The IT Nerd

You might recall that just before New Years, I was helping a customer with a defective netTALK unit, and the interaction with their customer service was….. less than optimal. Well, I knew that I would have to go back and finish the job once the customer’s replacement unit arrived. And I will give netTALK credit for this: They shipped it on the 29th of December which was the next day. It arrived on January 4th via post. That’s pretty good. While overnight is better, I can find little fault in how it was shipped.

However, they promptly went back into the bad category by having a note like this inside the box:

So that to me means that I should be able to plug this in, have it connect to the customer’s network and it should work. Well, it did connect to the network, but you couldn’t call the netTALK unit using the customer’s phone number. Not only that, the customer’s voice mail was gone as well.

#Fail

So seeing as they didn’t deliver on that front, I had to contact them via their chat window. The one that was infuriating to deal with the last time I had to use it. But this time, when I reached out to them, they responded within a minute and their responses were timely. Since I was dealing with the same person from whatever contact center in the Philippines that netTALK uses, I can only assume that he had been spoken to because it is highly likely that netTALK read my last post. He asked for my phone number and the MAC addresses of the old and new devices. Within 5 minutes, the customer was up and running. The voice mail had to be re-recorded, but other than that it was working.

Not that’s the interaction that should have happened in the first place.

But let’s circle back to the note in the box. It’s quite frankly stupid to put a note in the box saying that the account transfer had been done when it clearly hadn’t been done. Which then forces a customer to hop through an additional hoop to get things working. This didn’t go unnoticed by the customer, who is now leaning towards Ooma when they switch their VoIP phone service away from netTALK. That will likely happen in the next few months as they get closer to the renewal date of their netTALK service.

Net result: While netTALK did improve in some areas. They failed in one important one. And as a result they are still going to lose a customer.

Too bad netTALK.

This entry was posted on January 5, 2017 at 8:13 am and is filed under Commentary with tags netTALK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.