Posts tagged twitter

Do Consumers No Longer Value Quality?

Maybe today is just a bad Monday, coming off a sunny nice weekend, but I am continually speaking with customers who no longer care about the value of service or quality of network they are getting if they could just save 5% to 10%.  I am not talking 5% to 10% from $10,000.  I am talking about $500 to $2,000, which is not a whole a lot of difference for a proven reliable existing service.   Is it the recession, which we are supposedly slowly getting out of or are there just so many choices and prices or so cheap, consumers do not care.  Consumers are starting to take the stance, “the price is so cheap and unbelievable, if it does not work out, I will go find something else.”  I feel consumers are no longer realizing the cost for their own time.  As our time gets more valuable, with the popularity of Face book, Twitter, and IPhones,  consumers would rather spend hours working on finding better pricing for their services, instead of working with their current reliable vendor, and making a win-win.  Sometimes consumers forgot what made them successful to begin with or where to spend their time where it is most valuable.  Today was the last straw for me, when a customer wants to move this 4th of July weekend in 4 days, and was insulted that we charged them a $400 one time fee for us to process the order, manage and coordinate our vendor to a site survey, roll a truck to pick up the old equipment and take out the cabling, roll another truck for the new location to cable and place of new equipment.  I might be out of line on this, but the price of gasoline and paying employees to do this job on short notice does cost money.  I would love to hear from people their thoughts and if they are experiencing the same thing and what you have done to combat this reality.

Are You Following Yet?

There was a major outage in Yuma, AZ today, lasting over six hours.   Many customers were affected, including several of Intelletrace’s. It was a Level3 fiber cut.  We found out the hard way, Verizon Business was buying capacity from them, with no protect path. We also learned other Carriers were buying capacity from Level3. Unfortunately,  Verizon Business was reselling a Level3 circuit, when we thought we were buying a complete Verizon Business circuit end to end.  I will save for another blog. However, we did gain new followers including Verizon and Telepacific Support, on Twitter. We were giving real live updates with no fluff.  For future outages, please follow us at @AskIntelletrace. Our support will tell it like it is and provide our customers real live updates of major outages. These outages might also affect you as well!  Verizon Support would not give updates via Twitter regarding any updates.  Verizon Support prefers our NOC to call into their Support and sit in a que for endless minutes.  It seems like a waste of time and not a very useful way to communicate when a major outage occurs and multiple people are affected.  Just think how many phone lines and use of resources would be available in major outages, when thousands of people can be reached in a tweet or a blog.  We are communication companies and we need to continue to work on communicating more effectively with each other, especially with new applications being invented constantly. 

Join our NOC or follow me @malciati and any product questions at @intelletrace on Twitter.

Summer is almost over…

Playing catch up from summer vacation… With the kids out of school driving parents crazy and the ever changing hectic schedule of camps, summer still just flew by.

image provided by www.124simi.com

Just got back from the Mountains in Sunriver, Or. It was a great place to escape. However, with the power of telecommunications, I was never that far away. I was still able to jump on the internet through the resort’s wireless network and the cell service was strong too. Still tried to catch a peek at emails each day to make sure there were no fire drills. Although a vacation is meant to get away from the daily grind of work, it is nice to know, we can also work and still be in touch with people, anywhere in the world.
Heading off to Seattle tomorrow to meet with a few customers and some site seeing on Saturday.
It is nice to know I will still be connected with my iPhone… Emails, AOL IM, twitter, and Linkedin at my fingertips.