Multithreaded

Given my rants about the customer service, or lack of it, I received from Orange back in 2006 when I made the mistake of taking up their broadband service, I thought I might redress the balance a bit by singing the praises of two companies I have dealt with, one recently and one longer-term, whose service is exceptional and diametrically opposite to Orange’s efforts.

I’ve recently moved house and of course I needed to sort out the broadband. I looked at some of the more well-known offerings from Virgin, Sky and the like (funnily enough I didn’t consider Orange) but then I remembered a recommendation from a friend many years ago - Andrews and Arnold. Look at their website and you’ll see it has none of the glossy, flashy marketing stuff that appears on most service providers’ sites. However, behind that site are a number of experienced, intelligent, dedicated techies. Okay, it’s a little confusing to find the information about pricing and bandwidth, but it’s very encouraging that right on the front page they mention things like Reverse DNS and IP6. They even have a link to an IRC channel right there on the front page!

Now admittedly, your average householder looking for a bit of broadband for the weekend is probably going to take one look and head off to BT or the like - this is not a service for them. For the likes of me, a long-term techie who is as comfortable configuring up his own firewall and setting up SSH ports, etc, this tells me that these people speak my language and know what I am talking about. They are also refreshingly honest, telling you up front that the bandwidth you’ll get is dependent very much on the quality of your line and distance from the exchange and that they’re not going to make promises about that until the end of the first ten days by which time they’ll have monitored the line enough to tell what is the optimum speed to drive it at.

But the real kicker was when, on my way to work two days after I installed the service, I got a text message informing me that my line had just dropped. I immediately called the support line and got through to James who had all the details of the line history, noted that the line had been dropping off-and-on over the past couple of days and suggested that I might want to take the front panel off the phone socket and plug the router directly into the BT master socket to eliminate the internal wiring from the circuit and so see if that was causing any problem. It would also ensure that during the line training period I’d get the best quality from the line and when the speed was finally fixed I’d be getting the most from it. Moreover, the next day James called me back unprompted to check how the line was looking from my end and ask if I’d had a chance to plug into the master socket.

At the moment I am reading “Managing Humans” by Michael Lopp (aka Rands). In one chapter on outsourcing he describes an interaction with a customer support person for his broadband provider and talks about all the “idiot filters” he has to go through just to be able to get to talk to a human being. I can clearly say that A&A have no idiot filters in place - they assume that you know what you’re talking about and I doubt they’ve ever told anyone to re-install their operating system.

There are other things which set A&A apart, such as the card in a clear plastic envelope attached to the top of the router with all the IP addresses on one side and, on the other side, all the login details for the router and the ADSL line so that you can fully access the router or, if you prefer, set up your own. All of this is the opposite of most service providers who try to lock you down and prevent you from accessing anything, presumable on the basis that they think you’ll screw it up. I can, without hesitation, recommend A&A if you are a techie looking for broadband in the UK. Oh, and there’s no 12-month lock-in, just a modest (£5) disconnect fee, or no charge if you are migrating away to another supplier. Oh (2) they provide static IP addresses as standard.

The other company, which I have been dealing with for a while, is FogCreek, makers of FogBugz, a very fine commercial bug tracking system. Why would you buy a bug tracking system when you could just use Bugzilla? Well, it’s like Apple equipment. For the most part it just works. There are lots of little details in the user interface which show the care and thought which have gone into it. It’s clear that the FogCreek guys use it every day as part of their environment which means they have covered most of the things you would want from a bug system and some things I certainly never considered. But also there’s the fact that these guys are so nice to deal with that you almost want to give them your money anyway. I recently moved from hosting my own instance of FogBugz to using the On Demand service. I had, however, recently renewed my support contract on my locally hosted licenses. I mentioned this to support. “No problem”, they said, “we can either send you are refund or apply the balance to the On Demand service.” No hesitation, no quibbles about contract, nothing. Just treating me like a human being and like they care. Many of you may know that FogCreek is Joel Spolsky’s company and already read his blog or have read his books. Joel definitely lives by his no-nonsense philosophy which basically says if you treat your customer as king and treat them fairly then you don’t need to worry about giving refunds or such as these will be vastly outweighed by the revenue generated by repeat business and recommendations generated by the goodwill you’ve created.

These companies demonstrate how I expect to be treated as a customer. Not only that, but their attitude and approach reflect a high degree of confidence that the service they are providing means that customers won’t want to leave so they don’t have to have financial penalties to stop you going. I just wish all companies were like these.