good customer service

[cellio]

Wednesday night our DSL was out, not for the first time (we get little glitches, and occasionally outages of an hour or so). This one ran longer than usual, so around 10PM I called to report it. I got the same person I've always gotten when I call, no matter what time; it's the same person who sold me the service in the first place.

Our conversation went something like this:

Me: Our service has been out for a couple hours. I've done the usual debugging and power-cycling.

Him: It seems to be you. Happen much?

Me: We get this from time to time. Is it likely to be our 1999 modem?

Him: Yeah. I'll send you a new one, or you can come pick one up.

Me: I wouldn't have expected our service to come with a free modem. I was going to buy one.

Him: I'm happy to send it.

It came in today's mail, so as soon as we hit Radio Shack for some filters, we should be good to go. Kudos, Nidhog!

Comments

[giddysinger.livejournal.com]

Huh. Why do you need new DSL filters? Changing the modem shouldn't have anything to do with anything plugged into any other phone jack in the house.

[cellio]

We don't currently have any filters.

Yeah, weird. Everything I've read and heard tells me that shouldn't work. But our modem works without killing the phones. I used to think it was something special about our setup (we were early adopters; there's all manner of weirdness in our phone box), but the one time we borrowed another modem to debug, the phones became unusable. It seems to be something about that modem (a standard-issue, if vintage, Westel). Presumably the fellow from Nidhog would have thrown in some filters if it had occurred to either of us -- I didn't think of it, and presumably he assumed we already had them. But Dani works near a Radio Shack, so we can solve this tomorrow.