2 ms·

The telecoms legally own this data, its theirs, and its needed for all sorts of internal functions beyond just customer care - but lets focus on customer care:

• modeless 13y ago
  There should be better ways to report call quality issues than calling up to wait on hold for an hour to tell someone "fix it for me". Problem reporting should be mostly if not entirely automated. Google Voice, for example, has a "report bad call quality" option in its list of recent calls. Reporting other kinds of issues like failed calls could happen the same way. For situations where phone support is still required, automated systems can still enforce that a technician can only access data relevant to the user who is calling, and that access can be logged, audited, and reported to the user on their next bill. The important thing is that users should give limited consent to access data for troubleshooting, and that access should be enforced by automated systems, not NDAs. Technicians do not need and should not have blanket access to user data. Really, a lot of the problems you describe have been created by the telecoms for themselves. Telecoms rely on antiquated and terrible old equipment, and that causes the call quality issues. If they invested in updating their infrastructure, they could have consistent better quality calls and automated monitoring. But they have no incentive to update their infrastructure when they already have oligopolies or monopolies. My phone has a 10 Mbps connection to the internet and yet phone calls still sound like they're happening underwater; it's a joke! Billing complexity is an even more obvious example of a problem the telecoms have created for themselves.
  • Aloha 13y ago
    Ironically, the carriers who have the most billing and call quality troubles are not the legacy incumbent local exchange carriers, its the newer VoIP based carriers. In your 10mbps scenario its either a lack of QoS on your circuit (either from you or your ISP) or poor generally qualities of the end to end connection - like too much jitter or something.
  • MichaelGG 13y ago
    Even if we had an automated ticketing system that let a customer pick which call was bad, they wouldn't use it. Also keep in mind, every customer along the path would need to do this. There might be 5 or more companies involved in completing a single call. The end-user might report it to their local PBX guy. He's going to call his wholesaler and say "yeah sometime over the weekend, someone made a call from somewhere and something didn't work right". If the wholesaler is lucky and can comb through data, they might find the call in question. Sometimes the answer is "uh, you hung up" or "...yeah, so you got a busy tone". Most of the time, if you can actually find a problem, you forward it on to the offending carriers, and they repeat the search and forward it until it hits a real network. The answer to the end-user is mostly "Sorry about that, we've made some routing updates." and hopefully they won't experience the issue again. If the end-user repeatedly has issues, it's probably a question of their line not having proper QoS, or something else their local PBX guy needs to sort out. The "antiquated and terrible old equipment" is actually the least likely to cause issues. As much as I hate telecom, the real switches do a solid job. Dedicated hardware on TDM leaves far less place for problems. VoIP is the real quality issue most of the time.
    • Aloha 13y ago
      I swear - did we work at the same company? You're echoing my experiences in such complete detail, its almost scary.