said by TSI Marc:Take a step back man. We've been trying to help you. There's nothing arrogant or self-congratulatory in that.
If you care to help.. The thing that's the most helpful is to give constructive criticism.. I did ask you if you had any ideas. That's not blaming anybody...
Alright, I've more or less calmed down on this issue since Friday, and as much as I've been threatening to leave, I'm not going to. You DO have an excellent internet service. Better than anyone else, and you want to fight for a better internet for everyone. I can't name another ISP that does the same.
Back in my college days I used to make some extra money for school and beer through ebay. More often that I'd like I had issues with customers, most people will accept one mistake, but every once in a while the planets would align and the same customer would get multiple shipping/billing/item issues on the same order. Some my fault, others not.
In these cases, I'd eventually look at it and say, fuck it, this guy could be lying, but if he's not, I'd be pissed that I had to pay for such a clusterfuck of problems.
So I'd write out a letter explaining the issues, tell them throw it in a box and mail it back, I'd pay to ship it back. If the item value was less than shipping it back, it was just a fuck it, here's your money back. I would let them know that I don't control customs, canadapost, usps, or the quality of manufacturing of the product. BUT they were _my_ customer, and it was _my_ feedback at stake.
It may have left me in the red $-15 and the customer didn't magically get all their problems solved, but I wanted to prove to the customer that I was on their side, and that I took ownership of their order, and set him back to 0, it may have been irritating and annoying, but in the end, it didn't cost them anything.
The majority of these left no feed back, a few actually left positive feedback, but not once, did I receive a negative feedback.
I have no idea if I ever made back that lost money by not having someone's warning to other customers in my rep.
No one likes to be ignored, and It's not like I was demanding free internet for life, or anything unreasonable. I just didn't want to pay a fee for a service that was tremendous hassle and frustration over the course of nearly 3 weeks.
You do a lot of things right, and I agree with most of how you run your business. To be honest, you're the only ISP I've dealt with that seems to understand that HTML injection is a perverse way of notifying me of anything. DNS Spoofing of failed lookups causes lots of problems for running scrapers and other scripts. Fought against UBB and of course has the CEO (which I'm hoping isn't just an intern's busywork) responds directly to customers.
You have a lot of good things for the technically savvy crowd (Should be obvious from your name) but, having worked as a tech support phone monkey for nearly 5 years, I realize that most people aren't. If you want to stay the small guy that nerds use for internet, keep doing what you're doing, I'd rather not pay for kids to wait on the phone to tell me to reboot my modem anyways.
But I have no argument to convince my mother to switch from the big guys to you. Traffic shaping doesn't matter to her, she just wants to play scrabble and forward 10 year old jokes to her neighbours, as long as it's fast enough, she doesn't care about speed. She does care that when there's a problem, she has someone to call to get it fixed, and fixed in such a way that she doesn't have to understand the trials and tribulations of being an internet reseller. Just fix it.
Your internet service is usually good, which is why I pay you for it. When it's not I don't call in to hear excuses, I call in for a solution. If it's not solved, why should I keep paying you? When I'm not happy, make me happy. You don't advertise (that I've ever seen) you don't cold call (or so I hope) so happy customers are the ones that get you new customers. So take that advertising budget that doesn't get used and put it somewhere that gets you new customers, maybe my mother doesn't care about the technical issues, but if I tell her she should be using someone else for internet, she'll listen, even without an argument.
I hope this helps you to see where I'm coming from.