North American Network Operators Group

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RE: AT&T Broadband

  • From: Simon Higgs
  • Date: Thu Dec 20 18:45:40 2001


At 04:09 PM 12/19/01 -0500, James wrote:

<rant>
Here's my #1 help desk gripe. I call up and the person answering the phone is totally incapable of opening a ticket, and totally incapable of passing the information (or me if it's too technical for them to grep) to someone who can do something with it. You name 'em - all the help desks have this problem. Management want the statistics, and the help-desk want to close tickets to show performance. The customer has the problem, it's their problem, and the help desk is not going to take ownership or responsibility for the problem other than making the customer go away and the ticket closed. The help-desk is incapable of opening a ticket assigning responsibility to the company ("oh, it's us... we goofed").

Let me give you a real-world example. I call up with a problem (i.e. I can't connect to a specific VPN gateway because it requires my IP address to resolve forwards and backwards in DNS), and I know how to fix the problem (i.e. "you're PTR records say that when they're supposed to say this"), someone on the help desk telling me a router is down or a fibre is cut gets me really annoyed, and really quickly, because it has absolutely *NOTHING* to do with the problem at hand. The problem got solved by AT&T buying MediaOne and renumbering, but their help desk was completely incapable of assigning someone to fix their DNS.

All I want to hear is that the information has been taken down, repeated back to me, and a ticked number assigned. I will sleep peacefully knowing I am in the capable hands of a professional (whether that is true or not, I don't care). I don't want to open my control panel or change my resolve.conf when the problem is not mine to fix.
</rant>

You have to realize really how far the Residential Tech Support (is your
computer on?) is from Network Operations in terms of communications.
Most NO would ever probably tell Tech Support is "Just tell the customer
a router is down or a fiber cut or something."

- James

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
Simon Higgs
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 1:26 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: AT&T Broadband


At 09:48 PM 12/18/01 -0800, you wrote:

>On Tue, Dec 18, 2001 at 08:04:30PM -0600, Matthew S. Hallacy wrote:
> > Yes, this is correct.
>
>         Sounds like an issue for the e-mail or telephone support
>people at your provider, then.  It's amazing what you can find
>out by actually picking up a telephone these days.

Call AT&T Broadband's tier one support for help ("er... you need to
check
the web site, have you pushed the on button on your computer, er...
sir?")?

You're kidding, right? After escalating to their tier three, they still
couldn't handle a simple call to fix the DNS on the netblock I was on. I

was stupid enough to think they could. Never again.



Best Regards,

Simon

--
All your .sig are belong to us
Best Regards,

Simon

--
(A)bort, (R)etry, (T)ake down entire network?