Abysmal wait times for support

[darkzone]

Be glad they even called you back. I had a simple question about VDSL2 availability and didn't feel like waiting the 57+ minutes for a callback so I tried the "Ask a question" form in members tools; 12 days later and no one ever responded.

[Guest]

I'm a relatively new subscriber--a bit over 4 years, experienced legacy ADSL1 across 2 cities; my folks in SF on CO Fusion; and my current household with FTTN Fusion. It's unfortunate stories like these are cropping up. While I haven't had to call Sonic telephone support for over 2-3 months, I've never waited more than 5 minutes even on weekends when they were open. Email have been replied within 24 hours on weekdays and usually Monday/Tuesday if I sent it during the weekend. Estimated wait times of over 30 minutes definitely don't sound right.

My initial concern was a lot of people wanted more speed and those members wanted Sonic to rapidly expand coverage. Sonic reselling AT&T FTTN was a way to mitigate some of the void so it made business sense. But it's always balancing act whenever coverage is increased and staff support personnel are hired/trained for it.

I'm inclined to believe the majority of customers don't have an issue but "the squeaky wheel gets the grease."

Hopefully Dane or someone on the executive team could post a formal reply.

[pockyken007]

hm.... I am yet to experience the horror stories that you guys are experiencing so far my CS experience has been stellar but with so many posts and complains I would suspect that something is amiss ( even though personally I haven't experienced it ) . Dane is that because of too fast expansion / not enough trained staff or are you guys overloaded and the stress / amount of work is getting to people ? maybe it's time to look into expanding your team of CS / Techies as the company is expanding ?

[darkzone]

While I haven't had to call Sonic telephone support for over 2-3 months, I've never waited more than 5 minutes even on weekends when they were open.

It's been pretty bad the last couple weeks.

sonic-wait-20151005-small.png (13.87 KiB) Viewed 2408 times

The past day or 2 hasn't been quite that bad though.

sonic-wait-20151015.png (14.1 KiB) Viewed 2408 times

[Guest]

It's been pretty bad the last couple weeks.

I waited 45 minutes on hold today when I called to cancel service; the person
who helped me "lots of changes here" when she asked why I was canceling.
Obviously Sonic is going through some growing (or other) pains. Not a
good situation - hopefully they will survive.

The Sonic lapdog will be here in no time to say that it is all hunky dory is Sonic land ;) but
you see it post blather on every thread. What a clown! Wonder if it's not a Sonic employee
posing as a customer.....

Dane meanwhile has disappeared from these forums....gotten too hot in here?

[pockyken007]

it's all hunky dory in sonic land ... sincerely " Sonic lapdog" good job you canceled with your attitude if I had to help you I would hang up on you if I worked for Sonic .

[pockyken007]

While I haven't had to call Sonic telephone support for over 2-3 months, I've never waited more than 5 minutes even on weekends when they were open.

It's been pretty bad the last couple weeks.

sonic-wait-20151005-small.png

The past day or 2 hasn't been quite that bad though.

sonic-wait-20151015.png

Darkzone my FTTN experienced some connections problems especially with european based servers , I have monitored it for around 2-3 days now and today everything seems to be fine throughout the whole day ... I wonder if it was something ATT did on their servers or what ...

[dane]

Things are not hunky-dory, and we are well aware of it here. I can look out my window and see that there are 25 customers waiting to speak with us, and we have seen peak hold times of over an hour on a number of days.

Hold times which have been averaging 1-2 minutes in our monthly reporting leaped up to an average of over six minutes in September, and this week were not under 20 minutes from Monday to Wednesday on average. So yes, we're in crisis mode. Compounding the issue, we've run into capacity, licensing and bug issues in our phone system that have led to lost calls, callbacks, etc.

Our team is madly outfitting office space, running employment ads, interviewing and hiring new team members, ramping up training sessions, etc. Lots of growing pains here, and we know that it is challenging for both our staff, and our customers.

One key point to make: we are not going to continue to suck. This isn't a strategy to reduce costs of support or something, we have no plans to offshore or outsource or make it harder to reach us. We will solve this problem the right way: by adding good, friendly local people to our team, and giving them and our members better tools to manage their accounts more easily.

And we'll do it as quickly as we can, because we know this isn't something our customers should have to continue to tolerate.

[pockyken007]

Things are not hunky-dory, and we are well aware of it here. I can look out my window and see that there are 25 customers waiting to speak with us, and we have seen peak hold times of over an hour on a number of days.

Hold times which have been averaging 1-2 minutes in our monthly reporting leaped up to an average of over six minutes in September, and this week were not under 20 minutes from Monday to Wednesday on average. So yes, we're in crisis mode. Compounding the issue, we've run into capacity, licensing and bug issues in our phone system that have led to lost calls, callbacks, etc.

Our team is madly outfitting office space, running employment ads, interviewing and hiring new team members, ramping up training sessions, etc. Lots of growing pains here, and we know that it is challenging for both our staff, and our customers.

One key point to make: we are not going to continue to suck. This isn't a strategy to reduce costs of support or something, we have no plans to offshore or outsource or make it harder to reach us. We will solve this problem the right way: by adding good, friendly local people to our team, and giving them and our members better tools to manage their accounts more easily.

And we'll do it as quickly as we can, because we know this isn't something our customers should have to continue to tolerate.

And this is why people stick with Sonic .. keep up the good work Dane and the team

[Guest]

Things are not hunky-dory, and we are well aware of it here.
︙
And we'll do it as quickly as we can, because we know this isn't something our customers should have to continue to tolerate.

Thanks for the post. Perhaps you should write a blog post or enter a status on the blog. Some folks look for status there and I think maybe a sticky blog entry there would help, if not a sticky post on the forums already.

The wiki also needs to be updated, especially for people who are on FTTN and they have many questions about installation, phone features, etc. If there is no time by Sonic staff, it's quite evident there are individuals here who are knowledgeable and would probably help.