The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Happy 2007. Now Where's Our Phones?
Wednesday - January 03, 2007 01:04 PM in
We officially reported to our new offices yesterday but without phone service. I think the original promised date that our phone numbers were to be moved was nearly a month ago, and as of this AM, the revised revision of the revised due date was revised again, and maybe we'll have phone service by the end of the week.
You would think that 22 years after the breakup of Ma Bell, the telcos would have improved, but sadly the reverse seems true. As I have written before, the breakup of the old AT&T sounded ok on paper, but the truth, changing technology, and politics can often result in unintended consequences. So it is here.
Well over 100 years ago Theodore Vail (Vail was the REAL father of AT&T. Remember A.G. Bell thought he was inventing a hearing aid) convinced the government that telephone service was a natural monopoly. Vail's argument was sound. It was impractical to be on different service than your neighbors. You wouldn't be able to call them and the telephone pole wiring logistics would be a nightmare. In return for allowing the States to regulate prices, AT&T was granted exclusivity to be the phone company in the cities and towns where they owned the local wires, and because Vail had the foresight to gain control of Western Union with its existing telegraph lines and rights of way between towns, AT&T had a monopoly on all long distance traffic.
This worked pretty well, when the USA population was a more even mix of urban and rural locations and the AT&T policy of averaging the cost of phone service was a fair division. But as we gravitated to more of an urban population and labor costs rose to make rural service even more costly, the telcos who were limited by regulation to rate averaging and profit margins around 10-14% were stuck.
Court cases were running against Ma Bell (The Carterphone Decision allowed the hanging of non-Bell gear onto the public network cutting into hardware rental revenues, and Jack Goeken and Bill McGowan of MCI had successfully used microwave to bypass the long distance network to cream skim profitable high density long distance traffic.) Consumers complained that the telco was foot dragging in the introduction of new services, and so the breakup of 1984 came into being. But the breakup wasn't enough to satisfy the new telco entrepreneurs. They wanted to offer more feature rich services to businesses and to the public, but logically only where it could be done at a profit. But the monopoly telco still owned the wires into homes and offices and tearing up streets to lay more wires to bypass what is called "the local loop" was usually impractical.
So the new entrants lobbied the State utility commissions to force the telco to rent them facilities and even banks of phone numbers in bulk and at a price discount. The telcos fought, but lost, and a new breed of local competitive telephone companies sprung up renting lines from the old telco and undercutting telco rates while cherry picking where they wanted to serve; and leaving the old telco as the provider of last resort to places where service wasn't too profitable. The phone company had to cut back on service quality since they were making less money on the profitable lines while still losing money serving the boonies. The upstarts themselves were/are working on thin margins since the discounts they get aren't huge, so they can't afford to deliver any better quality service either.
In our case it makes some sense to do business with an alternative carrier because of our high volumes of in and outbound survey and test calling and other special needs. But that carrier still has to coordinate with the old telco (Qwest in our case) to complete the circuits, transfer "title" to the local phone numbers and assign cable pairs routed from the telco serving office to our location and back to the facilities of the alternate carrier in the other direction.
Not too hard to imagine why there are often huge coordination problems and missed due dates since both the telco and the alternative carrier are working on thin margins. And once again, the consumer gets the short end of the stick.
I am no fan of big government, after all they are a cause of this service degradation. But if someone wants to argue that its time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, you have my vote.
Posted by Rick Rappe'
Well over 100 years ago Theodore Vail (Vail was the REAL father of AT&T. Remember A.G. Bell thought he was inventing a hearing aid) convinced the government that telephone service was a natural monopoly. Vail's argument was sound. It was impractical to be on different service than your neighbors. You wouldn't be able to call them and the telephone pole wiring logistics would be a nightmare. In return for allowing the States to regulate prices, AT&T was granted exclusivity to be the phone company in the cities and towns where they owned the local wires, and because Vail had the foresight to gain control of Western Union with its existing telegraph lines and rights of way between towns, AT&T had a monopoly on all long distance traffic.
This worked pretty well, when the USA population was a more even mix of urban and rural locations and the AT&T policy of averaging the cost of phone service was a fair division. But as we gravitated to more of an urban population and labor costs rose to make rural service even more costly, the telcos who were limited by regulation to rate averaging and profit margins around 10-14% were stuck.
Court cases were running against Ma Bell (The Carterphone Decision allowed the hanging of non-Bell gear onto the public network cutting into hardware rental revenues, and Jack Goeken and Bill McGowan of MCI had successfully used microwave to bypass the long distance network to cream skim profitable high density long distance traffic.) Consumers complained that the telco was foot dragging in the introduction of new services, and so the breakup of 1984 came into being. But the breakup wasn't enough to satisfy the new telco entrepreneurs. They wanted to offer more feature rich services to businesses and to the public, but logically only where it could be done at a profit. But the monopoly telco still owned the wires into homes and offices and tearing up streets to lay more wires to bypass what is called "the local loop" was usually impractical.
So the new entrants lobbied the State utility commissions to force the telco to rent them facilities and even banks of phone numbers in bulk and at a price discount. The telcos fought, but lost, and a new breed of local competitive telephone companies sprung up renting lines from the old telco and undercutting telco rates while cherry picking where they wanted to serve; and leaving the old telco as the provider of last resort to places where service wasn't too profitable. The phone company had to cut back on service quality since they were making less money on the profitable lines while still losing money serving the boonies. The upstarts themselves were/are working on thin margins since the discounts they get aren't huge, so they can't afford to deliver any better quality service either.
In our case it makes some sense to do business with an alternative carrier because of our high volumes of in and outbound survey and test calling and other special needs. But that carrier still has to coordinate with the old telco (Qwest in our case) to complete the circuits, transfer "title" to the local phone numbers and assign cable pairs routed from the telco serving office to our location and back to the facilities of the alternate carrier in the other direction.
Not too hard to imagine why there are often huge coordination problems and missed due dates since both the telco and the alternative carrier are working on thin margins. And once again, the consumer gets the short end of the stick.
I am no fan of big government, after all they are a cause of this service degradation. But if someone wants to argue that its time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, you have my vote.
Posted by Rick Rappe'
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