Very well said. Customers 1-3 I bend over backward for. One customer
recently was very vocal about their connection going downhill as the
trees leafed out. I went as far as climbing 50 feet up several trees
and topping them for this customer. That is not a PITA customer. (I
have to admit, I had fun climbing!) :)
The PITA I am talking about is the one with perfect LOS, a -64 - -66
with a noise level of -107 connecting to the AP at 54Mbits over 6
miles.... and complaining abusively every time there is a blip or
small slowdown.
Keep the stories coming. All of these experiences are worth their
weight in gold. These experiences help all of those lurkers on the
list that are reading intently.
thanks all!
ryan
On Aug 17, 2007, at 9:46 AM, Jack Unger wrote:
Nobody is proposing that customers should be disposed of "easily".
We fight to obtain customers and we fight to keep them but
disposing of a customer who is continually draining your resources
or impacting the service that you deliver to others is a wise
business decision, assuming that their complaints are not justified
by your (not you personally George - I mean business owners
collectively) failure to deliver what you told them to expect in
terms of service.
Complaints are caused by:
1. Mis-set expectations. As a WISP it's easy to promise more
throughput than you can deliver either because you don't know how
much throughput you are actually capable of delivering (very common
in the WISP industy), or
2. Intentionally mis-leading customers about the throughput that
they could expect to receive (not very common in the WISP
industry), or
3. Poor system design or high interference levels (or the behavior
of other mis-behaving customers) causing customer slowdowns that
you did not or could not anticipate.
4. The small 1 percent or 2 percent of customers who "live to
complain". These folks who believe that it is their mission in life
to complain loudly, widely and continually to any and everyone
within listening distance (in person, on the phone, on the
Internet, etc) are the real culprits who, I believe, you should
politely "invite" to find another service provider.
Complaint causes number 1 through 3 above should be listened to
respectfully and addressed promptly, correctly and thoroughly.
But that's just my opinion...
jack
David E. Smith wrote:
George Rogato wrote:
Customers are hard to come by to dispose of them so easily.
I wonder, I wonder what it is that is causing the customer to
complain?
I'll agree with the principle of this statement, that customers
often have a legitimate reason for their complaints.
Some folks, however, simply love the sound of their own voices. :)
For us, the biggest problem is file-sharing software. If two or
three customers are running Kazaa or Limewire or whatever it is
the cool kids are using these days to download music and movies of
questionable provenance, the other thirty folks on that tower will
complain. Those folks have a legitimate beef, and that's not a
problem. We look at the tower, see who's doing what, and make the
problem go away (usually by temporarily disconnecting the customer
running the P2P software).
That's where the problems really start. That guy whose connection
is spitting out about 100 packets per second on Limewire? He
didn't read the contract, didn't listen to our installers (who are
instructed to remind customers this kind of software is a no-no,
and to explain in gentle non-technical terms why this is so), and
it couldn't possibly be my little baby boy why he's a perfect
angel (no he's not, he's a teenager, you remember what you were
like when you were fifteen?).
Usually, once is all it takes, but we do have an informal "three
strikes" policy - if you continually annoy us (and all the other
subscribers in your area) eventually we will ask you to find
another ISP. One customer who persists in causing problems for
dozens of other customers isn't worth it.
David Smith
MVN.net
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Jack Unger ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) - President, Ask-Wi.Com, Inc.
FCC License # PG-12-25133
Serving the Broadband Wireless Industry Since 1993
Author of the WISP Handbook - "Deploying License-Free Wireless WANs"
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Phone (VoIP Over Broadband Wireless) 818-227-4220 www.ask-wi.com
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