After returning from my Maine summer sojourn, one of my first technical to do’s was reassembling the VOIP infrastructure that serves as the non-work number (i.e. the only one I answer on weekends) here at the home office. The process went smoothly, since all it really involves are hooking the BPA410 device into the router, and then plugging that into the phone. All seemed well, initally. I was able to make and receive both calls, and voicemail operated smoothly.
Unfortunately, sometime last week I discovered that after a few minutes of talking, the service was “dropping” my calls. Not entirely – I could still hear the voice on the other end of the line – but they could no longer here me. Sure, a hangup and redial solved the problem, but only temporarily – and for a home line that’s a level of service I’m not prepared to accept.
Expecting very little, I opened a service ticket on Packet8’s website. About 12 hours later, I received an emailed reply asking for a good time to call because the problem was easier to go through over the phone. Again, expecting very little, I gave them the office number and told them to call this afternoon. At best, I expected to have a barely knowledgeable tech have me reboot the device a few times, and then my modem/router combination. At worst, no call.
Imagine my surprise then, when I received a call this afternoon from an English speaking tech who calmly and competently walked me through a simple reconfiguration of the BPA410 device and the setup of some new port forwarding rules on my Netgear router. It helped that I’ve done most of this before – and knew enough to know that I’d have to set up some new custom services on the router, as I have for Splunk and SSH and so on – but the tech was prearmed with manuals for the router (as that had been part of the original service request) in case I hadn’t. He also let me know where the VOIP device stores its call logs, so in the event of any future problems I’ll have more information to work with than just “my calls are being dropped.”
I have no idea whether or not this will solve my problem in any permanent fashion, but I was very pleased with the overall customer service I received. In a world where it seems like the only comments about customer service – mine included – are horrific, I thought this was worth calling out. Good on ya, Packet8.
