(This is the Online column, written for The Southland Times)
(aka WEEK 2 of my battle for good customer service)
I seem to be having some major difficulties when it comes to customer service lately and can’t help wondering if I am being punished for being something really bad in a former life: someone who was unkind to small, furry animals or perhaps a Leo Sayer fan.
After my postal dramas with NZ Post (still haven’t received the package or compensation), I’m now on the receiving end of special treatment via my ISP, Xtra.
Once in a very rare while I manage to go over my 10GB-a-month broadband data cap and get throttled back to dial up speeds until the end of the billing month. That happened in December and I had to deal with 5 days of slow internet. Then we had that little outage last week that put many of Xtra’s customers offline for nearly a full day.
One point about that incident (and every Xtra outage for that matter) was that when I did manage to connect for a short period I went to Xtra’s website, where the help section informed me that there were no known issues with the Xtra network.
In a parallel universe, perhaps.
My next step was to phone the helpline, where I struck the lovely (yes folks, that was sarcasm) voice-recognising, creepy, automated and incredibly irritating female voice that asks you questions so you can be directed to the right department.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather just push a button for the correct department than play 20 questions with a machine. Besides, the fact that I was phoning the broadband helpline might indicate I wanted help with my broadband connection. It’s not rocket science guys. Anyway, it was there I finally got a pre-recorded message saying the system was a bit buggered.
On Friday night I was finally back online but at incredible slow speeds so once again phoned. The reasonably helpful technician I spoke with said the network was back up and running and the problem was at my end.
He then spent half an hour talking me through various solutions until he concluded that there may be a problem with my phone line and suggested I call faults the next day, explain that there was static on my phone line and I couldn’t connect to broadband and that he’d suggested I ask them to test my line.
I did as he suggested, only to end up having a circular conversation with the woman on the other end of the line who kept telling me I needed to call the broadband helpdesk for connection issues, then ignoring me when I passed on what the helpdesk dude had said.
Eventually, she informed me that she couldn’t test my line because the system was down, and hung up on me. Nice.
Back to the broadband helpdesk, where once again a helpful technician had me crawling around under desks and behind tables, unplugging phones and modems to try to fix the problem.
But it was all in vain.
He decided he needed to pass me on to an advanced technician because my modem was connecting at the right speed, so the fault was probably somewhere in cyberspace.
Mr Advanced Technician proved about as helpful as Ms Faults. Mr Technician sent me to Xtra’s speed test webpage for a verdict on the speed, or lack of. I came in at a whopping 2.78Kbps (yes, that was sarcasm again). That makes dial-up feel like a Ferrari.
So, now I’m waiting for some kind of fix. He informed me that I need to do three speed tests a day for three days and send the results to their network people, who then study it all for at least 15 days and look for patterns with other users before deciding if they’ll open things up.
Now that’s service.
So, I’m looking for a new ISP guys, any recommendations?