Can free be too expensive?

One of our clients recently got six months of free phone service from its local telco. Sounds great. But there's no such thing as a free lunch - or free phone service. Read on.

Our client is a small but fast-growing company that has been adding both staff and phone lines at a rapid clip. Having broken through the 30-line barrier of its existing service (provided by the local telco), the company opted to add internal extension dialing (i.e., using just the last three digits rather than the entire number) and a few other nice features.

Since the company was upgrading its service, the telco informed the company it would need to move to a bigger voice mail server. "Would that impact the service?" our client asked. "No problem" was the reply.

At 12:01 a.m. on the morning of the cutover, the voice mail system was to be transferred from Server A to Server B. As part of this procedure, the client would lose any stored or unsaved messages.

Employees were told to listen to all messages prior to leaving the office that evening and to change their messages to instruct callers to phone back in the morning instead of leaving a message.

Sound reasonable? Our client thought so.

Unfortunately, the day before the scheduled cutover, the company's employees came to work to find that half their phones had already been switched over to the new message server - about 12 hours too early. As you would expect, all voice mail messages were lost. But at least new messages would be saved in the new system.

Somebody got on the phone to the telco - where somebody confessed that the order had been entered incorrectly into the system to delete all of the company's voice mail boxes. That's right, DELETE. Not move or change or upgrade. Even with this somewhat forced confession, the telco couldn't explain why the service had been deleted 12 hours before the scheduled cutoff date. Still, the work order was corrected and the telco was sorry about that lost voice mail. Back to work, everybody.

Then, around 4 p.m., the other 16 or so remaining lines were slammed from voice mail Server A to Server B. Blam, all those saved and unheard messages were sent into the ozone. This time, the telco couldn't explain what happened. But at least everybody in the company was cut over to the new system. The new voice mail system worked, the new phone lines worked, and all the new internal dialing features worked.

That is until the next morning, when people come to work to find that the new voice mail system has been completely deleted from the entire system. Instead of being allowed to leave messages, incoming callers were told to "enter their voice mailbox numbers" - after which they were not allowed to leave a message.

Several hours later, the telco finally restored the phone service. For the third time in two days, nobody could provide a good explanation for what went wrong. In exchange for this botched service, the client was offered six months of free phone service (and all 30 active phone lines).

I guess the two conclusions that can be drawn here are 1) the phone company is still "The Phone Company" and not ready to be a provider of value-added services, and 2) you really can get free phone service - but at a price.

If you've had a similar horror story, drop me a line or visit our User Forum. Let's see how bad it really is. Was this case the exception to the rule?