AT&T Broadband

Thu Dec 20 23:43:17 UTC 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: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of
>Simon Higgs
>Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 1:26 AM
>To: nanog at merit.edu
>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?