Hello All,
I own a regional ISP in northern Illinois. We run an asterisk VOIP PBX in house and have for a few years now. We have 16 incoming phone lines for customer service/tech support. These lines are ViaTalk VOIP lines. At approximatly 7pm this evening I went to place an outgoing call at the office, and my call was redirected to viatalk techsupport. After on hold a few short minutes, I spoke with a tech support agent who stated that 'something happened to my account' and that my account is temporarily disabled. He then told me that the party that takes care of this issue is out for the day and to call back tomorrow. He said that he did not know what was wrong with my account, and that he could not enable it. So now I must go over night with NO incoming or outgoing phone calls. When customers call it states that our number has been disconnected. He insured me that this has nothing to do with my account standing, as we pay our account on time everytime.
Secondly, I pay extra for 'business' service, and as well as an extra $5/month for 'priorty support'. I asked the support agent that if they have protocols in place to identify problems and disable a customer, should that protocol not included contacting the customer to ultimatly resolve the issue. He agreed but stated that he does not own the company, and to call back tomorrow. I also asked if there was a way to redirect all of the calls to another number in the meantime, he said that this was not possible.
I may be wrong, but owning a CLEC in the past I highly doubt this, but all traditional telephone compaines are regulated and mandated as a utility. This ensures proper response times in the event of a failure. If ViaTalk hopes to compete for business class service, they should consider implementing inhouse 'mandates' to have an equal quality service as its competitors.
So essentially, in a nutshell, Tech support noticed a problem with my account during business hours. Disabeld my account, and left for the day with out contacting me.
Instead of calling tomorrow to have the problem resolved, I will be moving my well paid account to another provider. Just a heads up for what to expect from this seemingly retroactive company.
Thanks for Reading!