In Which I Write about CRM and Releasing IP

Whilst this is officially a WiMAX blog, I must share my experiences with a recent run-in with some customer-related issues, many thanks to SusCom.

I was visiting my parents this weekend to do my laundry catch up, see what was new, eat some Italian food. I went upstairs to surf the net some and to my disappointment, found that I couldn't access the Net because RCN wanted me to migrate to SusCom. Well, ok. I'm moderately technologically inclined, perhaps I can do this. So I notified my mother that we needed to migrate over to the new ISP by releasing the old ISP and reconfiguring the system. Well, I forgot that I was not, in fact, at work and stating this to my mother was like reciting Shakespeare in Japanese. So I told her that we needed to move to the new company since SusCom was taking over for RCN. That, I think, she understood.

I reconfigured mom's e-mail with no problems. The family runs on my brother's super-duper Mac G4 monster and being a Mac user myself, I thought that releasing the IP address would be as simple as pie. Nope. Not at all. SusCom was nice enough to provide IP-releasing instructions for PC users, not Mac users. Since the interfaces are rather similar, I broke in (well, I really asked if I could) the apps panel and tried to reconfigure all the jargin, but to no avail. OK. So my moment of geekdom was squashed. I was not triumphant. I must admit defeat and call -- gulp -- customer service.

I called. I watied. I waited. I waited. I waited.

I hung up the phone. Tinkered a bit more. Called again. I waited. I waited. And then, I waited.

I was not successful at contacting SusCom, nor was I successful at reconfiguring my mom's IP. As flustered as I was, I changed users and logged in as my brother only to find out that I was miraculously connected to the Internet with no submission forms popping up and no error messages telling me that I had to reconfigure something.

Either I fudged the process somehow and it worked or SusCom knew it was me waiting on the phone (rather, they knew it was my mother by phone number ID) and by some form of magic, decided to give this geek-in-the-making a break.

Whatever it was, I am thankful to the IP powers that be.

And I do hope that SusCom has a better method of handling their migration. Not everyone understands what releasing an IP means. And please - get some Mac instructions!