How many times have you picked up your VoIP phone and not had a dialtone and said, “damnit, service is out again.” I can’t count the number of tech calls I have been a part of or heard about where a piece of equipment suddenly stopped working and the user declared, with passion generally reserved for Samuel L. Jackson and Al Paccino at the climax of a movie, that they were positive it was plugged in and it just stopped working. After a long line of troubleshooting, unplugging and replugging it in miraculously cures the ailment, clearly a function of some latent factory problem.

Since purchasing my 1994 car some three years ago, I have on three different occasions forgotten that it has a kill switch on the ignition. If it sits for some small period of time, the kill switch engages and the engine won’t turn over. Lights work, radio works, but trying to start it results in a non-response. If the ignition is not fully disengaged, for instance if it is slightly on and leaves the radio playing, pushing the unlock will not disengage the kill switch. After forty-five minutes of non-response from Verizon’s roadside assistance, I walked out to the car, pressed the unlock button, heard the familiar “BEEP BEEP”, started the car and drove to the office. Even the pros sometimes forget to follow the basic troubleshooting steps and end up falling into the assumption ravine.

Two minutes of stepping back, forgetting that I know everything, and following a basic checklist would have saved me a lot of time and embarrassment.

Comcast...Cares?

I am leaving you this note on the fridge because I can’t bear to face you.  I can’t bear seeing the look in your eyes when I tell you that it’s over. This off again, on again blamefest has come to an end. I was always there to support you financially, but you never reciprocated with the kind of love, the kind of consistency I needed in my life.

This isn’t easy for me. As I close this chapter in the book that is yet to be finished, I know I will look back on our times together with some hints of fondness. I am sure we will cross paths again, someday. I hope that we can smile, exchange greetings, show each other a base level of respect and courtesy.

I have taken the liberty of leaving all of your things at your office, so, aside from this note, this is goodbye.

Or is it…

After ten years of intermittent service, five of which were served in exile between Ohio and Orlando, my often tumultuous relationship with Comcast has come to an end. I now enjoy EPB‘s fiber service with 30mb up/down, and I have yet to experience an outage in my first three months of service. It just works, and works well.

When I called today to cancel my Comcast service, I was informed of a vague and unwritten rule that I would have to continue paying for service for another seven days.

Tip of the day for anyone out there in the business world:

The goodbye is your last, great chance to have a happy customer.

This is it. If you don’t make this customer happy at the cancellation, you have failed. EVERY company has an opportunity when a customer requests termination of service to perform this last great act.

1. Always ask what you could have done better to retain the customer, expect to get some angry responses here.
2. Always be appreciative of the feedback you received, it is priceless.
3. Always close the interaction with an open invitation to return, if possible.

Especially in the VoIP world, where margins are thin and customers are picky, there is this urge to “tax” customer’s to death as they go out the door. There are subtle signs this is turning around, and it should. Much like Comcast insisting I keep and pay for an extra seven days of service, unreasonable and excessive termination fees are the last gasps of a dying machine. Losing a customer is free, if it’s producing enough revenue to help the company, your model is dead.

As with every practice in any business, if it doesn’t produce meaningful revenue and doesn’t improve the customer experience, what is the point?

UPDATE 2010/8/27: In fairness to Comcast, prior to this blog ever being posed. the @comcastcares folks from Twitter took care of the nightmare runaround my local person had given me, and they were also the only source of useful technical assistance in the last three years. Comcast’s entire hope for being around ten years from now lies in being able to scale that team, and that model.

What? Where?

On Sunday December 29th, Level3 Communications, one of the largest IP transit networks in North America and Europe, suffered an outage affecting sites such as ESPN, Amazon, and CNN. Noticeable missing from Level3? Any official acknowledgment or discussion of the incident; and an outage that disrupts ESPN on a Sunday will definitely be noticed.

When one of the largest internet backbones shows trouble, there are two ways to handle the situation (after fixing the issue of course). The first would be what we here call the “Duck and Cover” method (sometimes referred to as the Vinnie Barbarino approach). In this method, the company either makes no mention of the incident or does a classic Vinnie impersonation… such as:

Concerned User: I think there’s an outage.
Level3: What? Where?
Concerned User: I think there’s a problem with the network.
Level3: I’m So Confused. 
(mugs to the camera and audience goes crazy)

The other approach would be to acknowledge the incident, explain what is known, and explain what will be done in the future to prevent similar issues. This approach is, to paraphrase Billy Joel, is hardly ever heard but mostly what we need. We’re not sure why so few companies use the “acknowledge” approach — maybe it’s an old school, big business ideal that’s ingrained into company culture, but who knows? Open source companies, such as Digium, tend to disclose issues and discuss them, well, openly.

Open discussion tends not to turn folks away. Problems happen. How companies handle issues can either increase customer loyalty or send customers searching for alternatives. In our tech circles, most people seem to embrace the companies they can trust — and those companies tend to avoid the duck and cover approach.

So, where does that leave us with Level3?

Well, sadly, Level3 reminds us that your VoIP powered telephone system depends on Internet. Choosing several providers can certainly increase uptime, and choosing a company you can rely on will certainly help you sleep better at night. As for the 12/29 incident, we here (much like others) can only speculate. Current theories suggest a weather storm in Michigan may have been ground zero.

Other readings:

• Level3 Press Releases (notice no mention) 
• TechCrunch reports “The Tubes are Clogged”
• Broadband Reports “Outages Plague AT&T and Level3”
• SANS “Level3 Outage Confirmed”
• Slashdot “Storm Causes AT&T Outage Across Midwest”

About Level3:

Level 3 Communications (Nasdaq: LVLT) is an international communications company headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado. The company operates one of the largest communications and Internet backbones in the world.

Recently Network World reported that Linux consumed as much as 12% less power than Windows 2008 on identical hardware. Now of course, hosting that server in a data center designed for a farm of high heat, high performing servers may thwart your green goals, but as we learned from Bill Murray… baby steps is a great way to start your journey.

Did you know that Paula Abdul had a hit with Rush, Rush? Not Fred, he lost a hammer thinking it was Hush, Hush.

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