What's Cox's plan for customers traveling outside the U.S.?

Hi Becky,
Thanks for the response. I’ve tried two other times to reply, but each time composing directly in the forum resulted in erasure of partially finished replies. So I am drafting this one separately, and will copy & paste it into the forum. This may cause some formatting issues, which is why I sometimes capitalize, but otherwise hopefully the third time is a charm. This, combined with the fact I was traveling in China (see below), delayed my response.

I will answer your post point by point, with comments and questions. To distinguish them, they’re prefaced with “Comment” and “Question.” PLEASE ANSWER EACH AND EVERY QUESTION.

But before replying to your post, I want to return to the question that’s the subject of this thread, “What’s Cox’s PLAN for customers traveling outside the U.S.?” So far this question has not even been addressed, let alone answered. Apparently nobody at Cox monitoring this forum understands the question. So I will divide this post into two sections: one dealing with the question and the other, your post. In some cases a comment or question touches on both, so I include it where it seems most relevant.

I also try to identify specific, narrow issues and correspondingly ask equally narrow, specific questions. This makes my post a bit tedious, but I must point out that this would be entirely unnecessary if Cox’s representatives had paid attention to the original question and answered it. I'm doing this in the hope of getting a serious answer rather than more deflection.

WHAT’S COX’S PLAN FOR CUSTOMERS TRAVELING OUTSIDE THE U.S.?

1. Comment : Maybe no one has addressed the question because they don’t understand what I mean by a “PLAN” and are confusing this with a “Policy.” A POLICY is a rule or principle, but a PLAN is a set of ACTIONS aiming at achieving some goal, possibly but not necessarily consisting of one or more policies. In some cases, a set of policies can constitute a plan if, but only if, the policies themselves pertain to actions.

2. Comment : For example, Erica W. provided a link to a web site that says customers traveling abroad should contact Cox beforehand to have their “device and login credentials” preauthorized.

By itself, this is a POLICY, whereas a PLAN would describe the action steps Cox
has taken to implement the policy and achieve this goal by doing everything possible to ensure that customers do what the policy prescribes.

3. Comment : So, with regard to my original question, I will restate it by posing a series of questions that, to my mind, any serious PLAN to implement Cox’s policy would have to address.

4. Question : Before customers leave the U.S., how does Cox PLAN to make them aware of the need to pre-authorize their devices?

5. Question : As part of Cox’s PLAN, what is the proper procedure for a customer to request preauthorization?

6. Question : Given that customers planning to travel outside the U.S. may be unaware of the exact procedure but nonetheless may try to inform Cox about their travel plans, how does Cox PLAN to ensure that any Cox agent a customer contacts (whether in sales, tech support, etc.) has sufficient training and knowledge either to pre-authorize the customers’ devices or to redirect the customer to more appropriate Cox personnel who have such training and knowledge?

7. Question : Does Cox’s PLAN include a customer support system (CSS), like Zendesk, which not only can keep track of individual support cases but also can provide a database of steps to help Cox’s support personnel assist customers, with the database having specific entries for helping customers traveling overseas?

8. Question : In my case, I was in contact with not one, but two Cox Tier 1 support agents, and neither was even aware of the pre-authorization policy; in terms of Cox’s PLAN, what’s the explanation for this? (I.e., is their lack of knowledge part of the plan, or is the PLAN flawed in this regard?)

9. Comment . Because I am traveling, I do not have my notes on the telephone conversation with the agent I spoke with before I left the U.S., but the second Tier-1 support agent identified himself as Jerry L. and chatted with me, trying to solve the connectivity issue, for over an hour on 22 Sep. before passing me off to a Tier 2 agent. But approximately 6 minutes into the chat he learned I was in Nepal. IMHO, and assuming what the Tier-2 agent said about Tier-1 training is true (see 19 below), an effective and efficient PLAN would have immediately caused Jerry L. to transfer me to the Tier 2 agent for pre-authorization, either because Jerry’s training taught him
to do this or Cox’s CSS told him to do so.

10. Comment : The Tier 2 agent is named Jayson P. He reviewed the chat with Jerry L. for a few minutes, and immediately diagnosed the problem as “due to a Cox Security feature that prevents emails from being sent when using an internet service outside of the US.” He went on to explain the remedy as placing my EMAIL ADDRESS on a whitelist. I then replied:

Why wasn’t this done when my wife & I called in (several times) to tell Cox we’d
be traveling? And why do the error messages say the problem is with passwords,
when in fact it’s with geographic location and IP addresses [and email
addresses]? And why didn’t Larry know this right away when I told him we’re in
Nepal? And [why] did our repeated attempts at specifying the correct passwords
in response to the bug in your error message cause us to be locked out of some
of you web sites?

