar annual USA telecom revenues and these non-ILEC “big” carriers quickly amount to nothing more than a gnat on a rhino’s ass.
There is no need for any non-ILEC to assume the ILEC customer service’s culture and push customers around. They need to have a big slice of humble pie and start thinking about how to beat the ILEC because collectively we all don’t add up to much of anything compared to the big picture. Bad customer service will kill you. Our non-ILEC provider, due to this response, will not get a renewal from us, even if we need to pay more with someone else.
“Your SLA is one hour” — pure disrespect and bullshit.
Remember: The softest pillow is a clear conscience.
Written by Dave Rusin - Telecom Executive
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Surprising that a provider would act like that to another carrier. What is the cost difference of an SLA that gives immediate attention to outages and issues?