The Best Marketing

"Word of Mouth" is sometimes incorrectly traced back to 1980s, when the term seems to have been coined. The truth of course, is that this phenomenon existed and was probably tapped long before it was named.

It all boils down to a simple set of rules, really. if you maintain high customer satisfaction and high customer retention, they will tell their friends good things. If you have high customer turnover instead, you will likely run out of people who want to buy your product or service because unsatisfied customers, tell their friends before their friends have the chance to purchase.

I'll provide an example: I heard about ISP Teksavvy by word of mouth. Satisfied customers told me they offered a great service at a great price, and that I should try them. I signed up for their internet services and have had relatively good service with them. Rogers and Bell are monolithic companies that spend a great deal of money on fairly average advertising. Some of their commercials have been alright, but they do not inspire the same reactions as the Old Spice commercials do. Teksavvy is a smaller provider without the money, size, or clout that Bell or Rogers have; they are a slightly oversized small fish in a pond with two elephants. They piggyback on Bell's RJ-11 DSL infrastructure and have recently also added support over Roger's last-generation coaxial cable infrastructure. Rogers and Bell have monopolies on their particular infrastructures, and both are expanding to add wireless capabilities. Most techs will agree that the bandwidth (which most people mistakenly think is speed) and latency (which actually is 'speed') you get with a physical line tend to be superior, so we will ignore satellite, wireless and the new 'fibre' that Bell is offering. Bell says that their latest Fibe network is Fibre To The Home, not Fibre To The Node. All the images I've seen of the Bell 2701hg modem show normal cables coming in an out of the box; no optical in sight. Since there is very little actual information about the current fibre network that is available, and we are here to talk about marketing foremost and technology second, I will cover what is known best. The Bell infrastructure and the Rogers infrastructure are fairly different, and the differences will be explored.

The cable connection coming in to each house has the potential for incredibly fast speeds of 50MBps, but the realized speed depends on the modem (older modems will not reach these higher speeds), the number of simultaneous users (a single abuser can knock out cable to a number of houses) and the ISP's tech. For instance, Teksavvy is using last-gen cable methods, which mean they can only provide 10MBps on the same cable that Rogers can provide 5 times that. One primary reason they added the cable service is to escape the throttling that Bell is now enforcing on them. Rogers may choose to enforce throttling as well in the future, but this move has bought Teksavvy a massive influx of customers, and generates greater monthly income per user, though this more than likely just offsets raised costs.

The DSL line is a much slower cable, but it is unique to each house. The quality of cable varies greatly meaning that you may get anywhere from 1-6 MBps depending on the cable quality, distance from the Central Office, contributing noise. Your max speed is lower, but varies much less since it is not as affected by peer usage. If multiple people are connecting to the same website, that site may be slower due to the number of connections. If enough connections are demanding real-time data, it could cause an issue at the Central Office that could slow all DSL connections or knock service right out. That said, speed and service, though slower, varies less than on Cable, in general terms.

Teksavvy recently added cable service to their repertoire, and about two months ago, their core servers went down and for three days, maintenance was necessary. This maintenance was performed during the night and information was scarce on what was going on. Teksavvy was more transparent than their big brothers on events, but not transparent enough. Bell and Rogers can lose customers, they've got plenty more. Teksavvy is not in the position where they can afford to do that, so rather than just being better, they have to be astounding.

I was astounded, but in a bad way, when I called in and reached a person who was brash, unhelpful and seemed to want to get me off the phone as soon as possible. I would later find out that this man never noted my requests for official documentation of the outage. His suggestion was that I call in the next day and talk to a supervisor, but that was not an option, since I worked the next day. I did call a few days later, but I was informed that no supervisor was available to assist me. I was upset with the poor service. I began to contact Bell and Rogers, both of which demonstrated that they were idiots. Multiple times.

