I think we finally have our phone lines and fax machine (better known as the money printer, since we get purchase orders through it) set up again.
I find it almost impossible to believe that our phone lines lagged behind our physical office move by two weeks. Our Internet is still not right here, and will probably take many more months. All of this after we gave Telus over two months notice of our move.
Luckily, VoIP works really well over Shaw, despite Telus insisting it was impossible to run VoIP over cable. In fact, it works so well that I plan to skip getting a home phone line next month when I move. I’ll either rely on cell phone (unlimited local calls via Fido) or get a VoIP line if I anticipate a lot of North American-long distance. A land line just does nothing that I need anymore.
I guess it goes without saying that all phone companies are inherently evil. What doesn’t go without saying is that ours in particular is also stupid enough to think they still have a monopoly on voice communications. Telus is going to be blind-sided, and it couldn’t happen to a better group of people.
August 8th, 2005 at 12:19 am
It seems that companies like Telus have two priorities: their bottom line and their labour pool. They’re willing to sacrifice the customer base for both, which comes at the cost of their future.
Dealing with Telus before (and during this strike) was pure frustration. A simple request, like having a set of numbers forwarded, took a week (and a dozen calls) to get started — before the strike started. After the strike began, the same request was lost and took 50+ calls (with random profanity) over a two week period. That’s two weeks where our customers were unable to contact us.
As it happens, forwarding the lines took about 5 minutes of techie time, after the three weeks of calls. Forwarding lines with an alternative provider, like Vonage, takes about 5 seconds using their handy-dandy web interface.
I’d guess that Telus cost us $4k+ in wasted time, and $20k+ in lost business. All for about 5 minutes of techie time.
I think that companies like Telus are already dead, they just don’t know it yet.