At IdeaSIP, we’re constantly doing everything we can to keep our users happy — even the non-paying ones. As a user myself, I want to have the best service we can have, and I feel it’s only fair to give everyone the best care we can possibly give. One of the guys on the team put it best when he said, “The measure of a company’s customer service shouldn’t just be how it treats its biggest paying customers, it should be how it treats all its customers.” I take that to heart, and I think everyone on the team does as well.

This, however, seems to be a rarity in the communications world. Constantly we, as a company, are having to deal with outsourced customer service for even the smallest of companies that we work with, with scripted call centers, or one guy sitting at a keyboard, answering trouble tickets or business enquiries in the most offhanded fashion.

This gives us an incredibly bad impression of the entire business we’re dealing with, even if everyone else is as professional and courteous as can be. And whereas, in many companies, an attitude like this would get you fired or at the very least severely reprimanded, this seems to be the absolute norm from telecom and IP communications companies. It’s staggering how little care for the customer there is in this field. And I don’t fully understand why.

In the days of purely physical telecom companies, customer service didn’t have to be quite as good because there were few alternatives. With at the most one ILEC and one or two CLECs in an area, you were stuck with sort of the concept that you had nowhere else to go, so you had to put up with the shoddy service that was available. But in the modern world of IP communication, there are quite literally thousands of players from all over the world. Granted, many of them are small and may not offer all the services you’re looking for or have quite the quality you need, but there are guaranteed to be at least a dozen who do.

Why, as a company, would you shoot yourself in the foot by employing customer service which was not at the very least responsive and cordial? Are the people moving into the IP communications field so deeply-ingrained in the old physical telecom mentality that they just think their performance is acceptable? Or do a majority of companies out there really just not care about your business?

We used to do business with a company that treated us like absolute garbage because we were a small company and therefore not very profitable to them. We used them for PSTN termination, and since we did almost no business in that area, they felt they could give us unacceptable service at all times. When we complained, we were told simply, “Too bad. If you don’t like it, leave.”

As soon as we started doing more business in the PSTN termination area, we did exactly that. We left and found someone else, never to look back. Why would you, as a company, treat a customer poorly simply because he’s not your biggest customer? He never will be your biggest customer with that sort of attitude.