11. Comment : Regarding the question about “why wasn’t this done when we called,” Jayson said he didn’t know but guessed the agent did not understand we needed access to our email while we traveled or did not know Cox needed to whitelist our accounts. But I think the agent understood we needed email access, because I told him I was calling to ensure we’d have no trouble with our email while overseas. So not knowing about whitelisting is the only viable explanation.

12. Comment : Regarding the error messages, Jayson said, “The error message is a default message there are too many potential reasons to have a specific error appear depending on the cause. The error is intended to encourage you to call into our support centers and we address the root cause.”

13. Comment : Since at least the 1960s, it has been standard in software engineering for an error condition that could be due to multiple causes to trigger a message directing the user to a manual page explaining the different possible causes. After web pages replaced computer manuals in the 1990s, such error conditions now commonly link to web pages or wikis that serve the same purpose.

14. Comment : Even without referencing proper documentation, throwing an error message giving the false and misleading information about passwords is inexcusably bad practice, particularly since passwords are crucial to computer security.

15. Comment : Because the bogus error message mentions passwords, it’s a sure bet the user will first spend considerable time messing with passwords before calling a support center as Jayson suggests in 12. By then it’s likely the user will have changed the password needlessly and will now have to change the password again on all the user’s devices.

16. Comment : But in any case, users who are overseas cannot easily call Cox’s support centers in the U.S. So the reasoning behind Cox’s PLAN, as Jayson describes it, is deeply flawed, even ridiculously STUPID. An overseas user is highly unlikely, or even unable, to telephone Cox support.

17. Question : So is this all part of Cox’s PLAN: that overseas users will get a false and misleading error message about bad passwords, spend considerable time troubleshooting password non-problems on their own, then realize they have to contact Cox, only to find that Cox’s “Contact Us” web page doesn’t display the proper chat button, an email link, or a toll-free international number for which Cox absorbs all international calling expenses?

18. Question : Since, according to Jayson, Cox PLANS for overseas customers to call the U.S. for Cox technical support when they discover their email does not work, is it Cox’s policy to reimburse customers for ALL costs associated with making such calls (i.e., not only the call itself, but also transportation costs to a calling location, money lost due to missing prepaid tours while traveling to make the call, personal time lost, etc.)? [In answering this question, please be specific as to what, if any, costs Cox PLANS on reimbursing.]

19. Comment : Regarding why Larry didn’t know about international travel and whitelisting, Jayson said, “Larry is part of our level 1 support team as this specific error is not a common issue Larry is not trained on this specific issue. It is why this chat was escalated to myself ….”

20. Question : Is it true that Cox does not train its level 1 support personnel to know anything about Cox’s policy or PLAN regarding overseas travel?

21. Comment : Since I have no reason to believe the agent I spoke to before leaving the U.S. is anything but Tier 1, this reinforces my conclusion in 11.

22. Question : If, as Jayson said, even Cox’s own level 1 support personnel do not know about Cox’s POLICY regarding overseas travel, how can Cox’s PLAN possibly expect its customers to know about it?

23. Question : Is this also part of Cox’s PLAN: that customers will spend hours dealing with level 1 support agents who intentionally are not trained to know anything about overseas travel – not even so much as knowing they don’t know enough about it to deal with it – and only if and when the level 1 agent is unable to solve a problem – which leaves out any stateside conversations, because the problems only crop up overseas – will the customer be transferred to someone who has any clue about whitelisting, pre-authorization, etc.?

24. Question : Doesn’t this make the idea of contacting Cox for pre-authorization while still in the US a sham?

25. Comment : Jayson P. said he would whitelist my wife’s account and mine but that the process would take about 24 hours, thereby making it impossible to know if he actually solved the problem while still communicating with him.

26. Comment : That was on 22 Sep., but it’s now 12 Oct., and Cox email still doesn’t work properly. This is why I set out to find a way to chat with Cox, so that I could follow up on Jayson’s failure to fix the problem. But, as Becky says, the chat buttons disappear when one is overseas, so there is no obvious way to communicate about the ineffective whitelisting.

27. Question : Why wasn’t Jayson’s promise to fix the problem fulfilled; what went wrong?

28. Question : Did Jayson actually whitelist the accounts?

29. Question : If not, why not?

30. Question : If so, then why isn’t the whitelisting working?

31. Question : For many reasons – not knowing about Cox’s pre-authorization policy, lack of time to contact Cox before leaving the U.S., contacting Cox agents who do not know about the pre-authorization policy (as in my case), or the system simply malfunctioning – a customer may be overseas without Cox services working properly; what is Cox’s PLAN for dealing with such situations?

32. Question : Specifically in relation to Question 31, since Cox’s normal communication channels do not work properly in such circumstances – Email doesn’t work, links to chat do not appear on Cox web pages, telephone calls are impractical, etc. – how does Cox PLAN for customers located overseas to communicate with Cox about the problem?

