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AT&T Phone Home (or Find Your CRM System)

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

My home, that is. I believe you may be in the telephone business and probably could actually call customers! –More on that later. I have enjoyed AT&T U-Verse service and would not discourage anyone from subscribing, but be VERY careful about the billing relationship. Let’s start with some good news. I have no photo or video of anyone sleeping on my couch. I will end with a high note about the lack of any need for that.

Suddenly about noon my AT&T service stopped. I thought there must be some new install in the neighborhood or some minor network issue. I had dial tone on my phone so I figured there was not some catastrophic problem. Since I rarely use it to make calls, I did not even try—that might have been a clue! All of a sudden it hit me. The threatening letters to disconnect service were to be effective about this time of the month. I had not been concerned since we had paid online within the last two weeks after some considerable confusion previously about arranging for U-Verse to be paid. I would say we have been getting threatening letters since the service was installed 7 months ago, so what was another.

But with the realization that those threatening letters could have been fulfilled, I looked up the last threatening letter and yes, it threatened that service could be discontinued, so just maybe I better call to see if this may be what happened. Well of course that was it!

AT&T has every reason to believe I am a deadbeat customer so I can certainly see the problem—NOT. Let me check, I have been an AT&T (and predecessors) customer all my life and never had a problem about paying bills. I have had the same phone number for over 30 years, not to mention a second line. I have had DSL service for years. Of course they may not recognize I also have two mobile phones from them. I am definitely a customer who could leave them and not pay at a moment’s notice. And on top of all that, they knew we had previously been having troubles getting the e-payment correct, and I later discover that this is a repeated story of others.

So there I am talking to some poor representative who has to deal with me in a state I don’t wish to be in, and now she doesn’t either. She verifies that my bill is overdue and indeed my service has been shut-off. How could this be we just paid? I was then amazed that in a few seconds she could verify that the e-payment was still incorrectly applied to my old landline account, where she found a surplus of some $230 credit. If she could discover this in less than a minute, do you think that there might be some policy to discover what accounts are being disconnected? Could anyone have discovered that AT&T did have payment but there was a billing confusion? Could it be possible to make a phone call to see if there was a problem we were aware of? Have they heard of email? Instant messaging? Text messaging? Twitter? Oh no, that is Comcast that has learned about Twitter. How about when your competition is using new service tools, that you better discover what that is about?

The final recovery: I did expect that there should be no penalty for restarting service and that was resolved without even a request. My tone of voice made that request unsaid. I was astonished that the incorrect payment could be found immediately. For clarity the origin of this whole mess is that my phone bill is paid in California (where I live) and U-Verse is paid in Illinois, I assume for everyone. I was told that some e-payments could not be arranged to them, which seems hard to believe. This must be a widespread point of confusion for customers.

I am trying to deal with the shock that restoring service could take up to 24 hours. Since this is my life line to the world, I could not imagine that something so simple could be that complicated especially when it took only a minute to discover the payment error. Towards the end of my call I did get a call center incoming call. It was then I realized that AT&T would not want to disrupt the billing of call centers to reach me. ( I blogged previously that I do not answer my legacy phone unless I see a known Caller ID.) While I was ranting to the beleaguered agent about receiving irritating calls while my service was disconnected she hung-up on me. Then MIRACULOUSLY within two minutes my service was restored.

I am supposed to be grateful that this was easily restored—and I am. Maybe I should be impressed that no one fell asleep on my couch, but AT&T this is NO way to run a business. You were supposed to get over being a monopoly long ago. Delivering somewhat state of the art services should be some sort of influence to use technology in the customer relationship part of business. Look at this one angry stupid phone that still has me cranked up. This is not the kind of animated customers a business needs. Thank-you for restoring my service in two minutes—after irritating me for a few hours and making me wonder, is anyone thinking there?

