The majority of scheduled maintenance work is performed between 1am and 5am local time. This timeframe is used because it impacts the least amount of customers that have WOW! service. Preventive maintenanace work is also performed at night Monday through Thursday. This time is used due to the low usage of Internet and Voice. Video has low usage during these hours but our VideoOnDemand product tends to have a higher usage. Because of this, we schedule maintenance for VideoOnDemand at 5am local time. Whenever maintenance is performed that will affect a large group of customers or a community for more the 15 minutes, we will deliver bulletins to the affected WOW! customers via computers within 48 hours of the scheduled work. We will also post this information on the Network Status page of the Customer Portal.
What to do about Spam
I’m seeing a lot of communications floating around here lately about Spam. Not the canned food, but the electronic version, of course. Unlike the food, there are many varieties of electronic spam such as email spam, mobile phone spam, instant messaging spam, and many others. The one type of spam I’m hearing so much about lately is the type that comes into your email mailbox, you know, the unsolicited and undesired electronic junk mail that’s trying to sell you something you really don’t need or want. Often, the email doesn’t even appear to be addressed to you but it is because your address is on the blind carbon copy (bcc.)
So how do spammers get your email address anyway? Well, there are many sneaky sites out on the internet that you visit that asks you for your email address for the sole purpose of getting your address to sell. It might be a survey form or an entry into a contest. It’s important to always read privacy policies before giving out your email address. Another source of email addresses is on those “chain” type emails that get forwarded multiple times and have multiple addresses embedded. If you’re sending emails to multiple people, consider using the blind carbon copy function so none of the addresses are visable to the recipients. And, if you receive emails with addressess embedded, be sure to strip those out before forwarding the email onto anyone else. Finally, spammers might even get your address by hit or miss, that is by simply making up email addresses by taking a common name and adding a @wowway.com, a @msn.com, or a @hotmail.com to it.
If your WOW! email box is getting deluged with spam email, turning on the spam filter can help. But, you’ll need to remember to check the “junk” folder on a regular basis to make sure legitimate emails that you want to receive are not getting blocked. If they are, there are email filter settings you can set to allow them to get through. If you need help with spam or email filters, feel free to give us a call. As always, we’re here to help you get the most out of your WOW! service.
Scope of Support
Most of the times you call us for troubleshooting help, we solve the problem over the phone. Sometimes though, we end up referring you to your computer, router, television, game console, or other manufacturer. When it comes to WOW! equipment, it’s never a problem. We have all the troubleshooting tools, documents, and diagrams we need to reestablish service. We can help you navigate through complex menus and explain what what wire goes where. But, with non-WOW! equipment, we don’t have the expertise or tools to support you. When other equipment is involved in the service equation and we can’t get your services working, we’ll bypass the non-WOW! equipment to verify our equipment is working properly. Once we’ve done this, our only option is to refer you elsewhere. It’s disappointing to you, we know, and we hope you understand. It’s not that we don’t want to help you, it’s just that we can’t because the problem is “outside our scope of support.” Thanks for understanding.
Time for Sun Outages Again
As I pondered what to write about this week, as always, I checked our customer care employee portal to see what topics were on the front page and I saw that it’s that time again for those pesky sun outages. We’ll receive calls from customers concerned about the quality of their pictures and have to consider whether or not the symptoms they are reporting require intensive troubleshoorting or even a field service call. If the symptoms are breakup, tiling, black screens, or static and only last for about ten minutes or so, it’s likely just a sun outage. To refresh you on what sun outages are and why they occur, please click here to read the article posted to this site in early spring. It’s pretty interesting stuff.
For Your Convenience…
Every company has a buffer between the customer and management. This is not to make matters worse, it is typically in place to better help the customer.
At WOW!, we empower our Escalation Line personnel to take care of just about any need of the customer, as if they were the supervisor or manager. These individuals go through an extensive training program which they are coached on: Active listening, Empathy and Negotiations as well as a series of general communications skills.The individuals you would be speaking to are hand picked, from upper management, because of their all around abilities to help our customers.
There are policies and procedures that need to be followed by everyone in the company and there is still an escalation chain. Not to say that everything can be resolved by one of our Escalation representatives but most issues can. Give them a chance and you may be surprised how quickly any question you may have is answered.
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