We expect our purchases to work as promised – and work right away. When it doesn’t happen, it’s frustrating and disappointing at best, and potentially a customer-losing experience at it’s worst.
Apple’s 3G iPhone was a product that I was enthusiastically looking forward to for some time. So I cast myself into the crowds on Day One to buy one of the first 3Gs. To make a long story relatively short, I’m now on my third handset, second SIM card, and have made numerous trips to various Apple stores to talk with techies at their Genius Bars. I also logged more than 12 hours over the course of the first two months on the phone with AppleCare’s tech-support staff. (It was more like four hours with their support people and eight hours on hold.) Funny how I never got the same advice twice. All that I really wanted was for my e-mail, calendar and address book to all synch properly with my computer (a MacBook Pro). Oh, and decent phone service as well. I guess I have high expectations.
Things are now working well with the phone. I am enjoying the handset, and the iPhone App Store customer experience is very good, much as I’ve come to expect from its terrific iTunes store. And, this in spite of the fact that I was advised to not use the 3G network to place voice calls but to stay on the EDGE network instead. Lesson – don’t be first to jump in.
I also have high expectations with my service. AT&T picked up me and my family as customers when I got my iPhone. (My wife and kids got LG Shines; it doesn’t make financial sense for them all to take the mandatory data plans that come with iPhones).
We’re now getting “fewer bars in more places.” My family-shared minutes are often spent reconnecting with one another – after dropped calls, I-didn’t-hear-thats and fights over “we were very happy with the service we had before the switch, so can’t we go back?” We live in a township of about 18,000, in the Metrowest area of Boston suburbs. And I’d venture a guess that translates to around 36,000 mobile phones. You’d think AT&T Mobility would pay attention to us.
The home as tower
Wi-Ex zBoost cell zoneT signal booster
To increase coverage, I installed a multi-band cellular repeater in my home attic. And also put an in-vehicle repeater in cars in two states. These are interesting devices. For $200 to $300 each, you can boost the ambient signal that you would pick up outside of your home or car and transmit it via a wired repeater to another location, presumably one where you spend a lot of time. My home office, for instance, is a dead zone. And so is the driver’s seat of my car in many places. The devices do work to give you what you would get from the outside, but they can’t fix a signal that’s not there and don’t really amplify the signals, but are more likely to capture a signal from the outside and reposition it to the inside of a building or vehicles.
With the repeaters, I was able to pick up an extra bar or two and successfully connect to AT&T. Hurrah! My home is my tower.
It only took about an hour each to install the devices. There is some trial and error involved in positioning the antennas correctly for optimum performance, but if you spend a lot of time on your cellphone, it’s time well spent.
As for the in-vehicle device, one worked only for a couple of days, and then went on the fritz with fast-alternating red and green LEDs flashing like a police car. I called their customer service and on my third attempt got to speak with a service agent. He suggested that I reposition the unit’s two antennae, which I did, but still to no avail. On call back, he gave me a return mail address number and promised 24-to-48 hour turnaround once he received the unit. So I ask – as a customer who has already been inconvenienced by a defective unit and who also has to pay for the return postage – why do I have to wait to get a replacement. Did it occur to them that they could send me a replacement right away to make the turnaround time a bit more palatable? It turns out that they had problems doing that in the past so the company policy is to wait until they have the defective unit in hand before they send something that works to the customer.
Wireless modems to the rescue
Novatel’s wireless USB727 modem
I do have to rave about one product – Novatel’s wireless USB727 modem. It worked first time, every time, right out of the box. And Verizon Wireless’ data service on this is great. It was my backup when the iPhone didn’t work and I was left feeling lost without my cellphone for most of a day. I plugged the Novatel wireless modem into my computer and logged onto Skype and I was back on the grid. Even the upgrade to the VZAccess Manager software seamlessly installed itself, and I’ve had connectivity, albeit sometimes slower than my home broadband network, in airports, restaurants, hotels, trade show halls, city parks, and a high-rise apartment building in Denver. I managed to drive several hundred miles of I-95, from Massachusetts to New Jersey, with only one drop.
So let me give manufacturers a novel out-of-the-box idea – make sure that things work the first time. And if you can’t (OK, things do go bump in the night), then at least acknowledge that your customer is precious and you’ll go out of your way to get a replacement that works.
Alan Bergstein, a self-acknowledged tech geek commuting between Denver and Sudbury, Mass., is the publisher and editorial director of RCR Wireless News.
