Srcasm

I don’t know about all of you but I’ve been a Blackberry, full QWERTY fan for a long time.  Over the last four or five years, I’ve been through 8700s, 8100s, 8800 series and even the older 7290s on the Blackberry platform and I loved them all…  Then I got hold of the TMobile G1 with Android.  I found another phone that not only fit the bill but the OS took the cake as it was simple, expandable and open source (all three of which, I love).

Posted via email from Srcasm’s Posterous Site

As everyone around me knows, I’ve become a huge fan of the G1 and the Android OS.  I’ve written about it a few times on the blog and I will continue to.  Today’s post is more about the service provider behind the product.

In my mind, TMobile never had great coverage.  I tested a TMobile Blackberry 8700 about 3 years ago and was getting dropped calls right in Olde City, Philadelphia.  That’s just not good.  Sure the coverage was decent on the highways and even up near my parents house in Quakertown, PA but to have calls drop out in a major city, no way I could use it.

Fast forward about 3 years to today.  The G1 is an excellent phone.  From design to execution it has been a total pleasure to work with (not that it hasn’t come with its kinks).

I called up TMobile yesterday and spoke to a wonderful woman named Luciana.  Her rep ID ends in 32880 and she’s in the Dallas, TX call center.  She was pleasant to talk to, she understood my problem (the hing seemed a little wobbly and I didn’t want it to fall apart) and she simply ordered me a new one — free of charge.  I didn’t even have to go into a store, they ship it UPS to me.

Many people might think it’s crazy that I’m excited about such a simple thing but calling customer service at any cell phone company can be aggravating.  I will usually go through 4 or 5 different people before I find the one I need to talk to and then they send me through a whirlwind of questions until they finally come to the conslusion they should, replace it.  TMobile didn’t make me do this at all.

I will definitely be sticking with TMobile for the time being and I will be trying to give Luciana a call the next time I have any issues.  TMobile is lucky to have someone like her on their staff because she just won them a customer that was with AT&T Wireless for 6 years and a blog post dedicated to them.  Customer service FTW!

I believe that most of you know that I’m working for Passpack now as a community/technology evangelist and one of the most difficult things to get used to is the time zone difference.  The entire Passpack team is located in Rome, Italy which means that they are generally around 6-7 hours ahead of me on the east coast of the US.  This makes for some interesting conversations with me half asleep and they’re on their 5th or 6th cups of coffee.  The second hardest thing to get used to are the methods and tools used to collaborate. 

Of course we have a project management tool and we can now securely share information between our team but it’s very different from sitting down at a conference room table with a hot cup-o-joe and a pen and paper.  We use tools like Skype to chat while online and Google Reader and alerts to make sure that we are following all of the latest news and trends in the web world but I’m curious to ask some of you how you collaborate with your international teams.  What tools help to aid in feeling more connected with the other side of the world?  How do you improve your processes (especially with the time zone difference) while working remotely or even presenting to the group?

I know one tool I have found very valuable is a service called EQO.  Besides having a fantastic domain (who wouldn’t want a three letter domain?) they provide a solid product.  I can put a little bit of money into my account and whenever I need to reach my friends and colleagues in Italy, I simply click on their name (since EQO can import your phone’s address book, it’s easy) and it connects me for a very low cost per minute.  For instance, to call the office in Italy, it’s only 2.3 cents per minute.  Compare that to AT&T which would run me $1.49 per minute!  In addition, their application runs on a huge number of cell phone including Blackberry and and Windows Mobile devices.

I’ve decided to combine EQO with Skype to provide me two very inexpensive solutions to contacting the people that I need to talk to no matter where I am.  I for one hope that people and companies continue to innovate and create solutions that aid in remote and international collaboration.  It’s how our world should work, as one.

Frank Eliason (aka @ComcastCares) and his team of phenomenal people are at it again!  They’ve had a bit of publicity on ZDNet, Brian Solis’ blog and even the Get Satisfaction crew is getting satisfied.

Today, I had a strange issue — I could no longer get the music channels on my digital box.  A quick reboot of the box didn’t fix it so I sent an email to Frank’s team.  Within the hour Catherine, from PA/De Corporate Escalations, had both called me and emailed me to see if we could get to the bottom of my problem.  After a quick call back, she had booked a service call for 7-9pm on Thursday (that’s right, a two hour window next day).  About 5 minutes later she called to ask if anyone had sent a signal to the box yet.  Nope?  She did and within seconds the music channels reappeared.  The fiancée was happy and so was I and she got to close a ticket in probably near-record time.  I want to make sure I say thanks to that whole team.  And keep up the great work, Comcast.

As for everyone else, learn from this.  Comcast has had historically poor support but they are working their butts off to get better.  When I call Verizon, AT&T, PGW and the rest of the bunch, I would love to actually get an educated, nice person on the phone — or at least be able to reach out to them on Twitter.