Bad Customer Service Experience #12,812

How I love bad customer service. In this latest saga, a vendor takes a minor problem and turns it into a major one, through a cunning combination of poor customer communication and not-entirely-thought-out provisioning procedures:

I use Vonage as my primary business landline. I've been using the service for over a year and, despite ongoing growing pains, have been pretty happy with it. The ability to take my a landline with me, whether I'm in the office, at the lake or on the road, is valuable. This is especially true in hotels, where you can often get broadband for free, but they gouge you on calls. Add in the geek factor of folks being able to call you on a 773 number when you are in a hotel in Tokyo and you've got a pretty sexy product.

Recently, however, the Cisco ATA-186 that Vonage uses to deliver VoIP service to a normal telephone started making a high pitched whining noise. This is fairly odd, since the device itself doesn't have a speaker -- but there must be some digital component inside the unit that is screeching, quietly, at the upper range of my hearing. It was obnoxious enough that I finally decided to get in touch with Vonage and see if they would swap out the unit.

First I tried to call their customer service hotline. After 15 minutes on hold, I got a message saying "Sorry, we're too busy to deal with you right now. Please send us an email instead. Thanks." So, I sent an email. And waited. And waited.

To make a long story short, three weeks and several emails later, someone from Vonage finally called me on Monday and agreed that they needed to swap out the unit. I got an email confirming this, followed by an email with instructions on how to do the return. Then, a few hours later, my Vonage phone line went dead.

No dial tone. No incoming calls. Totally kaput. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just call customer support." Called. Waited 15 minutes. Got hung up on.

So, I mirrored the ATA-186's Ethernet port to a diagnostic port on my switch, broke out tcpdump and watched what the ATA-186 was doing. The device was booting up fine, but when it tried to get its configuration file from the Vonage servers using TFTP, it kept getting "file not found".

Ah ha! Vonage probably thought the unit was totally broken, instead of just misfunctioning in a mildly annoying manner, and figured they could shutdown service to the old unit entirely. So, I emailed Vonage's "tier 3" technical support, explaining my problem and got an email back around 7PM the same day. This fellow confirmed that my diagnosis was correct, but provided no further details on how they were going to solve the problem.

The next day, I gave Vonage a call at 7AM Eastern to try and talk to a real person before the customer service system started hanging up on people again. I got through fairly quickly, spoke to a gentleman who, instead of trying to solve the problem, kept trying to explain to me how their provisioning system worked. Finally, after a few goes at this, I was transferred, with a heavy sigh, to a supervisor. He listened to my problem, asked for a few minutes to talk to his engineering staff, and promised to call me back.

Much to my surprise, he did. And then explained that their engineering department was so swamped and/or undertrained that, while he could reprovision my old unit, he wasn't confident he could get it done before the new unit would arrive here. And, if he did do this, I would have to call back (ha!) and ask them to reprovision the new unit, once it did show up, a request that would need to pass through the same quantum uncertainty scheduling system again. By the time all of this was said and done, I would probably be better off just waiting for the new ATA-186, he explained. To add insult to injury, the supervisor was going to make me pay for this outage, until I asked him to arrange a service credit for the period of the outage.

I'm happy enough with Vonage that I am not planning on discontinuing my service over this incident, but it is a perfect example of how companies can piss off their customers, even when they think they are helping them out. The tech who arranged for the new ATA-186 should have told me that my service would be impacted and arranged for the new unit to be overnighted, to minimize my inconvenience. Since this didn't happen, Vonage should have gone out of its way to reprovision my old unit and make arrangements to have the new unit rapidly provisioned once it arrived. Instead, I spent 90 minutes on phone calls and emails trying to figure out what had happened and ended up, at the end of all this, without a real resolution to my problem. And posted a bitchy whine on patrick.com.

Posted by pmk at April 30, 2003 9:26 AM