If you have the time and resources to be constantly watching the entire web for references to your company name, why can't you make a similar effort to get a responsive support and service department into place?-40hz
Now that, is a damn fine question.
Red Gear Software, who now owns TaxWorks has an excellent support staff. I had to call them twice this week while migrating client data to new hardware (compatability issues). I gave the first person I talked to a clear description of the problem ... And they responded with a clear and correct solution to said problem(s). That is how Tech Support is supposed to work.
-Stoic Joker
That is not quite a fair comparison but the point is, good support is hard to scale.
It is much easier to give good support to a fairly homogeneous customer base where you can make some assumptions on the knowledge level of the client and the number and type of requests are going to be more predictable. In this case, tax software. You call them with a precise question about their product.
It is very different for a cable company or ISP - the diversity of clients and the diversity of problems - and the number of customers - would make it hard to give good support consistently - you just cant have enough knowledgeable and empowered people manning the phones. You cant assume or predict much about the customer. And you cannot recruit the people you need, even if you did pay for them. Whereas in a smaller business it can be rewarding to do support, so you can recruit and train some good people (or it can be a rotation), it's a different chalenge if you need 40 people around the clock... can't attract the people you'd need.
At that size of company and kind of client base, the focus really should be on operations - have everything smoothly running all the time. Always do checks and tests and monitoring so that people don't have to call support in the first place. Then you might need less people on the support lines and you could train and empower them again...
Anyway, the problem you encountered was sloppy
operations - people didnt check that the settings were correct and al customers reconnected after whatever they did. Support didnt have the tools to check this. Operations, not suport, were the problem. It is very hard for support, even good support, to figure out problems of the "oh, we didnt do what we were supposed to do or what the log claims we did" kind. Operations should catch that, not support
And there your point is super valid... you have the resources to monitor what is said about the company, you should have the resources to monitor your services and check that work was done correctly
