[Asterisk-Users] ITSPs with good phone support

[Rich Adamson]

> With the recent service outage at Broadvoice, there has been a lot of 
> discussion here, on broadband reports, Voxilla, etc., regarding whether 
> VOIP is mature, or "ready for the masses", etc.
> 
> One particular point I've seen repeated, and with which I agree:
> 
> "we're willing to deal with less than five 9s, even one or 2 9s, as long 
> as we have good communication regarding the issue and its resolution."
> 
> In other words, good customer relations are as important or even more 
> important than the highest quality of service.

<snip>

> Who's the leading contender for "customer service of the year" award 
> among the dozens of providers that show up on the Wiki?

Seems the majority have been or were an isp at one time, and have
implemented a defacto isp model for customer service. I'd have to guess
that a fair number really don't have a clue what a good/reasonable
target happens to be. The flip side of that is that good customer
service staffing is expensive and is often times treated as an
unwanted / under-planned / under-budgeted operating overhead that
is viewed by many as the target for cost control, etc.

For the few times that I've had to interact with livevoip.com and teliax.com
support, both have been very responsive. Both still seem to emphasize the
use of email for interaction, but at least my issues were resolved very
quickly with that approach. (For both companies, as soon as they 
realized that I knew what the hell I was talking about, diagnosing
the issue and resolving the problem occurred very quickly. I can just
imagine how many calls/emails they get where their customer is reporting
a problem that involves a total lack of skills, understanding, mis-
configured BOYD equipment, etc. We certainly see it on this list!)

If you read between the lines, its not difficult to see that many of the
itsp's were started with a primary objective of being purchased by some
other larger company. We've already seen some results of that in several 
recent forms. Those companies only do whatever they think is necessary
to 'appear' solid, which also includes managing their customer service
overhead to some reasonable level (defined in their minds, not ours).

As the itsp space shakes out over time, the winners are likely to be
those that do offer some reasonable customer service in combination with
acceptable marketing plans, etc. Until that happens, customer service is
likely to vary rather dramatically even within the same itsp. So, what
you see for custoemr service today from an itsp may be rather different 
from what you see tomorrow or next week, and those changes can certainly
be positive or negative.