Search Results for: unintended

I have a painfully low tolerance for lousy customer service.

I can accept and understand that problems occasionally happen with all services. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking telecom, TV, airlines, whatever. In my view, what distinguishes great companies is how they respond to these troubles.

Why is it so hard to find service excellence in consumer telecommunications services? Sometimes, it just seems telecom service providers are willing to annoy their customers, one at a time. I’d like to believe this is an unintended consequence, rather than a strategy – but there seems to be uniformity in the delivery of disappointment through mediocrity.

My latest experience is with my high speed internet service provider (you know who you are). In the spirit of the season, I will leave out the details, but customer service rep I280 and her boss, Greg, didn’t seem to want to hear that your auto-dialling announcement machine was broken and bothering me. Greg claimed he was as high up as escalation could go. If senior management wants to hear about it, call me – I have it documented. It will be fun to compare his notes to mine.

The report of the Telecom Policy Review panel called for a new Telecom Consumer Agency. Customer service and consumer issues will be advanced as market forces lead the regulation of the industry. I don’t think that these issues should necessarily get resolved by a government body. But I’d love to see a publication of comparative tracking reports, the way that US airlines are scored on various performance indicators. Track outages as a start, as I suggested 2 months ago.

That little bit of information would lead to more informed and more empowered consumers. Then we can talk about real market forces.

Sunday’s Toronto Star had a front page feature describing software called Psiphon, from the so-called Citizen Lab at University of Toronto. The software is designed, in theory, to help people in oppressive regimes circumvent national restrictions on free access to content by more easily offering proxy servers on the outside.

It is an interesting piece of ‘hack’-tivism. Not really news (the Globe and Mail carried a story about Psiphon in February). In some ways, I suppose that the intent of the software is a modern day equivalent of Radio Free Europe – spreading the word of democracy by opening up communications.

I’d like to look at an unintended consequences of this initiatives. Will Psiphon help spread child exploitation images? Do folks at the Citizen Lab believe that images of children should also be free of any restrictions in their transmittal on the internet or does the Citizen Lab agree with the concept that freedom to communicate can have some restrictions?

Michael Geist is quoted in the Star article saying “There are international instruments that override even sovereign governments, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Let’s not forget there are also international instruments that restrict freedoms, such as the Convention on Rights of the Child statements on child exploitation images.

As a father of young children, perhaps the director of the Citizen Lab, Ronald Deibert will turn some attention to the issue of reasonable limits on internet freedoms.

Illegal Content on the Internet isn’t clearly defined. We’ll be examining the issue in a special session at The Canadian Telecom Summit next month.