Thank-you Telecom

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nate

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#106386 23-Jul-2012 11:38

Due to the porting away (from Telecom) of one of our personal ADSL connections, our main office ADSL connection which remained with Telecom lost its static IP. Both Telecom and Maxnet (the new provider) followed due process, and we were stuck.

Our static IP is vital, it's loaded into the firewalls of all our servers, and without it we were really stuffed - probably the worse thing to happen to us, short of losing all internet connectivity.

Spoke to faults, and after an hour of frustration, turned to @telecomnz on Twitter.

Tony Dale (TD) on their account addressed our issues and worked tirelessly to get us back up and going. Our static IP had been reallocated to another customer, so he liaised with them to sort them out, then restored our IP back to us - even offered to keep working on his days off to get us sorted.

His service during this whole experience has been exceptional - without his help we were facing weeks and weeks of outages, reconfiguration and cost.

Thank-you Tony (and Telecom) - you've been brilliant.

plambrechtsen

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#660303 23-Jul-2012 11:53

Cheers Nate, I've passed that onto Tony. He really is a top guy.

raytaylor

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#660626 23-Jul-2012 21:00

I keep telling people who live in town, when they ask which isp to go with, and i keep saying Telecom.
They dont believe me when i say they have really changed their attitude towards customer support, but this is just another example on how perceptions have been changing over the last few years.

Its awesome.

Ray Taylor

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daparrot

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#660638 23-Jul-2012 21:31

Yes I have to agree

Telecom have come a long way in the past few years

If you had asked me 5 years ago who to use, Telecom would not have been the answer

Now for everything but email I think Telecom is a good overall solution

Although the one thing they could do though which would make life even better would be if there was a way us professional IT types could register into a system where we can ring a number that bypasses the Tier 1 help desk ( is it turned on etc.. ) and the Tier 2 ( can you push the reset button )
and go straight to Tier 3 for support team

Maybe to weed out the dross they give a unique user pin to key in and if we are no good it bounces back to tier 1..

This would save many $$ for all concerned.

At the moment problems like Nate had without the GeekZone backchannel are a real headache to sort through the normal channels.

Just my 2 cents worth

Bruce

NonprayingMantis

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#660646 23-Jul-2012 21:51

daparrot: Yes I have to agree

Telecom have come a long way in the past few years

If you had asked me 5 years ago who to use, Telecom would not have been the answer

Now for everything but email I think Telecom is a good overall solution

Although the one thing they could do though which would make life even better would be if there was a way us professional IT types could register into a system where we can ring a number that bypasses the Tier 1 help desk ( is it turned on etc.. ) and the Tier 2 ( can you push the reset button )
and go straight to Tier 3 for support team

Maybe to weed out the dross they give a unique user pin to key in and if we are no good it bounces back to tier 1..

This would save many $$ for all concerned.

Just my 2 cents worth

Bruce

I guess the problem woudl be identifying people who are genuinely 'tech savvy' and the people who just think they are. You don't want to have a tier 3 rep on the phone for 30 minutes trying all sorts of things before the person realises that actually they just forgot to plug a filter back in or something.

plambrechtsen

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#660647 23-Jul-2012 21:58

daparrot: Although the one thing they could do though which would make life even better would be if there was a way us professional IT types could register into a system where we can ring a number that bypasses the Tier 1 help desk ( is it turned on etc.. ) and the Tier 2 ( can you push the reset button )
and go straight to Tier 3 for support team

There was a great post today on InternetNZ

"If you want to see the sort of "Internet nouse" that this sort of venture can easily attract, go read Geekzone and you'll see the threads that will make ISP-type people cringe. "I know what traceroute is and *this* hop is broken..." sort of things drive support costs up immensely. As do bespoke solutions, working with customers that want to do something odd, etc. Just because someone is technically competent in one domain does not mean it transfers to other domains (read nznog/ausnog/ietf/nanog mailing lists for regular, daily examples), and certainly I see many more people these days with highly focused technical competency that are nearly at a complete loss when faced with something out of their usual domain, and the number of entrants into the "telco/Internet" networking expertise domain is in decline."

Couldn't have said it better myself (with my own emphasis of course)

daparrot

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#660662 23-Jul-2012 22:24

I guess the problem woudl be identifying people who are genuinely 'tech savvy' and the people who just think they are. You don't want to have a tier 3 rep on the phone for 30 minutes trying all sorts of things before the person realises that actually they just forgot to plug a filter back in or something.

Yes but that's the beauty of my solution, you apply to Telecom and get a unique pin that you need to key in every time you call the special number.
If it turns out your a muppet the staff can rank the call as such and the system could downgrade your privilege so you hit tier 1 or 2 instead of the tier 3 desk.

raytaylor

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#660714 24-Jul-2012 01:11

daparrot:

I guess the problem woudl be identifying people who are genuinely 'tech savvy' and the people who just think they are. You don't want to have a tier 3 rep on the phone for 30 minutes trying all sorts of things before the person realises that actually they just forgot to plug a filter back in or something.

Yes but that's the beauty of my solution, you apply to Telecom and get a unique pin that you need to key in every time you call the special number.
If it turns out your a muppet the staff can rank the call as such and the system could downgrade your privilege so you hit tier 1 or 2 instead of the tier 3 desk.

That could work well -
In the meantime, i believe if you say "I have performed an isolation test including replacing the modem and filters", even if its only to change the email password, usually gets you where you need to be - faster.

Ray Taylor

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