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stinkfoot63
+4 more
Contributor II
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Scheduled Maintenance
How is it that the paying customer somehow doesn't rate any sort of notification when Cox plans to take down services to perform scheduled maintenance? I was enjoying a quiet close to my weekend surfing the net and listening to a streaming radio station when quite abruptly the music stopped and I was dead in the water trying to surf the net. I placed a call to tech support and after weeding through the very annoying delay to customer service that is the automated answering system I learn for the very first time that there is scheduled maintenance for my area- thanks to the recording Cox was "thoughtful" enough to provide anyone who bothers to call in after their services stop.
I cannot speak for any individuals from Cox who might respond to this but it's pretty evident that the corporate attitude toward the paying customer is one of contempt when the company doesn't even bother to shoot an email or place an automated phone call to alert us of the upcoming scheduled service interruption instead of letting us figure it out for ourselves after service inexplicably stops. This does not reflect any commitment to customer service- it echoes the attitude that we rate as no more than a money garden to be harvested every month.
This is hardly a surprise though- this is the same company that, after having its email service go down for an entire weekend offered no refunds on the grounds that email is a free service and sent an insulting form letter ""apology" to each email address. This is what you get when there is no real competition for the services we subscribe to from Cox which would provide some motivation to actually address customer concerns and give some downward pressure on ever increasing prices.
KipK
Former Moderator
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I agree, it would be nice if we could notify customers of scheduled maintenance in advance, but the logistics of it wouldn't really be possible.
In most cases, final approval for a maintenance event comes within 24-48 hours of the schedule time, and even then many scheduled maintenance events are rescheduled at the last minute. Plus for a large number of customers, we don't have a valid phone number or email address even if it was practical to try to notify them. And even if we found a way to pull it off, for all the customers who you might think would want to be notified, inevitably some would complain that the notification annoyed them--danged if you do, danged if you don't.
Believe me, we've thought about this. For certain types of work, specifically that which requires trenching, or for massive systemwide upgrades (we did one a few years back called EON), we sometimes send actual letters. But for minor outages, like many other providers, we have the information available on request. I apologize if you think this system shows "contempt" for customers, but I happen to think it's better than not having it available at all.
I can assure you we do care about customer service. If we didn't, this forum wouldn't exist, and I'd still be doing tech support on the phone.
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stinkfoot63
+4 more
Contributor II
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I'm sorry KipK but I just do not buy it-- Cox COMMUNICATIONS is a COMMUNICATIONS company that chose to NOT COMMUNICATE to customers about PLANNED outages. This is the same company that managed to dispatch a disingenuous "apology" after its "free" email service went down for an entire weekend. This is the same company that has managed to find a way to promote its services to existing customers via email and telemarketing calls I'm sure that if those charged with handling this (clearly) ongoing situation had visualized the planned outage as a service enhancement that they were to be offering free for a limited time they'd have thought outside that dreadful "customer service" box and come up with something that they could send out via mass mailing.
I imagine that the execs could have written something sufficiently detailed and informative- that once the laughter subsided after writing the opening: "Dear valued Cox customer". The problem is that there's no real competition for high speed internet and cable for most areas covered by Cox. In that environment the customer becomes little more than a captive little money bag whose concerns are to be kicked aside when it's inconvenient.
You may well be personally committed to customer service but the sum total of how your employer deals with its customer base does not reflect any real priority to service.
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scca229
New Contributor
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I found this thread due to trying to locate the Planned/Unplanned Maint page due to losing the modem line completely last night while trying to get some work done at home via VPN to the office. I had never seen the modem reporting absolutely nothing coming in with the signal page being blank except for the category headers. Calling in after about 30 minutes I was met with the "There is a known outage in your area" with no real way to know if it was planned or not or how long to expect to be down.
Where is the Planned/Unplanned Maintenance page that used to be a fairly prominent link (if you cared to know it existed at least). Doing a search for "outage","planned",'maintenance" or any similar terms results in no pertinent results. I know that the page was next to useless before as it wasn't timely updated at all, but at least it was SOMETHING to look at before calling and finding out that there is a known outage. Working in one of the larger Telecom's NOC working planned maintenances, that always annoyed me.
As far as not having an email for customers....that is their login to access their account. Every account has a valid email that ends in cox.net. Whether they choose to use it or not is entirely up to them but they can't fault Cox for using the primary account email for notification. Heck, I get enough advertisements from Cox through that email address and even the monthly receipt seems to find its way there...I think notifications can come that way as well.
It is ok to say that we don't pay for being included in the system for notifications if that is indeed the reason. Do Cox Business customers get notified? I can't imagine that Cox doesn't have a system in place for those notifications to be automatically generated based on entering what device(s) is being affected during a maintenance and emails are effectively free. Make it opt-in if need be, but it needs to be done.
If EON is a hardware and circuit inventory system like I think it is, then it has that capability built into it using the SA tab when creating a PA.
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