Re: {OT] Customer service: the sequel

On 2025-05-23 2:31 PM, Rhino wrote:

It's been a heck of a day as I try to get my new internet service working.
 It started at 4 AM when I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep. I had breakfast a bit early so that I wouldn't be interrupted when the installer arrived, supposedly between 8 AM and noon, to do 3 hours of work.
 

Oops, pressed Send too soon.
Anyway, 8 AM came and went, then 9 AM came and went and I started getting worried because I hadn't heard from the installer. I had requested that he call before he came so that I could tell him where to park since the driveway has no room and there's no parking in front of the house. Then I saw a text that had come in a half hour earlier saying he was "on site". I hadn't heard a knock or ring of the doorbell so I immediately went out to see if he was somewhere around the house doing wiring or whatever but nobody was around. I thought maybe he'd come, knocked very softly, got no reply and went away so I was just starting to call Bell to get him to come back when the doorbell rang and it was him. It turns out that he had to do some things in the box down the street so the "on site" message meant he was working on my installation but not at my house yet. He also took care of the parking issue by simply putting some orange pylons on either side of the truck and parking in front of the house ;-)
I showed him where the wire came into the house and he did some things, including going back to the box down the street. He came back to the house and did a little bit with the gadget over the workbench, too. He had already put the new modem beside the old one so I got it out of the box, connected the power supply and the two cables that it needed. (Turns out I had one in the wrong port but he noticed it and put it in the right port.)
So far, everything was going essentially fine but then things took a turn. He'd told me to turn on the modem, then it would update itself (firmware, I assume but maybe software too) and configure itself and it would be dead easy. It was NOT. There were a couple of messages on the little display on the modem telling me to do two additional steps but I wasn't expecting them, didn't write them down, and there was no way to scroll back to reread them. Apparently I needed to activate the modem and register my account but without being able to read the message again, I was clueless on how to proceed. I called tech support and he kept saying "give me a few minutes" and turned out to be doing the activation for me; at that point, I could get online with the new modem. But I was also supposed to sign up for "My Bell", which is basically a set of screens that keeps track of your account(s) and getting that work was REALLY exasperating because it asked me for a username and password which I didn't have! I tried figuring it out from the email I'd received confirming my order but it didn't have all that information. Then I tried the Bell chat thing but that was virtually useless; it referred me to tech support so I called them and eventually determined that I needed to wait for an email that would have my username/password. That's supposed to come in the next 24 hours or so. I wish someone had bothered to explain THAT to me at some point, ideally in the order confirmation! It would have saved me a lot of time and aggravation!
So now my internet is working again and I've confirmed that the promised 50 GB speed is actually being delivered. I still need to wait for the registration information but that should be along soon - I hope. (If not, I will hound them until I get it.)
I even configured my modem - partially. I've always had two networks in the house, a main network and a guest network, and I'd chosen the names and passwords for them so I wanted to do the same on the new modem. I used ipconfig to determine the default gateway and went there via my browser. It immediately asked me for the modem's admin password and I was baffled at what it might be but then it displayed a message telling me where to find it on the modem and urged me to change it so I did. Then I configured my two networks. But now I can't get back there to see if anything else needed configuring. When I try, it says "initialization failed" so I may need to call tech support yet again to sort that out.
Today was considerably more frustrating that yesterday but we were all expecting that, weren't we?
In the midst of all of this, I got a phone call from Bell asking me how satisfied I was with my recent interaction with Bell. I was darned if I knew WHICH interaction they meant so I explained, when prompted, that I was referring to my experience with the installer.
I hope I get another survey so I can tell them how annoying it was that no person or email explained about the registration information. Maybe they can clarify that for the next people that get the service and save them some of that frustration.
--
Rhino