Dsl_Case_Summary

Overview: As newly-appointed faculties at a local university and newcomers in Center City, Brian Cantera and his wife Marie find their new life was disrupted by the transfer of personal information system infrastructure from old city to the current one. Aside from the problems about cellular phone, computer and bank account infrastructure, the most serious issue came for setting internet service with a local service provider MightyFone, a subsidiary of its parent company BigFone. After weeks of communication with the customer service department without solving his problem, he decided to reflect his issue to the highest management level of the company before taking legal actions to the governmental authorities. Several problems came up during the negotiation process with the customer service department: 1. The customer information database system of the ISP was not unified that it took extra longer time to for Mr. Cantera to tell the customer representative his case and personal information before finding a solution to solve his problem. 2. The average lead time he waited for one customer representative to call back was long that many of them even never called back as they promised. 3. The customer representatives he tried to contact seems either willing to take of capable of taking responsibility for getting things fixed. 4. The company seems not giving first-line customer representatives enough authorities to directly solve the problems. 5. The company did not clarify the responsibilities of each case so that customer will be confused about who they should reported and solve their problems. 6. There are many overlaps of customer information systems between the acquiring company and acquired company and the connections between systems are time-consuming. Lessons Learned 1. The ISP industry is monopolistic. Even though you tries to receive a better service by choosing a local ISP, it may be only one subsidiary of an large conglomerate and you have to truly solve the problem you encountered by contacting the home company. 2. It is very important for companies to not only integrate their tangible assets during merge and acquisition but also rearrange their information systems so that the personal responsibilities are clearly identified and the database will be fluently shared among different department. Only when people show the severity of their problems do companies deal with the problems quickly and efficiently.