Every time I need to talk to Qwest (our ISP) about anything I get the same thing: in their focus to upsell me with bundled packages they forget all about why I actually called.
I called Qwest two weeks ago to increase our internet bandwidth. I’m on a slow 1Mbs DSL line and I wanted to upgrade to a faster connection. While processing my upgrade, the sales rep tried to:
- Add another feature to our phone line.
- Sell us long distance.
- Convert our family’s wireless phones over to Verizon three times.
- Sign us up for DirecTV service. When I said we already had DirecTV the rep tried to move the billing over to Qwest.
In the end, I got away with adding call forwarding (supposedly this would save me $5 a month because it would qualify for “bundle pricing”) and my bandwidth increase. We almost lost all of our web sites again because she was going to switch me to MSN (for free!) which would have blown away our static IP addresses.
One week later our bandwidth increased, but only to half of the 7Mbs I’m paying for. A quick call to tech support revealed that my modem couldn’t handle the faster signal and was downgrading to 3Mbs. I bought a new modem (we’ll see – the specs for the old modem say it works to 7Mbs) and the support rep asked why I had call forwarding since I already qualified for a bundle without it. I swear, Qwest should just put the tech support people on the front line because they actually know what the hell they’re doing.