33. Question : How does Cox PLAN to work with customers to solve the problem if Cox cuts off all their means of communicating with Cox?

34. Comment : You close your post instructing me to access Facebook, press the “Send Message” button, and mention that I can’t access my email. I actually have two comments. First, for about two weeks I have been in Tibet, where the Chinese government blocks access to Facebook. So this raises a question with Cox’s PLAN.

35. Question : What is Cox’s PLAN for communicating with customers whom Cox is wrongly blocking from accessing Cox Email because they are outside the U.S. but who are in countries where third-party communications channels (Gmail, Facebook, etc.), especially social media, are illegal and therefore blocked?

36. Comment : Especially when Cox is at fault – in my case it is at fault both by mishandling my stateside telephone call and by mishandling the subsequent international chat – it is inappropriate and inexcusable for Cox to require customers to use third-party communication channels like Facebook. There are many legitimate reasons – ranging from simply not wanting the burden of learning an additional app to not wanting to be among the 50,000,000 users whose personal information was recently stolen from Facebook – why someone might not want to use Facebook. Cox has NO RIGHT TO EXPECT ANY PAYING CUSTOMER TO USE ANY THIRD-PARTY CHANNEL TO RESOLVE AN ISSUE FOR WHICH COX IS AT FAULT. Cox
is a communications company, and it should take responsibility for providing its own effective communications channels when PAYING customers need to communicate with Cox to have Cox remedy its own mistakes.

37. Comment : I tried to reply to your post from Tibet but received an error message: “Error code 16<cr>This request was blocked by the security rules.” The error window then goes onto explain, “It appears that you are trying to access a Cox Communications website from outside the United States. To proceed, we ask that you complete the security challenge above. … Please click the
I'm not a robot checkbox to pass the security check. We will remember you and will not show this page again for the remainder of your browsing session.”

38. Comment : The problem is, I DO NOT SEE A “I’M NOT A ROBOT CHECKBOX.”
Apparently either this is the same problem with Cox’s “Chat Now” button (i.e., Cox is telling customers to check something that Cox deliberately disables), or perhaps Chinese public policy prevents me from seeing the CAPTCHA checkbox. Because I am now in Nepal and able to use my VPN, I am no longer running into this problem.

39. Question : What is Cox’s PLAN for dealing with such situations (i.e., when CAPTCHAs and other elements are blocked as matters of law in the overseas locations) when customers are overseas?

40. Comment : When someone travels overseas, it’s usually for one of three reasons: business, pleasure (vacation), or family (e.g., to visit a sick relative). In all cases, overseas travel involves extraordinary expense: airfare and other transportation, hotels, tours, time lost from work, etc.

41. Question : How is Cox’s PLAN designed to take account of the extraordinary expenses customers traveling overseas necessarily incur and therefore minimize the time a customer has to spend resolving connectivity issues?

42. Comment . These are common situations. Less common, but more serious, is one like that described in the book “What If Something Should Happen?” In this case the author developed appendicitis and complications while visiting Tibet and had to be in almost constant contact with her husband and travel-insurance companies in the U.S. before she was even allowed to leave Tibet, much less to be medivaced out. Fortunately, she had an ISP that did not cut off her access to her email, so she was able to communicate. It seems to me that if a customer would ordinarily be able to resolve such issues had they access to their email but in fact lacked such access due to their ISP’s negligent incompetence, then the ISP should be liable for all costs and damages due to such negligence. And certainly lacking an effective PLAN for dealing with customers traveling overseas falls in this category.

43. Comment : Perhaps there are other contingencies that Cox’s PLAN should address but I haven’t thought of yet.

44. Comment : But, as far as I can tell – based on not only what has transpired, but also the complete failure to address this thread’s question and describe Cox’s PLAN on this forum – Cox has no PLAN for customers traveling overseas other than shutting them off unless they do something which, in practice, Cox makes impossible for them to do.

45. Question : Is this conclusion correct?

46. Question : If this conclusion is incorrect, would you be kind enough to send me a copy of the PLAN?

YOUR POST
47. Question : What must the browser settings be to display Cox web sites correctly while overseas, and how do they differ from domestic settings? (No need to answer with browser-specific instructions; generic descriptions of settings would be fine.)

48. Comment : I use Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. None of them display the button. It seems highly unlikely that all 3 should suddenly develop improper settings at the same time.

49. Question : What about browser settings accounts for the fact that Cox web sites displayed correctly before we left the U.S. but suddenly stopped displaying the "Chat Now" button when we arrived overseas? In other words, what specific settings would make the sites display correctly in the U.S. but not overseas, and technically speaking how would they do so?