Adam: Now unless you want me calling at midnight, when I finish my work shift tonight, I am unable to call Bell via landline.
[Bell Rep]: Sorry then high speed internet service would not be available in your area.
Adam: Oh, so then I should just go with Teksavvy, or Acanac, or any of your competitors who can give me 5-10 Mbps in that same apartment?
[Bell Rep]: Sorry about that.
Adam: When I checked with Teksavvy, they said at least 5Mbps in that apartment
...
Adam: I take my current address and put it into the same form
Adam: and guess what?
Adam: "We were unable to confirm which services are available at [Address Redacted] Please try another address or check with your phone number. You can also contact Bell at [PHONE NUMBER]."
Adam: In other words, the website is broken.
Adam: Which is what I said at the beginning of this chat.
[Bell Rep]: Since the service is not available in your area you are getting this message.
Adam: Bell almost sold me service a year ago.
Adam: So are you telling me that Bell went into my house and ripped out cables? That's crazy talk.
...
[Bell Rep]: I hope you have already chatted with Karen.
Adam: I did chat with Karen, yes.
[Bell Rep]: And Karen have told you the service is not available.
Adam: No, she said to send an email to support.
Adam: and that I would receive a response in 6-12 hours.
Adam: I have a copy of the chat.
Adam: Which reminds me.
info: We will send the transcript to greentiger1@gmail.com at the end of your chat.
[Bell Rep]: Yes you will get the mail from the agent in Internet department.
Adam: So [Bell Rep], you're telling me that there is no service at [Address Redacted]. Where I currently live and get DSL/
Adam: And you also told me that there is no service at [Other Address Redacted].
Adam: I'm going to give you a chance to revise those statements./
[Bell Rep]: Yes you are correct there is no service right now.
Adam: But tomorrow cables will magically appear out of nowhere?
Adam: There are twisted copper pair faeries that come along and put it there in the night?

Personally, I think I'm going to stay up in the night to go on the prowl and hunt these RJ-11 Faeries. Point is, I have run into ONE person who knew what they were doing with their systems at Bell, and her systems were down when I was talking with her, so she was not able to help me all that much. Finally, I gave in and called Teksavvy from work to get things fixed up. I reached someone who seemed to know what they were doing, told me the last notes on the account were from last September, shortly after the account was setup, and that there were 'no requests for documentation'. The only reason I did not flip was because I got the feeling that something was going to finally get done. I mentioned that I preferred contact via email.

Then began a long chain of emails during which I was asked what outage I was referring to. The date of the outage had previously been mentioned during each of the phone calls, and I was upset that they did not know it. So I responded by sending them the original email I had sent them, in which I complained about the outage from 'last night', which included the 'date sent' details on it, as well as the to and from information. Apparently, people can't read between the lines anymore because I was asked again what the date was. I made it explicit this time, and since, I still have not received explicit documentation regarding this outage.

The one thing that makes me hesitant to slam Teksavvy is that during a recent outage I experienced before heading to work, I called them up and lambasted the service I was getting. The supervisor anticipated that the phone jack in my room had fried overnight, and that it was not Teksavvy's fault, which got me upset. After running diagnostics with the supervisor, I was surprised to find out that the jack HAD fried overnight, since the other jacks in the house worked fine. I swallowed my pride, admitted my mistake, thanked the supervisor, and moved it downstairs to the baement, where there is still a working jack. In short, out of four recent calls, two restored my faith in Teksavvy. Of the emails I received, none have. Bell on the other hand is batting at a 1/4 ratio, also 0 on email responses. Teksavvy needs to step their game up because I'd choose Teksavvy over Bell, but there are other options out there.

The most recent service I received was exemplary, but if I compare these ratios to what I can expect from WHB, who handles my online web hosting, they pale in comparison. I pay less than $5 a month for web hosting. When I go online to chat with an advocate or when I send in a support ticket, I have received the redcarpet treatment all the way. Even though their specs and features are limited in certain areas, and I may move somewhere else when I need those features, they have my service for the next 6 months at least. That's something I cannot say about Teksavvy.