Posted in NextGen Telephony, Social Networking, Tech Life, Telephony | 3,678 Comments »

Let Me Take a Bite from My Hat

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

Magicjack is a remarkable story in some sense, and that may cause some to lose a grasp on common sense. A new story connects Magicjack to the loss of landlines in the U.S. If you are responsible for landline retention I would think you have too many other concerns to think that Magicjack is responsible for a decline in landlines. If that were the case I would think Magicjack should be more concerned.

The Magicjack bundles hardware with a network terminating solution in hopes that users will buy upgraded services. Without upgrades Magicjack can only hope most users make few calls which is a pretty good bet. If users are making all household calls in a traditional landline sense, they are probably losing money.

Long before Magicjack appeared TeleVoce offered PC-to-telephone adapters. There has not really been much change in this market opportunity, except for the TV pitch infomercials that today have a greater of finding viewers with a PC connected to broadband at home. It is easy to get excited about such an offer, but the light of day has shown that most users do not replace regular phone use with such devices. By light of day, I mean years of user behavior records of real use of PC-connected phone use.

PC-originated phone calling is not new and incoming calls are not revolutionary either. Magicjack, as much as TeleVoce, serves users who make international calls (long the stronghold of VoIP) and users who have use for an alternative to mobile for any number of reasons. Magicjack probably has recruited a new segment of users who imagine a substitute phone service. Let me just state the obvious simply. A PC with a MagicJack is not going to connect to the multiple phone jacks in a typical home. It is a personal tool, not a household solution. Let landline providers worry about real issues.

Posted in NextGen Telephony, Product, Telephony, VoIP | 853 Comments »

Marketing in the Wayback Machine

Friday, January 30th, 2009

OMG, I just wasted five minutes checking out IP Man Adventures. On some level it was clever, but mostly it seems just wrong. I don’t like to bash a sincere effort, but this is like Gates and Seinfeld– only worse. I have to give credit for being brave in hard times and making a run at the market. Count me among the shocked if this really works, but it made me write about it so let me spell their name correctly. Broadvox must really want your business.

I am sure some ad agency could explain how this is off target from a purely marketing perspective. Just in the context of marketing VoIP, this seems old. Of course there are still customers in the dark, so to speak, but a cartoon campaign to target contracts with legacy carriers charging too much seems very old. A business that is still targeting minute rates may be old enough and that may be the story– We have an old business concept chasing cost of minutes and we are looking for someone who has missed the last TEN years of telephony! I can’t tell for sure if this is a sad statement about their target customer, or a sad statement about the business model. I felt like I was in some time warp trying to guess what year it was, and trying to imagine how a target audience would respond. I hope for the sake of Broadvox that there is still an appropriate sales target in 2009.

Posted in NextGen Telephony, Telephony, VoIP | 1,481 Comments »

VON Mission Impossible

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

I have not paid much attention to whatever is going on with VON after Jeff Pulver separated ways. There was always some understandable tension with institutional participants (bill-paying power) and revolutionaries. Now I see the revolution is over at VON. There is more evidence of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic than any embrace of what the IP revolution is about where it meets telephony . I clicked on an email link to an article pretending that so-called pure play VoIP is no threat to carriers. I was forced to click to see what this could possibly be about.

Apparently MagicJack, Skype, et. al. have not much to do with real people talking to each other. Every argument has some position that makes it rational, but you have to stretch a bit to find such position that is not crumbling under foot. I choked when I read the analyst quote, “What [the pure plays] offer is not a replacement for full residential phone service.” I wonder who pays for that kind of analysis? OK, I don’t really.

Now I am a customer so one might call me a hypocrite. I have AT&T U-verse, mostly to dump Comcast cable. It is my vote for the future. I do get to keep my legacy phone number as part of the bundle and I am forced to have unlimited national calling. If you like a good laugh you can look up my listed legacy number and call. I won’t answer. That is really a great product. One I really do not need.

