It has been stated that "nightmares may be upsetting, but they are not "real" and can't harm you. And if you have one, you're in good company" or are you? Like all nightmares we see in office communications, it usually is caused because innocent, yet unsuspecting people make bad choices by NOT involving a communications professionals from the beginning. This time, their nightmare even involved a complaint to the Georgia Public Service Commission.
Rottweiler, contracted to move a company's communication system, we became involved in this nightmare and subsequent rescue of their business starting Monday with a never-ending set of issues as the customer moved from one location to another and from their current dial tone provider to a new dial tone provider.
The nightmare started with porting numbers from one dial tone carrier to another. What the customer did not know and subsequently impacted their cut-over was that the lines were not owned by the carrier who was releasing the numbers. Years earlier this customer has subscribed to Birch Telecommunications which sold the same service at a lower rate than Bellsouth. That was fine, but when they no longer wanted the total package of services with Birch aka Bellsouth they migrated part of the services over to Network Telephone which later sold to Cavalier Telephone. So now you have Birch, Bellsouth (which is now known as at&t) and Cavalier. So every telecom player in this story has merged or become part of another telecommunications company. No current company wanted to communicate to either, the dial tone salesman was on vacation and all left the customer with only Rottweiler to defend their interests. Oh and the story does not end there...
When the port was authorized, part of the numbers ported to the new service carrier and part were left behind! With who? You guessed it, the "new" global at&t! We spent the next 6 hours on the phone pounding out calls to every at&t number you could get and personally I was so tired of hearing "thank you for calling the new at&t" I could scream! Every possible number I called and subsequently person we engaged said they could not help us and transferred the call to another person who could not help us or the now down customer. Calls to Cavalier Telephone did not produce any results either other than to say they refused to acknowledge that they even had the numbers until we produced the bill for the charges. Their response was....oh (long silence), could you please hold on a few minutes. That had to be a classic and this now required a new strategy.
Tuesday morning, we filed a PSC complaint on behalf of the customer and by 9 am had the PSC on the phone for followup. By 11:30 we had Cavalier Telephone acknowledge that they needed to be engaged in the resolution and a hand-off to at&t that stated "we can't help them" response. We continued to engage the impact with at&t and finally by 3:30 had at&t involved in resolution. This is one of those situations that if we had not engaged the PSC quickly this customer would have been out of business by Friday when they had to vacate the existing structure.
How this customer, and subsequently your business, can avoid a vulnerable situation such as this can be accomplished with little effort.
- Engage a professional (like Rottweiler for example), to handle the moving of your voice & data services. If you do not do this until move day, the vendors involved do not have the knowledge they will need to correct situations from happening to you. Never assume that a dial tone carrier has your interest at heart. A quality vendor is worth their weight in gold.
- Have available current copies of all phone bills available prior to customer. More often than not something is missed on cut-over day and then you are left with an after cut-over-cut-over.
- If you can avoid the confusion of multiple dial tone carriers, do it! Too many cooks in the kitchen ruin a good meal and in this case having several made everything confusing.
- If you sign long term contracts or you only engage the provider for the dial tone and Internet services, you are asking to receive what this customer got one BIG nightmare and subsequently a bill for the rescue!
