Ho John Lee’s Weblog

I just got off the phone with VoicePulse, my current VOIP service provider. They are demonstrating how not to manage a web service feature transition today, by both turning away new customers and annoying their existing ones.

I’ve been relatively happy with VoicePulse, having signed up with them a few months ago for commercial US PSTN access. The voice quality and stability has been OK, and they also offer IAX access which I was thinking about using for future integration with our Asterisk implementation.

All day today I’ve been trying to add a new device and a new number to my existing account. The sign up process requires entering the serial number and MAC address from the VOIP adapter (in this case, a SPA-2002 I picked up a few days ago), selecting a telephone number, and providing contact and billing information. I noticed that since I signed up for my account a few months ago they’ve started collecting E911 contact information, and added some verbiage explaining the limitations of VOIP’s 911 service (i.e. they don’t really have any idea at all where you are).

The process only takes a few minutes, so I’ve been trying it in between various other tasks today, expecting that it wouldn’t take very long. Each time I’ve tried it, I get an error page at the end.

Sorry!

You have encountered a problem while going through the ordering process. This is usually due to your session expiring if the browser was left unattended for too long.

If you have encountered an error with our ordering system, VoicePulse’s development team has been automatically notified.

Please close this window, go back to www.voicepulse.com in a few minutes and try again. If you continue experiencing problems, please call 732-339-5100 M-F 9am-7pm EST to place your order with a customer service representative.

The first couple of times it seemed vaguely plausible that the session might have timed out, but the third time I went straight through all the forms, now well practiced and fully equipped with all the information. Still got the error message. This time I called the customer service number.

According to the Voicepulse phone rep, their system is unable to accept any new orders at all today. They’re apparently rolling out changes to their order application, related to the E911 service that I observed during the signup process. Here are some observations:

• The VoicePulse customer service rep I spoke with didn’t learn about their phone order application being out of service until this morning. You’d think that they’d give their own CSR team advance notification about a planned application outage.
• The VoicePulse web application team didn’t bother to build a page indicating that they were unable to accept new orders, and that customers keying in any user account data (like me) would be wasting their time.
• The VoicePulse web application team left the existing failed-signup message in place. Although “true”, it’s misleading, since the site failure has absolutely nothing to do with the session timeout, and they know that the order process could never have worked in its current state.
• It didn’t sound like they had a committed “time to fix” — the CSR said it should be tomorrow afternoon sometime, but the fact that they didn’t tell them about it until this morning makes me think it might not have been planned. They suggested I call back tomorrow to see if it was working before trying to place an order. Ugh.

I can’t think of a good rationale for not blocking new orders on their site and putting up a maintenance message of some sort. Maybe they didn’t want people to know they couldn’t take orders?

I can’t think of a good rationale for not telling the customer service department ahead of time.

I suspect that most customers might be unhappy about keying in the 12-digit MAC, 12-digit serial number, along with their credit card data and having Voicepulse’s order processing application choke on it repeatedly, especially when they already know it won’t work. A lot of them don’t know how to cut and paste from the Sipura’s configuration page, and are vaguely uncomfortable with giving out their credit card numbers online as well.

I am a relatively patient person, but I’m astonished at the poor planning and execution exhibited at Voicepulse today. They either can’t plan and manage basic site upgrades, or they’re trying to hide some unexpected maintenance work.

If anyone has a VOIP carrier that they actually like, as opposed to simply tolerate, let me know. I may be looking for a new service provider soon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2006 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Business, Web Site Development, Voice Over IP, Front Page. 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.

Tags: voicepulse, voip, fcc, e911, ecommerce, business