From TCrabill@flashcom.com Fri Dec 1 13:40:06 2000 Return-Path: Received: from noc.nyx.net (noc.nyx.net [206.124.29.3]) by mail1.panix.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9163B487FC for ; Fri, 1 Dec 2000 13:26:23 -0500 (EST) Received: from nyx10.nyx.net (root@nyx10.nyx.net [206.124.29.2]) by noc.nyx.net (8.9.1a+3.1W/8.9.1/esr) with ESMTP id LAA22448 for ; Fri, 1 Dec 2000 11:34:06 -0700 (MST) Received: from west10.flashcom.com (d83b0704.hb.flashcom.com [216.59.7.4]) by nyx10.nyx.net (8.8.8/8.8.8/esr) with ESMTP id LAA28755 for ; Fri, 1 Dec 2000 11:32:55 -0700 (MST) X-Nyx-Envelope-Data: Date=Fri Dec 1 11:32:55 2000, Sender=TCrabill@flashcom.com, Recipient=, Valsender=d83b0704.hb.flashcom.com [216.59.7.4] Received: by d83b0704.hb.flashcom.com with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) id ; Fri, 1 Dec 2000 10:36:12 -0800 Message-ID: <6314D2E70A21D411AF7F00D0B769624E7ECF67@40bc72cf.pp.flashcom.com> From: Timothy Crabill To: "'Scott Norwood'" Subject: RE: disgruntled customer Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000 10:32:26 -0800 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01C05BC5.0D92BFE0" [ Part 1, Text/PLAIN (charset: ISO-8859-1 "Latin 1") 146 lines. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] [ The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set. ] [ Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] RE: disgruntled customer

Your line as been cancelled and we are waiting for our carrier to now cancel your order as well.

With Regards,

Timothy Crabill
Escalations Team
Together Everyone Achieves More!




-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Norwood [mailto:snorwood@nyx.net]
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2000 9:10 AM
To: rjones@flashcom.net; DSL Support; President
Subject: disgruntled customer


Hi --

This morning (~11:30am, EST), I spoke with Mr. Richard Clinton in
Customer Service in the San Diego office of Flashcom; he was very
helpful in explaining things and he suggested that I forward some of my
comments to you.  I currently have two open trouble tickets for which I
have received no resolution or status information.  If there is a more
appropriate person for these comments, please feel free to forward them
to that person.


First, and most importantly, this level of service to which I have
committed to a one-year contract has been substantially altered since
I first signed up for it back in September.  At the time, it was being
sold as a "business-grade" service (192k SDSL, $99/month, one-year
commitment).  Part of this service included, at the time, 24-hour
technical support for outages and the like.

Apparently, this level of technical support has recently been reduced
to 8am-5pm PST, rather than 24 hours as promised or 5am-6pm PST per the
Flashcom web site).  This is totally unacceptible for a service which
is being sold as a "business-grade" product.  Here on the east coast, I
lose nearly half a business day before I can even talk to anyone about
service problems.

Because the level of service provided has been radically changed since
I first signed up for the one-year contract for the service, I would like
to request either a permanent rate reduction in order to compensate for
the reduced level of support or, preferably, the ability to cancel the
service without incurring the usual penalties associated with doing so
prior to the end of the contract term.


Second, I would like to complain about the nonresponsiveness to the
trouble tickets which I have opened.  It appears that, in many cases,
your employees are either unwilling or unable (either by lack of
knowledge or artificial limits imposed by management) to respond
to trouble tickets.  Additioinally, a 24-hour "expected" (but not
promised) turnaround time is unacceptible for a service which is being
sold as "business-grade."  Unfortunately, this fact was not made clear
to me until long after I had signed up for the service.

I have not once received an acceptible response to having opened a
trouble ticket.  I do not think that it is unreasonable for me
to expect, at the very least, a progress update within the first hour
or so after issuing a serious trouble ticket, such as for a total
or intermittent loss of connectivity.  On several occasions, I have
had my router lose sync for minutes or hours at a time, with no
explanation and no progress reports for the repair.  Again, this
is unacceptible.

In at least one other case, the trouble ticket as entered into your
database was blatantly wrong:  I had called to complain about the news
server (which apparently is outsourced to Supernews) rejecting incoming
connections on port 119, which anyone who is at all familiar with how
news works would recognize as a serious problem.  Unfortunately, the
individual to whom I reported this problem kept insisting that the
problem was that I had never signed up for a Flashcom email account
(why should I bother?  I don't need or want one!) and apparently added
something about "the customer was uncooperative" to the trouble ticket
instead of attempting to understand what I meant when I explained to
him that a refused telnet connection on port 119 of the news server has
nothing to do with anything related to email accounts.

In yet another case, when I attempted to complain about a loss of
connectivity, the employee somehow thought that the problem was one
of my network hubs and could not comprehend the idea that I could ping
and telnet to the router just fine (which rules out an issue with a
hub) and that pinging remote hosts while logged into the router always
failed, thus indicating a network problem.


Third, I would like to point out that there are certain aspects of
the customer-service telephone menu system are horribly broken; for
example, "press 1 to speak to someone" often leads to a busy signal
rather than the "hold" queue.  This should be fixed.  Further,
I have usually experienced hold times of 15-30 minutes when calling
support.  Again, this is unacceptible for a "business" service.


Fourth, the email communication that I have received from Flashcom have
often been in HTML.  This shows a great disrespect for the customer
(since not all of us use HTML-capable mail clients) and a general lack
of understanding about Internet email standards.  The last straw was
when I received my email invoice in HTML.  _Please_, please, stop sending
HTML mail to customers!  Most of us find it terribly annoying.  There
is _no_ reason to ever send HTML email to customers, particularly the
sort of broken, pseudo-HTML code generated by assorted pieces of Microsoft
software.

Fifth, I will mention my continued intermittent loss of sync, which is
an open trouble ticket for which I have received zero information on
progress.  As a customer of a service which is being sold to businesses,
I would expect that the least that could be provided would be periodic
updates about the expected downtime as well as a final update explaining
what the problem was and what steps have been taken to fix it and ensure
that it does not happen again.


Thank you for reading this overly-long message.  I expect that you
will agree with me that the service with which I have been provided
has been of poor quality and that my expectation of a rate reduction or
contract termination without penalty is a reasonable one.

I realize that there are some internal "issues" at Flashcom relating
to your support database and such, but, quite frankly, these are not my
problem, and I would expect that any ISP which is providing
business-grade services would have enough resources to have a backup
system (even if it consists of pens and paper) for such an event.
There are many consumer-oriented ISPs which offer 24/7 support which is
of high quality.  The fact that Flashcom does not offer this to its
business customers (after promising it to them when they signed up) is
problematic.

I know that this service can actually be very good, as it was for the
first week or so after it was installed.  If these customer-service
issues can be worked out, I would be happy to be your customer; otherwise,
I look forward to cancelling the service as soon as possible.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to call me or
reply to this.

- Scott Norwood
  406 Merrimac Trl. Apt. 4
  Williamsburg, VA.  23185

  757-565-0894