Old Bear?
Charles Demas
<eskw...@SPAMBLOCK.shore.net> wrote:
>
>Is he still with TIAC?
Yes, he's still there, but he's been moved out of Customer Support
and into Operations. Mauricio has been put back in charge of
Customer Support.
>Has customer service improved in the last 6 months?
Actually it did improve, a web-status page was added, and for a time,
it was providing some almost timely information. It gets updated
less regularly now that he's not there kicking people for not
doing it. There was also the tiac.announce newsgroup that was used to
supply outage and problem information to customers. Unfortunately,
this seems to have gone into non-use except for problems like
losing dialup for several states at a time. This happened recently,
and I'm not sure if it's fully restored yet.
They also added some helpful web-pages. So, yes, some customer
service things were made better. Training didn't seem to improve,
but that may be a function of turnover. Tiac hires entry level
people (little or no experience) and uses them until they find they
have enough experience to be paid more by someplace else.
One problem with their NOC is that it's staffed by former CS people,
who started out as entry level employees. I don't think that
TIAC has a formal training program for them. Tiac has lots of
operations problems, a combination of new modems, RNK switch
problems, and other carrier problems, and it seems that they
are hard to identify where things are going wrong, especially
when they're reconfiguring their physical plant at the same time.
Tim also comes in and modifies schedules, just to help matters. :-)
The Old Bear has done lots of good things at TIAC, and probably is
keeping it from totally collapsing, but recently, it seems to be
falling apart faster than he can put it together.
I think the Old Bear must feel like Canute, but even he cannot stop
the tide of customers that are leaving TIAC; leaving because of
problems with news, dialups, email, web access, web hosting, and
overbilling.
Seems like TIAC has come to mean, "This Isn't A Choice."
Chuck Demas
Needham, Mass.
--
Eat Healthy | _ _ | Nothing would be done at all,
Stay Fit | @ @ | If a man waited to do it so well,
Die Anyway | v | That no one could find fault with it.
de...@tiac.net | \___/ | http://www.tiac.net/users/demas