Blog of a Telecom CEO

Flexibility and improving the customer experience is what every business is working on.  At least I hope to think so…   This proves to be challenging when most people already believe dealing with anything from your wireless service, your cable services, and especially your Internet services is awfully painful and is often a time killer.  However, most businesses rely on their data and Internet connectivity, so it is a necessary evil.  Intelletrace deals with the unknowns, which often happens after the service is already ordered and the client expects the service turned up tomorrow! 

With this challenge of uncertainty, Intelletrace must understand what our customer’s need, not just what they want, in an environment which is moving 0 to 60 in milliseconds.  If we just rely on believing what our clients want they and if we can provide it, we may win the business, but the long term business relationship will fail and often times the service the client thinks they want is not meeting their performance needs.  Ever been there before?  In today’s fast paced environment, clients just want it DONE, and as a small business, we must maneuver between our vendors, who are very large but operate in a small box,  to supply a complete solution.  Our clients do not want to hear the BS.  If they heard it before when dealing with their other Carriers.

How Intelletrace has overcome this challenge are 3 words which we continue to operate our business under:

1.  Flexibility-Continue to work with clients to meet their ever changing business needs.  Therefore, we never say “NO”.  If we have to create a new service on the “fly”, then we DO IT!

2. Accountability-Everybody in our organization is held accountable and we are accountable to our customers.  In an industry where everybody likes to put blame on somebody, Intelletrace continues to take the attitude, if our customer’s are not happy (for whatever reason and whoever is at blame) we take it on and get it fixed.  We may have to issue credits or let our clients out of their contracts, but we continue to take the philosophy, of “Doing the Right Thing”, will earn us a long term relationship.

3. Experience-We continue to hire people with years of experience in the telecom industry, from our IT group to our Service Delivery Group.  As layoffs continue with the large Carriers and outsource overseas, it is tough to get the correct experienced people on the phone to help out. 

We often take several meetings with our clients before we are ready to service them.  Our engineering team will create a plan and design a network which  will be affordable and easily can change as the client’s business changes.   We just do not not want to be a vendor to our client, but a partner.  We do this by providing a solution to their pain.  Although this pain is different with every customer, there is a central theme of dreading to make changes and working with Carriers who do not care or understand their business.  Soon this realization of working with a Carrier who does care, hits them, and often the question is asked, “Where were you the last time we made changes?”  Another RAVING FAN is born.

I am not a marketing major, nor do I pretend to know the first thing about marketing, but I was wondering if all the marketing departments from the Telecommunication providers all hang out at the same bar.  It seems they all talk to each other to make sure none of them have the same name for the same service.  For example, Ethernet Private Line…. Verizon has many different terms which essentially are the same… EPL Metro, EPL National, EPL Access… TWTelecom has ELAN, ELINE, WSNLAN, SNLAN…Qwest has QMOE…AT&T has Gigaman and Opteman….

I know the Carriers will say these all do different things, but really they are all Private Lines connecting to end points, whether it is to the Internet, cross county, or in the metro.  Why can’t marketing departments make it less confusing?  In fact, sometimes the people working for these companies do not even know the product lines themselves.  Intelletrace has been buying Ethernet services for years now, and Verizon has now said it will not honor the pricing they have given us in the past, because the product name is not in the agreement, even though every other Ethernet Acronym is.  I am sure Verizon will do the right thing, as they have been using these contracts for several years, but it is a lot of time wasted to try and understand what exactly are the services which we signed up for.  We constantly have to double check and triple check with all of our Carriers when we order Ethernet services.  Sometimes you just do not know what you are getting. 

Marketing departments… let’s keep it simple, so everybody can understand.

It’s funny… I recently blogged about what is service in telecom? Leave it to AT&T, who is probably the worst culprit and sets the service bar to an historic low, to continue expanding their wireless network through mega mergers instead of concentrating on taking care of their current clientele and growing organically. I’m a current AT&T wireless customer and have been for 12 years.  During the few times I have had to deal with them, it was very painful. Yes, a merger could improve their coverage, which would definitely make customers happy, but these improvements also may take a few years to make.

AT&T seems to have completely forgotten about their wire line service.  Perhaps they will they continue to buy other small Local Exchange Carriers and ruin their customer service experiences too.  We have already experienced this in the past year from other big Carriers buying smaller CLEC’s, who were successful because of the ease of doing business.

Intelletrace buys services from AT&T, but they are one of our least used vendors.  Most of the time, we buy services through other Carriers who end up reselling  AT&T.  It is funny how this industry works.  As I have said in the past, we are ALL resellers.  I don’t care who the Carrier is, big or small.  Get over it, if you are a Carrier who does not like resellers.  You are buying from one, and you probably don’t know it.  AT&T is still the “last mile” in the majority of the western part of the United States, so we are still struggling on working with them daily.

Interesting times… Verizon and AT&T continue to battle for to become the dominant wireless Carrier and forget what got them there.  I am sure this is not the last of the mega-mergers for 2011.  I am still waiting for the mega merger on the wire line side.  Especially for the Carriers who do not have a “last mile” presence or any local footprint.  As wireless continues to grow, the “last mile” will not go away and the Carriers who own it will be the last one standing..

I have been in telecommunications for ten years now. Very few Carriers understand the meaning of service or even know who their customer is.  I know most of the time it comes down to the account manager level and they are doing everything in their power to do the right thing. Often times, it is out of their control. I would say 99% of the time the process is so broken, there is no way a big Carrier could service their customer even if they really wanted to. Of course the Carrier loves to put the blame back on the customer. Why not blame the customer?  The Carriers have had so many lay-offs and people are working double time, if the customers just went away then that would free up everybody’s time to get their job done. I am sure you have heard this before, “Sorry.  We test good on our network, so it must be your equipment” and “Sorry, the order entry person incorrectly put the wrong information on the order, so this will delay your order, but you can always pay an expedite fee”. Unbelievable…

As you probably have guessed, it has been a frustrating day. I left the Carriers seven years ago to bring SERVICE back to telecom. Sometimes it is out of our control, but at least we hold ourselves accountable and make sure our customers are happy or at least do the RIGHT THING (a past blog). Yeah, our customers put the blame on us and might tweet about us, calling us a “typical middle man”, but those are typical customers who may order a single circuit once a year or even every three years. We are always working on ways to communicate with our customers more effectively and get them information as fast as possible. Once we do our research and use our resources, good news or bad news, we tell it like it is. If we have to change vendors, pay expedite fees, or send out techs on site to troubleshoot, Intelletrace gets it DONE! Job security for Intelletrace…