Z-rrific!

Competitive service providers take so many lumps these days. Some deserve them, some don’t. So, in defense of startups everywhere, I’m going to share a personal tale—even though you probably couldn’t care less about my personal experiences.

It all started a few weeks ago during an interview with Kent Steffen, CEO of OSS developer Telution. Telution provides emerging carriers with all kinds of management applications—order, trouble, customer relationship, revenue, etc.—with its Communications Exchange OSS platform. Steffen mentioned that one of Telution’s customers is an outfit called Z-tel Communications, an ICP that serves about 300,000 customers using unbundled network elements from incumbents.

Ironically, when I got home that evening and sifted through the standard stack of junk mail looking for the good stuff—deliveries from Wine.com, holiday cards in the form of money holders, Victoria’s Secret catalogs, etc.—there was a piece of direct mail from Z-tel on the pile.

Unlike most of the holiday cards, the Z-tel correspondence did indeed contain money—a check for $25 along with an offer to morph my home phone line into a “Z-line.” In my world, an extra $25 during the season of perpetual celebration is really nothing to sneeze at. So I read on.

Z-tel’s pitch promised me a $49.99 package that included flat-rate local service, 100 minutes of long-distance and all the trimmings—call waiting, caller ID, call forwarding, 3-way calling, find-me service and voicemail with e-mail notification options. That, combined with the $25 check and the fact that my typical monthly bill from Ameritech and AT&T is typically in the neighborhood of $75, sold me.

My earlier conversation with Steffen of Telution also helped close the deal. After all, I would be able to experience and evaluate the effectiveness of Telution’s OSS suite first-hand as a customer, not as an industry journalist. So I called the 800 number at 12 p.m. on a Saturday and began my journey into the competitive field.

I was immediately annoyed that a CSR named Mark answered after I was on hold for 8 minutes. (Just to clarify, my annoyance was with the wait, not with the guy’s name.) Mark turned out to be very helpful. He assured me that everything, including my phone number, would remain the same, saying “The only thing that’s going to change is that you’ll have a lower phone bill.” He said it would take about 10 to 15 days to switch me over (“That’s largely because of the holiday”) and that I could test for completion by dialing 00. Mark also walked me through a recording that recorded my verbal authorization of the switchover, probably so Z-tel could taunt Ameritech with it. We wrapped everything up at 12:16, just 8 minutes after we started.

Somewhere around Christmas Day the changeover quietly took place—so quietly, in fact, that I didn’t even realize it had happened. People who called heard a recording that said “You’ve reached the Z-line of [pause].” It was only around the end of December that I bothered to dial 00 and realized that I had 10 unheard messages—many of which were hang-ups from confused callers who didn’t know who [pause] was.

The only negative experience I’ve had with Z-tel so far was when I tried to access my messages. Having yet to receive any instructions by mail (“That’s largely because of the holiday”), I called my Z-service agent to find out what I was supposed to Z-do. She (I neglected to ask her name, but she was no Mark) said the last four digits of my phone number would act as a temporary PIN that would allow me to access my mailbox and customize my features.

That didn’t work, and when I called back another unnamed CSR said I was “in the process of being migrated” from Ameritech and that Z-tel didn’t know when that would be finished. I asked for a supervisor who could tell me when I would be fully migrated and was told, “No one in this department will be able to inform you of the date.” For the record, Mark never would have said such a thing. But I forgave them, because moments later the PIN worked and my voicemail setup went swimmingly.

So that’s that: I have had a largely positive experience so far using an alternative carrier. I’ll let you know if it doesn’t live up to the Z-promise.

Contact Editorial Director [pause] at jason_meyers@intertec.com.