Posts tagged Level 3

Level 3 purchases Global Crossing

I just blogged about this in last week,  about the “last mile” being very important for a Carrier to survive. I thought Sprint might be the one to get acquired or look to acquire, but Global Crossing is another Carrier who does not have a local footprint. Level 3 will gain a greater international presence and domestic long haul network. Global Crossing will get what is has always been lacking, the “last mile” presence. The Carrier space is definitely getting crowded, so I suspect this is the just the beginning of things to come.  Leading  to more confusion, as the Carriers continue to work on growing through acquisition, and forget about the customer. Carriers will still have the issues of merging networks, merging databases, and merging different company environments. It sounds like there will be a stronger need in the future for companies such as Intelletrace to assist in navigating through the mess which may be created.  The Carriers, themselves, are already working with Intelletrace to assist.

Social Networking, Finally

It is nice to see a few of the Carriers are catching up to the Social Networking tools, which people use everyday to communicate. The first of the year, I turned over a new leaf to come out and call out the Carriers who continue to bring back the dinosaur age, when it comes to customer service.  Unfortunately, I do not have enough posts to discuss the Carriers who are stepping up and delivering at a high level.  I have been posting and naming Carriers for almost 6 months now.  Not one as responded until now. 

Level 3 was the first to respond to our frustrations at Intelletrace. After taking several days and sometimes weeks, to get back budgetary pricing, Level 3 delivered Intelletrace a pricing tool. After 5 years of working with Level 3, we were happy to hear from them.  The pricing tool is easy to use and prices out their private line and Internet access products. The more you use it, the more you can build up the database, so it will see be just a point and click for quick pricing. It took 2 days after our post, for Level 3 to  deliver what we needed to service our customers. I guess that is the power of blogging, when it goes out to the world. Blogging is getting to be more powerful than escalating within the Carrier executive levels.  Hmmm… I starting to get other ideas.
XO also responded quickly after a blog post. After an install which went South, our head Geek posted his frustrations and XO quickly responded.  We quickly spoke with Executives and have set up meetings to see how we can work closer together.  At Intelletrace, we rely on our Carriers to make us successful. Our Carriers, are just as important as our customers. We are amazed they are starting to respond to our need through the Social Networking channels.  I hope we can resolve problems and strengthen the partnership through getting to know each other better.

Level 3 and XO are ahead of the game when it comes to getting to know their customers and communicating.  We will see how long until the others catch up or continue to fall behind in the market place.

The Bait and Switch

I am sure this has happened to most people when shopping for a car, but this often happens in telecom. Today it happened again…. This time it was Level 3. I requested their new FastPath. They met my target price and had two deals pending. I even questioned Level 3 on the route, latency, and mileage. My rep confirmed we were all good, however, when I requested the Service Level Agreement, that is when the stalling started to happen. I asked repeatedly, why Level 3 cannot produce a SLA for a service they have already sold.   My customer was ready to pull the trigger and was happy to see Intelletrace come through again for them.  24 hours had gone by and the phone call came, “Sorry Marc, our pricing group made a mistake and gave Intelletrace the wrong price”.  Not only was I pissed, but I had to go back to my customer and greatly apologize.   How can Level 3 make this mistake? This is not the first time this has happened to me, but it hurts the most. Had two large deals pending which would have got our year off to a very good start.  Unbelievable!!!