I was just reading Hancock4's post of 9/22.
His brief reference to 'finger pointing' in the industry brought back a lot of memories.
I worked for MCI during their high growth years. I was a very sharp troubleshooter on analog lines. Every time a vendor tried to get me into a finger pointing match with them, I always prevailed. That was because I did thorough troubleshooting and I never assigned blame to another telephone company or COAM provider without absolute proof. If it wasn't their issue, I'd just fix it without getting them involved.
Sadly, a lot of the COAM and even some of the phone companies would make assumptions and deny the issue was theirs even though my troubleshooting clearly demonstrated that it was. It happens a lot more often than you think much to your customer's displeasure.
In my later years at MCI, I was involved with a department called 'Accounts Maintenance'. It was a polite name for something else. A more accurate name might have been 'Troubled Accounts'.
These were customers with foreign exchange lines, WATS lines, and/or analog data lines.
They never sent me to a customer unless the customer was already absolutely furious. I could bet you a hundred dollar bill [with no fear of losing] that the customer was ready to eat me alive when I walked in the door.
But I never failed to resolve their issue(s). I always had them eating out of my hand when I left. I saved many an account for MCI.
When I would get into a difference of opinion (a more professional way of referring to it than 'finger pointing'), I would schedule a meet with the COAM or telco and prove the issue to them. I always isolated the issue to their service or equipment and got them to repair it.
I thoroughly embarrassed the local Bell company because they refused to believe my assessment. Their field installers/repair men always took the attitude that if you weren't one of them, you didn't know anything.
The customer was experiencing a loud hum whenever they bridged their MCI WATS line with one of their Bell lines. It otherwise worked fine.
I had the local phone company go out and check it. All he did was check for dial tone at the demarc, said there was nothing wrong, and proceeded to leave.
That customer was a burglar/fire alarm company that paid the local company twenty thousand dollars per month for all of the lines they used to monitor their customers' alarms. That customer stopped the installer, explained to him that he was a large customer, and politely asked him to assist him in resolving that issue. The installer refused and he left.
I went out there with my test equipment. When I put a volt ohm meter between ring and ground, the meter pegged to the left. There was positive battery on the ring of the circuit we had leased from the local Bell company to carry our WATS service to his premises. I checked the conditions on the Bell lines to compare. They all showed negative battery ring to ground.
I opened a trouble report with the local phone company. They sent the same installer/repair man to the site as before. He called me and told me I didn't know what I was talking about. He said I sent him out on an unnecessary trip. He also stated, 'on a loop start circuit telco does not provide battery' (excuse me?).
I told him to hold tight and not leave because I was now going to escalate this.
When I called the escalation line, they let me speak to a technical supervisor. I told him what I had found on the line and that the installer/repair man was refusing to address the issue. He told me he'd call me back.
About ten minutes later, my phone rang. It was our customer. He told me that it worked and he even bridged up our line to demonstrate that there was no longer a loud hum on the line when they bridged it. I heard a clear MCI dial tone with no hum.
Five minutes later, I got a phone call from the technical supervisor. He told me, "Fred, I would have bet a month's pay that you were wrong. And I would have *lost*!". They had identified a defective power supply they had installed on the customer's premises. When they replaced it, the issue cleared.
Problem solved.
I ran into that installer/repair man at one of our data customers about a month later. From then on any time I asked him to do something or told him how to troubleshoot anything, it was 'Yes, sir' and he acted! I never had another minute's issue with him (I still remember his name, haha). Apparently that story spread to the rest of his colleagues in that area because their attitude seemed to change when I dealt with them, too.
I could tell a number of other stories like this. I had one with Rolm where I had to arrange a meet. I really embarrassed the folks at Rolm when I immediately proved that the issue with the WATS line was a card in the customer's switch and not our WATS line. They had been telling the customer for weeks that the issue was not in the Rolm switch. Of course, they insisted the issue was on the WATS line we were providing. The supervisor that met me swapped out the Rolm card while I waited and the issue was immediately resolved. The customer went absolutely ballistic when he found he had been without his WATS line for weeks because of that defective card and Rolm had repeatedly denied it was their issue. I could give you further details, but I think you get the idea.
Nothing is more frustrating to a customer than finger pointing between telcos and/or COAM providers. First, thoroughly troubleshoot it and clearly identify the issue. If it is your issue, resolve it right then and there. If you isolate it to another service provider or customer equipment, schedule a meet with the telco or COAM provider and make sure everyone in attendance understands that no one is leaving until the issue is resolved. Then, resolve it. That leads to much happier customers.
Fred