One Utility’s Crash, Another Utility’s Gain

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One Utility’s Crash, Another Utility’s Gain

November 18th, 2003 Issue

It is amazing that here in the heart of Silicon Valley, my neighbors and I experience regular power outages. Actually, the general physical infrastructure, whether it be electrical, transportation or telecom is really pretty pathetic in the valley. For instance our cable system features dual 300+ MHz plant, circa 1975. Needless to say we don’t have cable modems, but at least we are fortunate enough to have DSL.

In fact, I have been quite pleased with the SBC Yahoo! service. At $29.95 per month ($26.95 per month, if I had signed up a few weeks later), it is quite affordable and it provides a number of nice features, such as spam control and gobs of online storage for email. The service has been very reliable; I don’t believe I had lost service at all.

Then the great power outage of 2003 hit. Well, it actually wasn’t so great – the shortage was not caused by the weather or even a pigeon shorting a transformer. When the power was restored, DSL was no more. So, I went through the normal troubleshooting procedure of cycling power to the DSL modem, checking the router’s settings, etc. None of the usual troubleshooting techniques done in the past seemed to work.

Being an email addict, I couldn’t go the weekend without some sort of wired access, so I decided to contact SBC on Saturday. Unfortunately, the paperwork with the help contact information was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, I was able to dial-out and gain access to the SBC Yahoo! help desk. I checked the FAQ section, but no luck. I noticed that they offered an online chat help desk.

The online chat help desk worked pretty well. I actually liked this approach, because I wasn’t tethered to the phone and I could multitask in between responses. During the course of troubleshooting, the case was seamlessly raised to the next level and transferred to another service representative. Finally, I was asked for my phone number and a good time for another service representative to call me.

A few hours later, I received a phone call from an SBC representative. After a brief conversation and, based on the earlier troubleshooting that had been performed with the other service representatives, we determined that the DSL modem had probably been affected by the power outage – maybe a power surge, but I did have a surge protected line. The good news was that I had another DSL modem – the bad news was I didn’t have the $10 power supply to make it operational. I was promised that a technician would show up on Monday between 8 and 12 A.M.

Sure enough, early Monday morning, I received a call from an SBC technician, Pat, to confirm that I still had the problem. He arrived in his brightly painted SBC Yahoo! van approximately 30 minutes later. We changed out the modem and it fixed the problem.

Pat went way beyond the call of duty and gave me some good tips on how to get the most out of the service. What really impressed me, however, was the fact that he gave me a call the next day to confirm the problem really was fixed. It was a surprise to get such personal service from such a big company – very unexpected.

So, what were the lessons I learned from this long-winded tale of my trivial DSL woes?

That the need for good customer service and service with a personal touch is more important than ever before as the technology becomes more complex.
That there may be value in telcos providing home networking in the same way that telcos provide inside wire “insurance” today. The challenge is convincing the consumer that this is useful before they have an incident like mine. Maybe one way to do this is to work with retailers to sell this option at the point of sale, similar to how retailers sell extended warranties for higher end consumer electronics today.
DSL modems should be separate (or at least in the form of replaceable modules) from other components, like routers, media gateways, etc. This way, if a DSL modem does fail, other components do not have to be replaced. In fact, like the cable modem, the DSL modem should be available at retail – I could have replaced the DSL modem. Who knows, I was so desparate, I might have bought a new one to replace the one that was shot.
I need to finally open my wallet and buy that standby power supply to ensure that DSL doesn’t drop, even when the power does.

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