Today I experienced Internet downtime at my Office for 1 hour. The reason being that my router disconnected itself, but Singnet held on to my Internet session tightly and refused to let go! The time was 5:50pm as I called the Singnet helpline to be greeted by the customer support who requested me to call the Singnet business helpdesk which was going to close at 6:00pm!
I made the call to be greeted by a foreigner who server me half heartly, as if he was trying to leave work on time. The personnel requested me to fax the company letterhead, and a whole load of information to them so that they can get their supervisor to do a reset or I could remove the modem and wait for Singnet to do a timeout of the session.
I considered the fact that it would take me sometime before I can get the letterhead and all the information. I choose the latter as the helpdesk personel sounded like he was in a rush to leave and it would be worse if I just faxed the document and the office helpdesk office was already empty. So I waited for 15 minutes, the period of time the helpdesk requested me to wait. Pluged it in and to no avail, the Internet connection was still down.
Work needed to be done and I really had to get the connection up. With no other options I called the consumer department. This fella was helpful enough, although I knew he was new to the job as he sounded unsure of some procedures he was most willing to serve me to the fullest and went back and forth to get me connection up. After about 20 minutes of exchaning information my Internet session was resetted and everything was back to normal. I also gathered that the Consumer Helpdesk was not to help the Business clients.
This started me thinking, how come the business service support group only services customers till 6pm? Everyone would like to go home early, no doubt but there are times when work has to be done and completed and the work requires uploading files to servers then what would happen?
As a registered business, service plans are more expensive then the consumer plans but in terms of service I’m getting less hours of support? Why must there be a seperation of departments where Business handles business customers and Consumer, consumer customers? Why can’t the two departments work together? Even if you say it’s to provide customized services, I do not see any customization when I called the business helpdesk at all.
It’s true that there maybe a security issue where others may make use of the company’s Internet connection for spoofing perhaps? But there is also another side of the story where the company is rushing to upload a website when the Internet goes down. So how can this issue be resolved? As much as the consumer side should not be concerned with the business helpdesk but some exceptions can be made. To allow us to reach world class standards in service, we have to start from where things matter. We need to look into our professionalism and working attitudes in someway we have become complacent and think that we are better then others.
