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Reason #365,954 why voip outperforms the phone company
Saturday, January 06, 2007
In the normal scheme of things, you sign up for phone service, chatter away all month, and pay the bill when it pops up in your mailbox. If you get your bills in the mail, you might squirrel them away in a records file for a year or so, but mostly, you don't think about it too much--until there's a problem.
We've got voip internet phone service and a traditional landline. We also get both statements via email; it's convenient and cuts down on the clutter. Recently, we needed to verify a call that came into our landline number a couple of months ago. I went online and discovered that, no...they don't grant account holders access to that kind of information.
So I called customer service, and talked to an infinitely unhelpful young man who let me know that Caller ID is what you use to find out about incoming calls. Or sometimes, if you sign up for this thing that's kind of like an answering machine (but you have to pay extra) and if they call and you're not there it will take a message and whatever, or something to that effect and maybe you could find out that way. And I said, "Voicemail?" and he was all, "ummmmm, sure. Do you want to sign up?" Then I asked what if the police called and needed to get a hold of phone records. What then? To which he replied, "well, I don't know--maybe you need a court thing or something." You have got to be kidding me.
Too bad the call didn't come in on our voip line. All I'd have to do is login to my account and take a gander at my phone logs. Incoming, outgoing, length of the conversation, time it happened...pretty much anything you might need to know (excepting a transcript of the actual conversation, of course).
