a smaller company certainly has a smaller budget.... ----- Original Message ----- From: Ken Hohhof To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2016 8:54 AM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] whine whine whine whine
The secret is to not let it bother you, or create systems and hire people that just ignore customer complaints. At least that’s what some big ISPs with no competition do. (Frontier, Centurylink) I compare them to slum landlords who buy distressed properties and don’t spend a lot of money fixing them up or doing maintenance. If people don’t like it, evict them and somebody else will take their place. The churn costs less than fixing and upgrading the infrastructure, and ignoring the whining customers doesn’t cost anything if it’s part of your plan and you don’t lose sleep over it. If you’re really clever, you build government subsidies into your business plan. It’s like if you sell your WISP to a big company, you probably imagine they will implement all the upgrades you couldn’t afford or didn’t get around to. Probably not. Once you stop losing sleep over customers saying bad things about you on Facebook, you spend only enough to keep the churn down to a tolerable percentage, the point where the cost of acquiring replacement customers starts to exceed what it would cost to fix the network. Even with competition, inertia is a powerful force. Some people will whine but not leave. From: CBB - Jay Fuller Sent: Saturday, July 30, 2016 6:19 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] whine whine whine whine hahaha - that requires money! i have to pay for my mafia... ----- Original Message ----- From: Colin Stanners To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, July 30, 2016 6:11 PM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] whine whine whine whine That's the fun of running an Internet provider, which a lot of people consider an "essential utility" these days. All you can do is add redundancy through more towers and more UPS capacity. On Jul 30, 2016 5:30 PM, "CBB - Jay Fuller" <[email protected]> wrote: so i lost tower "b" yesterday during a storm. not a bad loss, actually. water in a cable shorted out a power supply. just happened to be the one backhaul link in. i got it fixed about 2 pm? this morning about 11 am another round of storms took out the main tower - tower "A " - power outage, i assume. haven't been down there yet. (ok, it's four hours later, its probably not just a power outage) now i'm getting calls from customers on "B" that they haven't had service in days. I guess not, if they didn't use it from 3 pm yesterday until 11 this morning.....uggh.... correction - i don't take calls on weekends. but they know me on facebook....
