Devauld.ca

Recently, after years of service, we decided to sever the ties with Bell and TekSavvy in favour of Shaw's unified service.  Now, to be clear, I do not really like Shaw's service; as I find their PVR functionality and usability to be an order of magnitude under Bell's similar service.  Although, their internet offering is what drew me away from TekSavvy.

My difficulties with TekSavvy were never with the company itself.  They choose to not compete as heavily in the West, and as a result I can get internet 4x as fast for about the same price.  In the few times I have had to call TekSavvy on a technical issue, their service was top notch, and every time the problem boiled down to the service they were reselling.  Honestly, if they would have offered a similar cable option out here, I would have stayed, even if I had to pay more to use it.

Bell's television lineup and technology is top notch in Canada.  Their PVR is much easier to use than Shaw's similar offering, and you get more channels for equivalent price points.  My problem with Bell is an even split between very bad customer service and their stupidly draconian stance on usage based billing.  Just because I can get a month's worth of HD movies for the price of a single 'download on demand', does not mean you should cry to Ottawa that internet should be more expensive.

Regardless, the point here is customer service.

Today I called both companies, TekSavvy and Bell, to cancel my service.  For TekSavvy, the experience was a dream.  I only needed to penetrate 2 levels of the automated call system, and I was faced with a human being.  I mentioned that I needed to cancel my service, and he countered with a question as to why I would like to leave.  After a short discussion on not having cable internet, I was given a confirmation number and sent on my way.  Total time spend on this endevour: four minutes and thirty five seconds.

Bell on the other hand, was an exercise in restraint.  My first call to their system, resulted in me being on the receiving end of a hang up.  Two minutes (and four seconds) down and I'm starting all over again.  On my second call, I knew how to navigate the menus, so I was in very quickly.  For those of you familiar with Bell's phone service, one of the first identifying pieces of information they ask for is the account's phone number.  My face went right into the palm of my hand, when the first thing the human I encountered asked for was my phone number.  This sort of inconsistency is what puts Bell's customer service on par with being screened at an airport.

When the human on the phone was satisfied I was the same customer I claimed to be, I told him that I would like to cancel my service.  Then I had to run the gauntlet of 'what if we offered you this discount', which honestly only serves to frustrate me.  If you are willing to offer me these prices, why not offer them to me when I am a happy paying customer.  After I made it clear that I was leaving, I was placed on hold for whatever reason; nearly 2 whole minutes later the gentleman returned with the latest bombshell.

Apparently, as part of my agreement (from almost 5 years ago), I need to give 30 days notice to cancel my service.  I'm not entirely sure why, considering I own the dish and receiver, and the only effort on their part is to toggle a bit from one to zero in their system.  Regardless, I'm going to have to pay for an entire month's service for no reason other than a lawyer put it in writing.  In the end it doesn't make me feel like a valued customer.

My second call to Bell took a hair over ten minutes.  Half of that time was arguing that I didn't want to keep my service, or waiting on hold.  Add in the time for getting hung up upon, and it took me three times as long to cancel my Bell account, than to end services with TekSavvy.

In the end, the support received is what you remember.  If TekSavvy unrolls a new, faster service in Calgary, I will jump on board even if I have to pay a premium over similar service.  If Bell offered me their service for free for six months, I would still recall being bartered with to keep on using Bell as well as the fact that their system dropped me the first time I called.

I hope that more people feel the same way I do, and after all is said and done, those companies that care more about what their customers want, as opposed to quarterly bottom lines for shareholders, will fair better in the long run.

Recently I have been pondering the asymmetry of user provided content on the internet. These thoughts have been growing in magnitude since they first skipped across my consciousness about a month ago.

The adventure started when I purchased myself a kindle to start off my 34th revolution around the sun. The device brought me back to the butterfly romance stage in reading. Easy to use, and ever available, I unfortunately began to diverge away from my required studies to spend time reading adventures of protagonists and fables of disbelief. Exploring the internet for possible leads into worlds unknown, I found myself on the goodreads website.

This is where the fabric of the perfect tapestry started to show some loose ends. My difficulty with good reads, is that I do not want to go through the effort in adding all of the hundreds of books I have read up to today. To the benefit of goodreads, they allow for an import, and export and although I could enlist a delicious monster to help me get all this data together, I paused; my thoughts running about wildly.

I was previously burned on spending time to provide the internet's most valuable commodity: user provided content. I spent some time on Rotten Tomatoes forebearer Flixster, rating a plethora of movies that I've seen. The time spent was rewarded in being provided with highly rated choices from people that shared interests very similar to my own. The problem being is that even though it was my, and my peers, effort that created the value in the database, once the information had landed on their site, they came to view it as theirs. Then about a year later, when I was test driving Netflix, I found that I wanted to get the information I created out of it's current repository and into my new acquaintance so it would be able to help me out in my viewing exploration. Nowhere could I find even a simple listing of ratings that I've made, so that I may cobble together a script to extract information that is rightfully mine. It appears on the surface that they went out of their way to prevent me from getting this information.

The one-sided view of information on the internet was once again right whispering in my ear. Just as my Flixster ratings are forever locked within their vault, to never grace the likes of IMDb or The Movie Db. Even simple asymmetries like not being able to get my Canadian Amazon Wishlist into my American Amazon Wishlist so it can be viewed on my Kindle are starting to irritate me.

In the end, the problem is a mindset. Some darling visionaries like Wil Shipley and Otis Chandler are chipping away at the wrong mindset that the medium controls the information. Truth is, the information held by those other websites are my opinions, and although there is probably a clause or five in the end-user-license-agreement-that-nobody-ever-reads that says otherwise, I'm pretty sure those opinions are still mine. There needs to be a shift in mindset, moving towards focusing on the user. Think of the benefit to both large commercial entities like Amazon as well as little ol'peons like me if I could easily get an export of books and push them into their system. Sure, you run the risk that if something better comes along, that I'll just take my data and leave; this is the main reason that I believe the curmudgeons of business keep these exports from being readily available. Do they really believe that by not allowing me to see all the media I've rated, that I'll just keep coming back to rate more stuff? Instead, as soon as I discover their desire for a one way flow of information, I clam up and stop giving them any information. Instead I option for mediums that allow me for an unfettered flow of information that I help create.

The advantages of keeping this information open far out weight the costs.

We executed another Smashening; this Smashening breaking a dry spell of a couple of years. Taking the usual set of photos, we were thoroughly impressed with a new piece of technological wizardry that made our setup and time-to-shoot drop to marginal levels.

Aside from the experience and photographs, Ryan was kind enough to splice together a video of the event. Be warned, language is not tasteful.

Well, it turns out that 2011, is a Sexy Prime; although it's not as interesting as it sounds. I'm not one for New Year resolution, because I don't feel you should wait until the end of the year to change things in your life that need changing. However, putting up a new calendar, usually causes me to reflect on the year gone by.

The past year was full of excitement and change.  I was very proud of my country when they took home the most gold medals ever won in a Winter Olympic Games.  Then all of my plans for growing my photography business and making an attempt at writing a novella were sideswiped by my acceptance to the University of Calgary's Graduate Program.  I had even dreamed of taking up cycling, and purchased a new bicycle, only to have ridden it three times before life overcame all of my free time.

Oh well.