Re: comast email issues, who else has them?

["Christopher L. Morrow" <christopher.morrow () verizonbusiness com>]

On Thu, 7 Sep 2006, S. Ryan wrote:

> Christopher L. Morrow wroteth on 9/6/2006 5:11 PM:
> > something truly wrong? So escalating every problem that seems even half
> > baked isn't an option?
>
> You're probably right.  However, if someone called my place of
> employment (a small local ISP) and complained followed by quite a few
> others, I would at least escalate the issue so someone higher than me
> can check out logs, connectivity, etc.. things I don't have access too
> to make sure there isn't a problem.
>
> What is unfortunate is the fact that this generally doesn't happen.  You
> get lots of calls and Tier I does the obvious and it works and works on

I think you are doing 2 things here:
1) assuming that there is a local and flat (all in one place and within
earshot) tier1
2) someone is correlating issues across all tier1 tickets in 'real time'
(or near realtime even)

> those others that call that the issue must be them and it's case closed
> and nothing gets escalated.  It's even worse of the problem gets
> seemingly solved and the customer doesn't call back for quite a while..
> gives the appearance all is well even though it truly is not.

Ask a credit card company about the number of sub 10$ fraudulent charges
they get on a monthly basis across their customer base, they do nothing to
stop it... in fact they don't track it (in most cases) because it's not
federally reportable :(

Unless someone has a ticketing system that tracks problems and allows you
to correlate the events in near-realtime for 'problem caused by' there is
no want to know when there is a mass problem :( Or atleast it's much
harder to do that correlation :(

> > Perhaps some of the comcast folks reading might take a better/harder look
> > at their customer service tickets and do a 'better' job (note I'm not even
> > half of a comcast customer so I'm not sure that there even IS a
> > problem...) on this issue?
>
> Most ISP's could do a better job.  The last ISP I worked at utilized RT
> for their support.  I think a strong ticketing system and using that
> ticketing system to it's full potential would go a long way in getting

yes, agree, see above.

> things solved faster as well as being able to see trends that could then
> get escalated without lots of pissed off people having to call and bitch
> whine and moan before escalation happens.  You could easily see an issue
> with a properly setup ticketing system such as RT.

.. and someone actually monitoring that ticketting system :) don't forget
the 'monitor the system part' because I would guarantee that comcast has
some form of ticketting system (just using them since they are in the
example/email here...)

> > In general blaming the first level tech for something isn't going to get
> > anyone anywhere near a solution. Perhaps Sean's actually saying: "The
> > right tool is to use another provider?" even though Steven's thought is
> > that the 'other provider' is in the same boat of clue :(
>
> ... good point.  It may not even be the techs fault on any tier level.
> It might be company policy, unfortunately.

yes :( try getting support for mci phone service apparently they stopped
providing it a while ago :(