The system is down, yo!

[thesawg.livejournal.com]

Currently [Not so large Cable ISP] is experiencing a wide scale disruption of service.  Therefore, for the last two days my life has sucked, as I have answered around 300 calls.  I understand calling, I understand the frustration, and I don't understand why they need to talk to me, though.

As soon as they call up there is a recording about the disruption of service, how there is no ETA, and how it is recommended to occasionally powercycle your cable modem.
This is the first "clue" that there may be an outage currently.
The they hear there is a 12 minute wait to talk to a tech.  And since most of these people have called several times before, they should be used to the fact if we even have a wait at all we usually get to them in an average of two minutes, sometimes around five if we are really busy.  But twelve is unheard of.  This should be another clue that something is up.

It's amazing how many people will sit in queue so I can spend 90 seconds on the phone with them to tell them the same thing the recording did a few times while in queue.  Maybe 2-3 minutes if they forgot the powercycle instructions they heard a few seconds ago, or they think they can pry a ETA out of me.  I do not have a time frame, and if I did I wouldn't give it to them.  If we said an "hour or so" they will be calling up pissing and moaning that we "lied" sixty-one minutes later.  But those are the ones who at least know we have an outage.  There are plenty of others who have no idea why they cannot get on-line, or why the On-line light on their modem is blinking.  Or others who don't understand that the word nationwide includes them too.  And as of right now, not everyone is offline and more are coming back on line, but if their neighbor is on-line that doesn't mean jack shit.

At least according to the boss man, about 25% of the callers hung up after hearing the disruption of service recording at the beginning of the call.  For all the other short bus riders that hung in there, thanks to them I don't have to worry about call times at all this month.

Comments

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I love that.

My habit, for giving people estimates of time? I add 30-50% onto the time frame I've been given. If they tell me half an hour, I tell the users 45 minutes.

[jecook]

I feel your pain.

I really do. we've been dealing with a DDOS attack on our mail server which causes the server software to shit it pants.

[sketchydave.livejournal.com]

I had an experience like that once. Much smaller company and residential dial-up, the radius server went down and backups failed.

Most people were cool, it was the jackasses who were using residential dial-up for businesses (morons) that were pissy. We have no business accounts, it states in our TOS that this is for residential only and we cannot be used for business purposes.

I had one guy who was going ape on me complaining that he wants to speak to the tech in charge, etc. etc. I politely explained to him that we are not meant for businesses and he could wait for the server to come back up or I could ban his account in violation of the TOS instead. That got him off the phone.

[ex-deliveryboy.livejournal.com]

People get that "it's applying to everyone but me" mentality.


Or they think we can restore service "just for them" or give them the "inside scoop" that we wouldn't give to anyone else.

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

They have a right to expect that as they are far more uniquer than everyone else.

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

Of course this can lead to a non-support situation, where a customer actually did have a problem that could be solved but it was just chalked up to an outage. I've had that happen and I wasn't exactly amused when three days later I finally had to have a field technician come out (two days after this point) and correct the signal strength issue I was having that was kicking me offline, not the server screwup.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

This is why I recommend having a phone button which dumps a caller back to an endless loop of the intro message.

"Mah innernet just fell over!"

*BUTTON*

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

That is an excellent idea.