It's hard to get good help these days. Unless you’re a disgruntled end user, trying to solve a problem in our forums. If you can’t get a question answered from one of the lurking technical gurus, you can find representatives from most of the major ISP’s perusing our forums daily, answering questions, solving problems, and generally putting on a good public face for the subscribers they serve. Yet some ISP’s still look upon public forum interaction as something of a liability, and reprimand their techs for offering a helping hand.

One example: One Cox subscriber, capped at 1.5Mbps/128Kbps, in Ocala Florida, was noticing a complete loss of sync every day from 1-3PM. Jumping to his aid, one cable tech quickly ran some diagnostics on his Mac address, noting that his signal levels were adequate, and began to explore other possible problems via a battery of tests. After looking at his customer and node history, the tech learned that his upstream power was jumping to ridiculous levels every day between one and three PM. The tech even bothered to offer proof:



Suggesting that the problem may be related to temperature was the last bit of help that was offered. The technician providing the help was contacted via phone and reprimanded for sharing the material, even though he was assisting to pinpoint the problem and probably saved Cox themselves time in further diagnosis. The call was from someone who had no local connection to the tech whatsoever. The tech involved refused to speak to us about further details.

Cox's response is peculiar because there have been many instances of company Vice Presidents from various departments answering question within the Cox Forum walls. In fact, since this event, they’ve set up two accounts in order to assist customers and have an “official” presence in the forums, and have other Cox employees going above and beyond in trying to resolve issues.

Many companies are slowly shifting their stances on public interaction. Once just the domain of marketing gurus and salesmen, a smart ISP knows that a friendly human touch and a quick resolution to a problem can mean more than all the price cuts in the world to an end user. One of the last companies you'd expect would allow open criticism of its policies, oil baron Shell, has set up an open forum in which anyone can criticize the companies policies. What's unique about this, is that the company even encourages open employee response. Of course whether these employees are warned privately is another matter.

Our forums are filled with ISP’s who have learned that making yourself accessible makes good business sense. You can find Covad technicians willing to help out in our Speakeasy or Covad forums. Likewise you'll usually find techs troubleshooting in our Optimum On-Line forum, with Charter also having a very strong forum presence. We've yet to see any of the techs in these forums lead their respective companies into chapter 11, or even behave in ways a company wouldn't appreciate. In fact, if you ask the end users, we’re willing to bet their impression of the companies improved ten fold.

Other ISP's seem much more heavy handed in their approach to technicians in public forums. Some of the strictest tech leash jerking has come from the folks at Comcast, who have been very restrictive on techs who've offered their services to forum visitors. Roadrunner has also been known to play hardball. Several technicians have been strongly reprimanded, and other have had to withdraw from the forums completely, deleting all posts, supposedly at the risk of termination. There are other ISP's who have similarly strong "anti-forum" policies.

It’s understandable that concerns about public interaction and liability exist. Particularly when you find techs from resellers or sub-contracted employees representing your company and technology without proper authorization or oversight. But for standard employees, would it not make sense to draft behavior guidelines for such forums, and reap the benefits of good PR that responding to problems quickly brings? Many companies have frequent internal discussion about public presence, and simply require a disclaimer after each post freeing the company from responsibility.

If concern over privacy, liability and image is so rampant amongst companies holding the leash, why not establish clear and solid guidelines for technicians to follow while engaging the public via a public forum instead of suppressing the help all together?