Hey Teksavvy gang,
just thought I'd give an update on my thoughts regarding the company from the standpoint of my/friends more recent experiences.
I have been a customer with the company since Cogeco started capping certain services back in 2005/06 and joined the forum afterwards. Since then I'm glad to see that this company has succeeded and I sure hope it continues to do so. Unfortunately there have been some trends happening recently that cost Teksavvy lost business and leave the customer feeling unhappy. While I am going to document these, I'd like to make it clear that I think they can be overcome with some changes which I outline; maybe these recommendations are good, maybe they aren't (and feel free to let me know why not).
1) The wait times are horrible and the cost associated with it is lost business. I have recently recommended Teksavvy to friends; they phoned twice and both times they waited over 45minutes with no answer and finally hung up. There is no excuse for externalizing the cost of wasted time onto the customers. For new customers this is their first impression with the company and it certainly is not a good one. I realize there is an effort being put towards dealing with this situation but in the meantime it has cost you lost business.
Solution: Hire more support staff; there's been a lot of talk about it, but as of last week you lost business.
2) If the customer (me in this case) is a network administrator that only runs linux at home (fine, I have windows running within KVM)...your support staff should be told that they probably know more about what's wrong with their own cable connection then they do.
Background: after my POI moved to ATPIA and I asked to be moved to a new speed profile offered. Rogers did what they normally do when a speed profile change happens on my account (yes this happened before a year or so ago); they immediately cut my connection. I spent the majority of the night on hold then despite already having followed all the instructions that were given to me while on hold, I was asked to do this all again! Why have instructions while on hold if I'm going to be asked to do it all again when I finally reach the CSR because they don't believe me; can someone explain this logic to me? I was told that despite my router running linux, I had to connect my PC that was also running linux and run ipconfig. ***PSSSSSSSST*** in linux it's ifconfig, but yeah I got done what he was looking for (surprise, same IP issued to the linux router); explained to him that I was getting an internal rogers network provisioned IP. I got disconnected and gave up for the night after phoning again and staying on hold for another hour; then phoned back the next day only to have to go through all the same steps.
So to recap; 1) this had already happened a year before 2) I knew from the get go what was happening because I had followed the instructions during hold (and had done it before a year ago) 3) to add insult to injury both nights when dealing with tech support I was told to redo all the tests even though your tech support can't quite grasp that a linux distro setup to do routing has little difference for the linux distro setup to be a desktop computer with respect to which IP it will be given (seeing as I told them I could change the MAC on the router WAN port, etc.). The cherry on top of all this was of course that I waited a minimum of an hour each night before getting through (in addition for the extra hour on the first night). I can't quite blame the lost customers from above since this was ridiculous and it seems your support staff **must** make the customer go through all the steps regardless of what their knowledge is and if they've already done what you've told them to do on hold.
Sotuion: Allow your support staff to USE THEIR BEST JUDGMENT to expedite certain problems; don't turn them into robot tools (I'm looking at you Marc) like most large corporations do to their support staff. If there is an environment at Teksavvy where they already can use their best judgment then a memo should be sent out to your staff to remind them of this: If the user has already had the same thing happen to them before because of Rogers or Bell being douches and is a network administrator themselves then what gives?
The underlying question here is, why haven't you pushed Rogers to stop doing this to customers of third party ISPs? Are there no legal means for people like me to testify that their system is broken or that they are possibly doing this with nefarious objectives (most people will blame Tek for what Rogers did to me)? It is inexcusable to say that your cable connection has to go down for a few days before your profile gets updated and your connection gets reactivated. Someone is sitting in a back office changing what the status of the modem on their network is.
3) I am looking to get a fibre connection as a backup link (possibly primary) for our business. What is the status on the 24/7 accessibility talked about in here (Andre?): https://secure.dslreports.com/forum/r28440949-Now-I-m-PISSED-4-hour-SLA-fiber-link.-ZERO-CONTACT-TSI-
I'm assuming I don't need to deal with the customer tech support if I have problems with it? (Seeing as they don't know what ifconfig is or that other linux distros exist besides Ubuntu (wtf are they doing with Mir...seriously))
4) MyWorld limitations: If you are a DSL customer looking to order cable for your location due to the speed limitations (for distance and technological reasons) of DSL, this can't be done. There should be an "Add additional services" option. Relatives of mine wanted to do this and had to phone in and go through the long wait to do this.
5) Getting Bell/Rogers techs to show up on the date they set for installation. These subcontracted companies never follow through with the actual date/time which is first set (most recently in a another friend's cable hookup and my grandmother's FTTN upgrade mentioned below). The cost of this is being externalized onto the consumer and you read about it in the forums all the time. Is there anything being done to make sure that these when these companies lie they can't externalize the cost onto the customer (waive installation fee -- although this doesn't really address the cost of someone losing pay for taking a day off work to wait for the tech).
6) THANK YOU for adding the option to upgrade your existing DSL service on behalf of customers who will use this feature in the future. I had to do this for my grandmother and was told to do this in MyWorld, but the option didn't exist at the time.
I love you guys and I really hope that the wait times can be cut down so you don't lose business along with the possibility of holding companies like Rogers monetarily culpable for cutting users off their network for no reason other than their poor business process or intentional malice.
Hopefully this post clearly specifies the problems and offers constructive criticism; if not feel free to offer your own cc for me :)
Best,
Jonathan987
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