This Is Enterprise
I have a friend who likes to say he's amazed that any business makes money the way they handle customers. It must be that they all operate equally badly, so it's a level playing field. I can relate to Joel's experience with Cingular, because I'm a Cingular customer as well. I've seen that message before, though usually when I'm trying to pay my bill. My wife uses Qwest, and trying to manage her wireless account via the web, I've seen firsthand what a mess Qwest is. Sure, it's bad when the programming and customer service are outsorced to different places, but what about when the whole wireless network is outsourced as well?
Then there's the uptime issue. There's a lot of talk about 5 9's availability in the enterprise space, but I can't pay my credit cards at 11 PM during the week (due to mergers, I hold 3 cards with the same bank... that's another story). They have a scheduled maintenance window daily from 10PM to 6AM Eastern time. Nice for the programmers and operations staff, but so much for paying bills in your PJs.
Still, I think that Comcast has topped them all. About a year ago, I tried to set up an auto-payment plan on our account. I went to their website, enrolled in autopay, and waited. Some weeks later, I got an overdue notice in the mail. Seems the enrollment process didn't work. I repeated it. Weeks later, another overdue notice. This time I called, and a half hour later, had the auto payment process hooked up. Then we moved and had to get new service, which entailed a whole new account number. For months, I would go online, log into my Comcast account, and try to pay my bill online, but each time I received a message "The System is Down For Maintenance". So after trying for a few days, I call and pay the bill over the phone, so I can tell someone their website has a problem with uptime. This goes on for a few months, and it dawns on me what's happened. They are rewriting the online payment system. Sure enough, a couple months ago, I go thru the monthly ritual, and this time, I can pay online for the first time in 6 months. The system is down for maintenance... indeed it was.