Knowledge compartmentalization is bad for the customer
Category rants
Hooray... it's time for a rant.
Until last Friday, I'd had Time Warner Cable's internet service for 18 months without a single noticeable outage... I'm sure it's dropped from time to time, but never long enough that I even noticed it was down. Compare that to Comcast in Albuquerque, where it'd occasionally drop for an hour or two, or - going even further back - AT&T in Denver, where I'd routinely be without service for a week or two at a time. So I've been extremely pleased with TWC's reliability. Then suddenly around 11 AM last Friday, my modem lost its I.P. and was dead until about 8 PM. I was told the modem was faulty, so they sent someone on Monday to replace it. Meanwhile, each day I saw a similar pattern: dropped around 11, back up around 8, fine all night (presumably) and most of the morning... repeat.
On Monday afternoon, a technician brought over a new modem, and told me the signal was fine, so it must be the hardware. Sure enough, he plugged in the new modem and I was back online. I was fine all day Tuesday, then yesterday, down again. Same time of day. Up again last night, down again this morning. They sent out another tech this afternoon who told me the modem was fine, but that the signal was crap... the cable was going through about 12 splitters outside the building, which was dropping the signal to the lower end of the spectrum of acceptable signal strength. He ran some sort of bypass and drastically increased the signal. Plugged the modem back in and I was up and running again... until about 15 minutes after he left. He'd given me his cell number, so I called him up and he came back, changed something else and I was back up again... for about two hours. Thankfully, through all of this, I've still been able to get online, courtesy of some neighbor who hasn't secured their wireless network. I know, I shouldn't be "stealing" someone else's bandwidth. But I'm paying for connectivity I'm not receiving - from the same ISP - so if I can hitch-hike on their network while TWC figures out what's wrong, so be it. But that doesn't do my server any good, which is why my site's been inaccessible pretty much all week.
I called TWC again and they said the signal was fine, the modem was fine... something else must be wrong, but they're all out of ideas, so they'd connect me to RoadRunner support (the "Tier 2" folks)... who told me the account was disabled. But they couldn't tell why, because they don't have access.
So I was reconnected with the very same department I'd talked to the first time I called. A week ago.
"Your modem's fine, your signal's fine."
"Yeah, I know. But my account is disabled."
"Oh. Sure is. Are you moving to a different address?"
"Yeah, but not until this Saturday."
"Whoever handled your transfer listed you as a disconnect instead. You should be back online now."
"Yup. Thanks. Bye." Amateurs.
On the bright side, now I know why someone else from TWC called me Tuesday night asking when I'd be bringing in the equipment. At the time, I told them the modem had already been replaced, so why would I need to bring in any equipment? I was told that they're "just a call center... they don't tell us why. They just give us numbers to call to schedule appointments for people to return equipment."
Specialization can be a very good thing. Ideally, an organization should leverage the strengths of each of its resources by positioning them in roles for which each is best suited. BUT... if knowledge is compartmentalized such that each person can only see 1 factor in a problem with numerous potential root causes, efficiency goes straight down the proverbial toilet. Customer service becomes almost futile, because even if every individual who attempts to address the problem is doing their absolute best, the customer's still pissed off because they get bounced from person to person, each of whom tells them something different, and nobody's talking to each other. Nobody's collaborating (I'm Lotus-centric... of course that's bound to be one of my pet peeves). The taste left in that customer's mouth is especially sour when it turns out that the entire origin of the problem was that someone didn't do their job right, and nobody else noticed, because they don't have access to the information that would have made that immediately obvious.
Hooray... it's time for a rant.
Until last Friday, I'd had Time Warner Cable's internet service for 18 months without a single noticeable outage... I'm sure it's dropped from time to time, but never long enough that I even noticed it was down. Compare that to Comcast in Albuquerque, where it'd occasionally drop for an hour or two, or - going even further back - AT&T in Denver, where I'd routinely be without service for a week or two at a time. So I've been extremely pleased with TWC's reliability. Then suddenly around 11 AM last Friday, my modem lost its I.P. and was dead until about 8 PM. I was told the modem was faulty, so they sent someone on Monday to replace it. Meanwhile, each day I saw a similar pattern: dropped around 11, back up around 8, fine all night (presumably) and most of the morning... repeat.
On Monday afternoon, a technician brought over a new modem, and told me the signal was fine, so it must be the hardware. Sure enough, he plugged in the new modem and I was back online. I was fine all day Tuesday, then yesterday, down again. Same time of day. Up again last night, down again this morning. They sent out another tech this afternoon who told me the modem was fine, but that the signal was crap... the cable was going through about 12 splitters outside the building, which was dropping the signal to the lower end of the spectrum of acceptable signal strength. He ran some sort of bypass and drastically increased the signal. Plugged the modem back in and I was up and running again... until about 15 minutes after he left. He'd given me his cell number, so I called him up and he came back, changed something else and I was back up again... for about two hours. Thankfully, through all of this, I've still been able to get online, courtesy of some neighbor who hasn't secured their wireless network. I know, I shouldn't be "stealing" someone else's bandwidth. But I'm paying for connectivity I'm not receiving - from the same ISP - so if I can hitch-hike on their network while TWC figures out what's wrong, so be it. But that doesn't do my server any good, which is why my site's been inaccessible pretty much all week.
I called TWC again and they said the signal was fine, the modem was fine... something else must be wrong, but they're all out of ideas, so they'd connect me to RoadRunner support (the "Tier 2" folks)... who told me the account was disabled. But they couldn't tell why, because they don't have access.
So I was reconnected with the very same department I'd talked to the first time I called. A week ago.
"Your modem's fine, your signal's fine."
"Yeah, I know. But my account is disabled."
"Oh. Sure is. Are you moving to a different address?"
"Yeah, but not until this Saturday."
"Whoever handled your transfer listed you as a disconnect instead. You should be back online now."
"Yup. Thanks. Bye." Amateurs.
On the bright side, now I know why someone else from TWC called me Tuesday night asking when I'd be bringing in the equipment. At the time, I told them the modem had already been replaced, so why would I need to bring in any equipment? I was told that they're "just a call center... they don't tell us why. They just give us numbers to call to schedule appointments for people to return equipment."
Specialization can be a very good thing. Ideally, an organization should leverage the strengths of each of its resources by positioning them in roles for which each is best suited. BUT... if knowledge is compartmentalized such that each person can only see 1 factor in a problem with numerous potential root causes, efficiency goes straight down the proverbial toilet. Customer service becomes almost futile, because even if every individual who attempts to address the problem is doing their absolute best, the customer's still pissed off because they get bounced from person to person, each of whom tells them something different, and nobody's talking to each other. Nobody's collaborating (I'm Lotus-centric... of course that's bound to be one of my pet peeves). The taste left in that customer's mouth is especially sour when it turns out that the entire origin of the problem was that someone didn't do their job right, and nobody else noticed, because they don't have access to the information that would have made that immediately obvious.
