Service and Support

[jsiepka]

Yesterday I received complaints from my customers about incoming calls not getting through and outgoing calls intermittent.

First thing I check is the Twitter Account to see if there are any outages. None were reported so I open a ticket.

9 minutes later I received the usual response, what's the network topology, is there a firewall, are the ports open.

15 minutes later I respond no firewall and using public IP address.

An hour later I receive the usual response "We are not encountering any outages"

Then today I see this posted in another thread which corresponds with the same time frame when my customers were having issues.

well, I hate to point this out, but service at the TX server went down this morning.

my customers who were still on MI server were not affected and worked great.

The issues I'm having is with the response times The assumptions its an issue on the customer end. By the time I create a ticket we have already exhausted local troubleshooting by power cycling the ATA's and Modems, checked network connectivity, called the ISP to see if there is work being done in the area or known outages.

Any other resellers having similar issues?

[GreenLantern]

Yes. Troubleshooting can definitely be challenging, and frustrating for all parties.

Some end users know more about networking than I do. And some are at least very helpful and communicate well.

At the other end of the spectrum, some users seem to live in a fog of cluelessness or denial, or simply won't do what we ask of them. Some even outright lie about what they have and have not tried.

Just today, I asked a client to power cycle their router for me. He claims he did that, didn't help. Then we reboot his voip device. No better. So then I asked if I could log into his network to check some settings. At that point, he informs me that he's not even at the location where the problem is. Soooo.... how exactly did he just reboot the devices? I call the physical location, ask them to reboot the router, and they are back online in minutes.

My point is, Voipo doesn't always know the reseller's level of ability, or if they have done the basics: port forwarding, disable sip alg, check for double nat, power off (not just reboot) modem/router, check codecs, change port, update firmware, check number of rings, make sure phone is not in "do not disturb" mode, and on... and on... and on...

On the other hand, there are definitely times when there is obviously some kind of network wide outage event going on. When I get 30 or 40 calls/emails within a 15 minute time frame, all with the same problem (inbound callers just hear dead air, no ringing... or sip devices won't register to the TX server... etc), I immediately test my own account.

When I confirm my own account is having the same outage, I alert voipo. I try to be thorough, but brief and polite, to let them know what I have already done, and that multiple accounts, including my own, show the same issue.

Sometimes the initial reply indicates that voipo is not yet aware that this is a broad issue. That can definitely be frustrating. But generally, if I let them know what I've already tried, and that it is happening on multiple accounts, they are usually quick to shift gears and focus on fixing their own internal issue.

Another problem is that sometimes accounts that had been working for years, suddenly start having trouble. Of course I ask the end user if they've changed anything. They often forget to mention that they installed a new router last week, or switched from DSL service to Fiber yesterday, or added a 12 camera surveilance system, or installed Carbonite on 20 PCs... ugh.

But sometimes I have several accounts that suddenly start having call route issues. This makes me suspect voipo is trying out some new carrier, and that a sub-group of my clients are getting routed through this new, subpar carrier. So I have to go through the rigamarole of submitting multiple separate tickets. Eventually, the issue seems to go away for awhile, for all of those users... only to happen again with some other group a few weeks or months later. That type of thing really undermines my confidence in voipo. So I probably end up submitting tickets on routing issues right away, rather than being thorough about checking out the end user's network.

Regardless, I definitely wish voipo had better monitoring capabilities so they could jump on outages and routing issues before end users become aware of problems.

Posting immediate updates to the twitter page would be helpful as well.

[acelisGC]

^^^ THIS!!
Couldn't have said it better myself.

I will say, late last week 8/26 Level3 had a massive outage... this is outside of VoipO's control as some calls route through Level 3 at some point... I was having lots of issues with other SIP Trunk providers too. Having to explain this to a customer was difficult and I understood their frustration. Happened again briefly last night... around the same time Voipo's service was having issues... thankfully hardly any of my customers noticed last night/this morning.

My boss has me quoting out on-premise non-voip phone systems now for upset customers and new customers.
It's frustrating because my customer's confidence in me has been diminished by outages that were largely outside of our control.
I just hope I can smooth things over.