Very small phone services can have issues
Someone called us for help today with a problem that was costing him thousands of dollars in lost advertising and I thought was worth describing here for visitors.
To make a long story short, The customer had a number with EasyTel (an enhanced voicemail service) for 3 years, but because of a law suit between EasyTel and their carrier the number was shut off and they weren’t allowing it to be transferred, claiming he had an Unsatisfied Business Relationship. That means he has an outstanding balance, but it was automatically deducted from his credit card and he’s never been a day late. (They even continued to deduct for it AFTER it was shut off too) Everyone blamed everyone else and this basically shut not only his phones but his whole business down.
The point I often tell callers is that in a small company, like many of the enhanced voicemail services that you find on the web, outside circumstances can cause problems. Smaller can be good sometimes, but bad at times too. Whether it’s a flood, illness, computer crashes, auto accident, a law suit or even just a vacation, outside influences can adversely affect the service. Most enhanced voicemail services for instance are like little puddle-jumper charter airlines. They have anice website but they only exist on the web and most only have one or two customer service people. Smal companies cn give better more personal attention when things go well but circumstances or life in general can also get in the way and cause real problems in a small compay too.
You don’t have to be the size of AT&T or American Airlines to be big enough to avoid the majority of individual issues. AT&T’s size brings it’s own set of problems rising from being too big with too much internal bureaucracy just like it does for the really biggest airlines, vs the smaller more competitive companies. Little puddle jumping charter companies are just more likely to have issues. So when you’re picking a phone company remember that size does matter or at least can be a factor in some critical areas of your business.
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Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
June 13, 2008 at 1:11 pm
By the way, I’ve been adding more posts like this about other providers recently for a reason. We’re working quite a bit on the Providers Section of our site and want to have both a directory of researched providers as well as several articles that relate to some of them too
Bill
Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
June 13, 2008 at 6:43 pm
It didn’t take very long for Thomas Skala of Easytel to respond. Just a couple hours after this was posted he called. Literally the first sentence out of his mouth after hello was threatening a law suit, so you know it wasn’t a very productive conversation. In the conversation he stated very carefully that was there is “no law suit about toll free numbers”. The way he said it made me think that there may very likely be a law suit but that it just didn’t relate to toll free numbers.
The other interesting thing he said was that they don’t allow anyone to transfer toll free numbers. That they sell the service and the toll free number is included with it but if you cancel the service you can’t take their number with you if you want to leave. This makes me think that someone may have simply told the customer the lawsuit story in order to justify why they weren’t able or should I say, willing, to release numbers.
If there is no law suit, I’m sorry. I was told in writing by a customer that this was their reason for refusing to release the number he had used for three years. If there is no lawsuit then I apologize but providing toll free service and refusing to release numbers in order to hold their customers hostage is MUCH worse in my book and definitely requires more attention and discussion in the future.
To Thomas Skala: I will include your response if you do provide one and respond appropriately. But if someone there is telling customers there’s a lawsuit as your excuse to ignore toll free portability, not only is that worse but you can’t blame anyone else for repeating what you or someone there said. And to start out by threatening a law suit about a casual mention in an article that wasn’t even really about you, is absurd and says more about you than anything I said.
Bill Quimby
Thomas Skala (1 comments.) says:
December 6, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Bill,
The information you published is not correct. There was no lawsuit about toll-free numbers or anything related to toll-free numbers. In addition, it does not look like you understand our business model.
EasyTel.Net does not sell toll-free, local numbers or long distance services as a stand-alone service. EasyTel.Net is in the business of providing a unified communication service and includes at no additional cost both toll-free and local access numbers to its subscribers, (only when using its service), through one of its own toll-free numbers or local numbers, which are available in about 5,000 cities and communities, in forty countries, on five continents.
No one is held hostage as the service is offered on a month-to-month basis without any term commitments. The numbers provided by EasyTel.Net and they remain our property and are not for sale. In the event a subscriber wishes to port their own number to our service they can take that number with them when they leave our service.
By the way, the correct name of our company is EasyTel.Net and we should not be confused with other companies which are also called EasyTel as they are not related to us.
Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
December 7, 2008 at 1:26 am
That’s interesting. Here’s your email saying “We are not lying about anything. EasyTel has filed a lawsuit against the carrier that provided these services for incorrect billing. This litigation involved hundreds of thousands of dollars and has been in process for several years. Once again we are not blocking your request to port the number.”
That’s not what the customer said, that’s YOUR email to the customer which they sent me. Were you lying then or are you lying now, or is there some way to make these contradicting statements both line up?
Bill
Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
December 7, 2008 at 1:28 am
I had to write about this comment in terms of holding customers hostage. It’s a perfect example and it’s so funny that he says he doesn’t hold anyone hostage while at the same time explaining that he does. If there was ever an explanation of why you need to get your number from a seperate outside source, this is it!! Thanks Thomas!
Bill