Thoughts

[genxweb]

Her is a Major issue a well a way to monitor hardware devices. I have a clients ATA who has been down for 2 hours and I have no way to look at logs or the device to help trouble shoot it and support is now close for the weekend.

[VOIPoTim]

Her is a Major issue a well a way to monitor hardware devices. I have a clients ATA who has been down for 2 hours and I have no way to look at logs or the device to help trouble shoot it and support is now close for the weekend.

What kind of information are you looking for? VOIPo really doesn't have a way to monitor hardware either. We can tell if it's connected or not but not a lot else. We simply walk customers through connecting on the phone and worst case we just use remote desktop to connect to their computer and login to the adapter remotely and make sure their network is all setup correctly.

99% of the time when a customer is down, it's an issue with their router or modem. Usually it's something like the IP changed and is easily resolved by simply rebooting all devices (the modem, router, and adapter all). Have you tried having her reboot everything (not just the adapter)?

We monitor our network very thoroughly 24/7 and if there are issues on it, they're corrected around the clock.

I think over time you will see that 99.9999% of issues your customers run into will be related to their home network, ISP or routers and are going to be resolved by just working through their home network issues and making sure they reboot, etc.

Unless our system is down or there is a problem with it (which we monitor for 24/7), the only variable is the customer side. There's really no magic to VoIP support. If our system is up and running and working for tens of thousands and a customer is having issues, logic says the issue is on their end.

You'll need to work with your customer to troubleshoot their network. There is very little that we can do for issues not on our end.

[VOIPoTim]

Her is a Major issue a well a way to monitor hardware devices. I have a clients ATA who has been down for 2 hours and I have no way to look at logs or the device to help trouble shoot it and support is now close for the weekend.

I'm glad to hear that this was resolved and turned out to be on your customer's end with them having cables connected incorrectly.

This is one of the main reasons I've said our support hours really don't affect resellers much. As long as we keep our network up and there are no issues on our end, all problems will likely be on the customer side. The only time you'll really need our support team is if there is an actual problem on our end which we already monitor for 24/7.

The longer you provide service, you'll see how true it is that it's very very rare that there are issues on our end or issues where we'd be able to help. It's not something we say to shift the blame or support away from us...it's something we say because it's truth we see every day.

It's extremely rare to see an issue on VOIPo's end. The case of your customer last night mixing up the WAN/LAN cables after unhooking/rehooking his adapter up is a great example of what we see all day and kind of shows what I mean in that there's absolutely no way for VOIPo support to help you with that or figuring that out since we can't see the cables or communicate with actual customer.

[GreenLantern]

Tim,

I agree that most support issues are on the customers end.

That said, it would be nice to have a skeleton crew dedicated for reseller support available a bit later, say 8 or 9pm. Sometimes we just need basic questions answered. Or need to get little things worked out, like when a number needs to be moved from a voice account to a fax account.

An alterantive would be if resellers had a bit more control over accounts. For example, being able to change the account name or type without having to call support would help.

My two cents.