Wonder if it's the Mr Angry I had the displeasure of dealing with four or five years ago. This customer claimed to be a major investment bank who was "losing millions an hour" thanks to intermittent service on his single copper circuit. That's right they had a single copper circuit which was many years olds and probably should have been replaced with fibre years before. Yes a single circuit, no redundancy no resilience.
Due to the technology in use the full service test could not be run without the cable being unplugged from the wall. Mr Obstructive flatly refused to unplug the cable. "What" he asked "do I pay you for? You can send somebody to unplug the cable."
I politely explained that he did not pay us to unplug cables. If he checked his contract and customer support plan he would have found that the demarcation point was the wall socket. Not the NTE. The circuit was strictly wires only and his employer had purchased the NTE when they had begun the lease on the circuit. Unfortunately we had inherited this customer when we bought another company. It wasn't a good buy, there were lots of customers with similar products.
I explained that we couldn't raise an engineering task with the carrier until a service test had been run. We could send an engineer to unplug the cable, but there was no SLA for this and it would be the next free engineer in the area who would spend. This I explained could take a few hours. If the engineer attended and found no fault then the visit would be chargeable. If the service test did reveal a fault then we would need to raise a task to the carrier, on an eight hour SLA. I checked the contract and found that this was on a 12x5 basis so even if our engineer could get to site within the next couple of hours it could potentially be the next day before his service was fixed.
This dude not improve the general mood on the other side of the conversation. Mr Incandescent was he told me going to sue for all their lost business. He was also going to speak to our CEO who was a personal friend and get me fired. It seemed to me like a breach of normal social etiquette to sue a personal friend for millions, but I didn't mention that at the time. However I explained that as long as we remained within SLA his options for financial redress were limited to what was in the contract. And as his employer had signed up to these terms there was nothing I could do about this. I didn't mention that the contractual limit on what redress he could claim was diddly squat. I promised he world get the next available field engineer and he hung up threatening all sorts of terrible consequences.
I tracked down his account manager and gave her a call to find out why this customer was still on a terrible old copper circuit when we could do fibre faster and at around three same price. The account manager explained that once a year she called Mr Apoplectic and explained to him that instead of just renewing the contract for the existing service for another year we could do him a three year contract for a faster more reliable fibre service on a shorter SLA and with a managed NTE thrown in for the same annual fee. She even gave costs for a backup circuit (with a different carrier naturally) and a pair of managed routers. Every year Mr Unreasonable would claim we were con merchants and were just trying to make more money out of him and that he was fine as he was thank you very much.
My next port of call was to look the company up. While they were in investment they were not "a major investment bank" and they certainly weren't turning over millions every hour.
Then an engineer came free so I called up Mr Best-Friend-of-the-CEO to give him an ETA. Naturally he wasn't happy about the ETA. I explained that the engineer had to travel across the city from his previous job and the ETA was pretty much worst case and the engineer would probably be on site before the quoted ETA. This still didn't satisfy Mr Totally-Uneasonable and he expected me to find a closer engineer and pull them off three job they where on. I had, said Mr Patronising, a lot to learn about customer service.
When engineer called in from site well before the quoted ETA I told him I was ready to run the service test as soon as the cable was unplugged. No need, came the reply, the fault was fixed. It turned out that the cable was badly damaged. It appeared that the plug at the wall end had suffered such a heavy impact that the casing was broken. The wall socket was also damaged, but functional. Since he had been shown into the comms room by Mr Suddenly-Contrite and he'd also taken lots of photographs there was no argument. As luck would have it the engineer had a spare cable in his van and service was back up in no time.
Same day engineer, mileage and time plus parts added up to a nice chunk of money. Which was of course not noticable next to the millions of pounds Mr Not-Entirely-Honest was no longer losing every hour.
The following day the account manager called me to let me know that Mr Probably-Looking-For-a-New-Job's boss had been in touch to get a quote for a couple of fibre circuits with managed firewalls.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