So-called full residential service is a dinosaur, a buggy whip. How can I say this? I think I blogged about this recently even. We are not living in an interrupt based telephone call culture. Has anyone at phone carriers noticed this? Anyone know how many calls end in conversation? Anyone see the trend over the last X years? For years the carriers did well with widows’ investments. Maybe they can still eek out some phone traffic from the same widows. The only thing AT&T can be “proud of” is that I appear to be paying for my legacy phone. IF they gave me some option to only send voice mail to an online account, that would be just fine, and not for long. Almost no one calls me or anyone on my 30 year old legacy phone number. Hello?– this is not value. It is not a good product. It is an accident of history. Keep rearranging those deck chairs, but I think you will notice your feet getting wet.

Posted in NextGen Telephony, Skype, Tech Life, Telephony, VoIP | 3,693 Comments »

Which Phone Technology or Application is Dead Now?

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

It is fun (and seasonal) to close the door on something as dead or being totally over. I have been playing with the concept that your phone is dead. There are two dimensions to this telephony question in my mind, technology and application.

It is great to speculate about some view of VoIP that finds it to be dead. You need to have a very specific view to make such a comment. VoIP, as a technology, is everywhere. That game is over– VoIP wins. As an application you could have a different view. Now all the pretenders, and they are legion, exploiting VoIP claiming to have invented some variation on perpetual motion are lining up to be declared dead. I am more amazed that some are still flourishing by any virtual measure. The search for greater fools to make a graceful exit becomes more difficult in the financial times we are mired in now. The grim reaper is stalking these operations.

From a technology perspective I think it would be hard to declare legacy (digital/analog) telephony dead as well. We would be speechless without it. It is a game that may be over in many ways, but gone it won’t be for some time. –How long has fax been dead? I rest my case.

From an application view I have been considering proclaiming your phone dead, or at least “over.” Almost every mode of communication is more useful, than a legacy phone call, that includes mobile. Of course we still talk, but the category of a “cold call” now includes your friends or almost any call. I find this to be the biggest story in telephony. Who made text so cheap to demand that we use it? Instant messaging and now Twitter variations and any other text mode is more useful. Where are you? How do you feel? What’s on your mind? Who would call to ask how are you? Your mother– we can count on that, of course.

While I am in a bashing mode I am pretty harsh on videoconferencing , but this is very different. I have been too close to videoconferencing since 1995. I was suspicious then and have seen it proclaimed as the next thing for so long, I could be tired of it. We have it integrated all over and that certainly makes it easy finally, but the value is still exaggerated. That is a subject in itself, but an unwelcome interrupting call is no more attractive because of video! Family, lovers and never-ending porn variations have real value. This does not make it a vital dimension of communication, no matter how much you love your mother. (A reference to porn and your mother is not good in the same logical sequence, but you get the idea.)

Posted in NextGen Telephony, Social Networking, Tech Life, Telephony, VoIP | 7,538 Comments »

Who Would Call Voxox Another Skype Killer?

Monday, November 17th, 2008

Of course, we like such phrases to capture mind share and claim a market position. I certainly hope that it was not PR activity from Voxox that planted the idea of being a Skype killer. With such praise I fell for downloading yet another voice/comm/VoIP client. I don’t know why. Consider that I did it to save you the trouble.

I did not get far and I am going no further. You may appropriately read between the lines. I have many years experience in the land of product design and technology products. Design is to my way of thinking central to whatever your market objective may be. I had to look at the GUI presented which could be called confusing, but I thought I would attempt the most simple action to call a phone number. It seemed a pretty simple first act. It required no other person to download and decode the interface. Simply make a phone call and proceed from there. I don’t know how many of the multitude of claimed capabilities I might have explored, but the result of attempting to dial a phone number revealed all I needed to know. This is not a beta product. It seems to be more an alpha headed toward its omega.

