45 minutes on hold and heading for the record ...

The ISP that was a part of the grief we faced with a client whose IP changed (previous blog post), used to be locally owned.

When they were locally owned, we spoke to real people almost immediately. In fact, over the years we were dealing with them, we got to know a number of the tier 1 and 2 support personnel very well. Their ADSL service was first in line when we were setting up a new client's office or Internet setup.

They were since purchased by a company called Uniserve based out of British Columbia here in Canada somewhere close to two or more years ago now.

Around a year after the purchase, the local support team was disbanded and support has since been provided solely out of B.C.

Well ... the support person just picked up ... and doesn't sound too confident that they can help us.

We need a second static IP for the new Intel Remote Management Module 2 out of band management product we are installing into our client's relatively new SBS box.

Once we had established the reason for the call, the support person let us know which static IPs we should have ... unfortunately they were the IPs we used to have before the upgrade to ADSL 2.0 over a year ago.

After we got things kinda straightened out, and there was a realization that their records were sorely out of date, we now have to wait up to two business days for another IP to be assigned to our account.

The message one can get from such a long hold time is multi-faceted:

1. There are not enough people staffing the support centre ... which could be purposeful or not.
2. There are issues with the network causing high call volumes.

The call is now finished after over 70 minutes including the hold time. We are fortunate that there are other tasks being accomplished while we are here at our client's site. But, essentially we are pretty much no further ahead than we were before we called.

*sigh*

Fortunately, we only have two clients who are left on this particular ISP's services. The one whose IP was changed recently and this one.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.