50. Comment : I have designed many web sites, and I can't think of a single way that browsers like Firefox and Chrome, which follow Internet standards, would not display a web site properly due to improper settings, IF the site itself were designed to conform to Internet standards. (Internet Explorer is another story because it does not conform to standards.)

51. Comment : Similar observations apply to IP addresses. I can't think of a single way a web site would not allow access from non-U.S. IP addresses UNLESS SOMEONE WENT OUT OF THEIR WAY to make it so. But IF the site follows standard conventions, it wouldn't do this.

52. Question : Does Cox deliberately design its web pages not to function properly outside the U.S.?

53. Question : If the answer to 52 is “Yes,” why?

54. Question : If the answer to 52 is “No,” then is Cox’s web site malfunctioning?

55. Comment : I have heard, but do not fully believe, that Cox does this for "security reasons." I say "not fully believe" because, if true, this is so STUPID. In most foreign countries, any savvy high-school kid can easily get around this “security feature” by using a virtual private network (VPN).

56. Comment : Even if Cox deliberately designs its web sites to malfunction when accessed from outside the U.S., for whatever reason, deliberately having them malfunction by hiding important buttons and links is a particularly BAD way to accomplish this. Basic freshman-level human-factors engineering would instead have a warning or error message explaining the real cause of the problem (e.g. “You are blocked from accessing this site because you are outside the U.S. If you are a Cox customer, please contact Cox so we can fix the problem.”)

57. Comment : Whether or not a web page is well or poorly designed, there is simply no excuse for Cox personnel not understanding how it works. In particular, if buttons & links do not appear on a web page because the customer is accessing it from outside the U.S., then Cox personnel should not waste their time and the customer’s by telling the overseas customer to do things that are not possible from outside the U.S. See 9 about how Jerry L. wasted over an hour of his time and mine in part because he did not know how Cox’s web pages function overseas. Also see earlier posts in this thread where Cox personnel repeatedly told me to initiate a chat session using various elements on Cox web pages, when in fact the necessary elements do not appear
overseas. What terrible training and service!

58. Comment : Thank you for you apology about the two Cox agents who were unfamiliar with Cox’s policies regarding overseas travel. Apology accepted!

59. Comment : But this is not enough! One of the STUPID, TIME-WASTING things Jerry L insisted upon was that I check my email configuration. I suppose he suspected it had somehow magically changed itself since I left the U.S. IMHO, one of the worst things in tech support is an agent who does not know the limits of his own knowledge but is too stubborn, ignorant, or arrogant to admit it. He followed a script rather than address the most obvious explanation: the fact that I was now overseas.

60. Question : Now that these issues have been brought to Cox’s attention, what steps has Cox taken to fix the problem, i.e. how has Cox changed its policies, procedures, web sites, etc.?

61. Comment : You devote the bulk of your post to accessing Cox.com. But I never said I was having trouble accessing Cox.com.

62. Question : Why did you address this non-problem?

63. Comment : I believe what I said in another, related thread is that I am having trouble accessing Cox’s SMTP server. The link Erica W. provided also says, “Without pre-authorizing your device, you may be unable to sign into Cox.com or use Cox Email via an email client.” THE LATTER IS THE PROBLEM I’M HAVING.

64. Question : Why didn’t you discuss the problem of using Cox Email via an email client?

65. Comment : You mention administrators “whitelisting an IP address of a device.” But for many reasons, I don’t understand how this is technically possible or practical. First, almost every hotel, airplane, IP hotspot, etc. uses DHCP, which assigns IP addresses temporarily. So there is no unique IP address associated with a device that’s being taken overseas. Second, a given device is likely to be used in multiple places: a hotel room, a hotel lobby, an Internet café, a tour bus, a conference room, etc., each of which will assign its own IP addresses. Third, the issue is compounded when a traveler may be going to multiple cities and countries. Fourth, travelers on a single account are likely to have multiple devices for each user: e.g., laptop, tablet, and phone; each of these devices will have its own (sets of) IP addresses. Whitelisting each one’s possible
IP address(es) seems awfully cumbersome and error-prone.

66. Question: Can you please explain how a device’s IP ADDRESS, rather than its public name or MAC address, can be whitelisted? [Please don’t hesitate to give a technical explanation; I’m quite familiar with TCP/IP.]

67. Comment . Second, the problem is not that I can’t access my email but rather that I can’t reply to or send original emails with my email client (Thunderbird). Once I am convinced you understand what the actual problem is and know a solution, I will then follow your instructions if I am able.

68. Question : Given that I do not have access to Facebook (or anything Google) in China (and likely other countries to which I will be traveling), and all of Cox’s communications alternatives are apparently deliberately broken, please provide an alternative way to contact your team so it can fix Cox’s mistakes?

69. Question : If and when I am able to contact your team, exactly what additional information should my message provide?

Thank you once again for your help.