I entered a phone number to dial and got the following error message. “Please hold all the phone calls before to place a new one.” End of test. Some coder has an idea what event may have triggered such a message. I am certain something is wrong. I really don’t care what it is. During development all kind of error codes may be used to indicate events and trap behavior. If you expect a user to have any role in evolving a product, I would suggest one of two messages. 1. – a cryptic code that would require an inquiry or look up for possible meaning. (Microsoft has mastered this technique) Or 2. – an actual message express in words that would tell a user what has occurred. A cryptic message that masquerades as useful information only shows contempt for users. Please to hold all comments that claim reviewer mistake of code interpret. Advise to uninstall before to use again.

P.S. I might have guessed. After “uninstalling” and restarting Voxox continues to haunt. I will have to take extra steps to have an exorcism for my PC. This is definitely alpha to omega.

Posted in NextGen Telephony, Product, Skype, VoIP | 660 Comments »

Ooma Lands Another Round of Megabucks

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

I saw a post about Ooma bringing in $16 Million MORE. I don’t think I have had much that I have written about Ooma. Remember what your mother told you if you don’t have anything nice to say. Nice isn’t exactly right word, but oh boy. Where can this go?

Posted in NextGen Telephony, Product, Tech Life, VoIP | 242 Comments »

I Come to Praise Skype and Not to Bury It

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

Depending on how you read many of my posts I may seem to be trolling for Skype weaknesses to highlight. Today let me at least praise the keynote presented by Skype’s Jonathon Christensen at the Internet Telephony Conference this week. These industry conferences are not known for too many real edgy positions and controversy, but the title of “VoIP is Dead” for his talk certainly was a wake-up.

Since Skype never liked to use VoIP as a descriptor of their services, declaring VoIP dead may have been some semantic trick to make a point. It was not a ruse. For those entrenched in the world of telephony it was direct message to contemplate beyond your belly button, so to speak. This message in one form or another has been delivered for over ten years, but this was a good summary of what is right in front of our faces.

I do want to take this moment to specifically praise Skype because I have often felt there was a lack of appreciation for the marketplace where they are a key participant. I am pleased to see an acknowledgment, specifically from a post-eBay Skype that there is some vision about the overall environment. Now I would be impressed to see an organization energized by this market recognition. You can see the talk summary at the TMCnet website.

Posted in NextGen Telephony, Skype, Telephony, VoIP | 264 Comments »

How Many Monkeys Does It Take?

Monday, June 9th, 2008

I had to chuckle when I first read on Skype Journal that 3 Monkeys were going to do press work for Skype. That may be a clever name for a firm– even I am not sure about that, but when one could ask how many monkeys has Skype had working on PR and marketing in general it ceases to be too funny.

While Skype has been largely wildly successful and a great business story, it is hard to complain much. There is a lot more to Skype’s “problems” than PR. (“Problems” meaning ones that many would love to have!) It may be that 3 monkeys can help get the word out, whatever it is, but that is more the issue.

What is the strategic vision at Skype? Most have gotten tired of thinking that it may come from eBay, but it must come before the tank is too close to empty. It is a difficult problem in my view. This is a paradigm shift, but has to keep connecting with the old paradigm of telephone service. So now users and Skype think it is some phone service, but what is it?

My view is that Skype very quickly got confused about being a phone service or what it was. First the use of VoIP was verboten, yet it was built completely on VoIP. Fair enough because VoIP was such a confusing moniker in the marketplace. It is not a phone service because then 911/emergency services become an issue. In the meantime alternately partnering or terrorizing phone providers in various markets seems like a phone competitor. And in the end are users who are still thinking of phone service as they know it.

I think it will take more than 3 Monkeys or any number of monkeys to figure this out. Paradigm shifting is exciting and non-trivial. Embracing the old helps the transition. Yet if you partner with the walking dead, where will you be? We knew the Internet would change everything, but no one provided directions.

Posted in NextGen Telephony, Skype, Tech Life, VoIP | 91 Comments »

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