Finally, a good ISP experience

I have rarely had a good ISP experience. Especially if you mention you are running anything other than Windows.

Yesterday afternoon we started having connection issues with our DSL provider, Prodigy. The way it was coming and going, it seemed more like a network problem than my personal connection to the world. But, I called them this afternoon anyway just in case it might be my modem.

The agent that took my call, Victoria, spoke a bit fast and didn’t seem to care that I was not a native Spanish speaker. If I didn’t understand something I would ask for a clarification. Like most people, she just said the same words but a bit louder. I think people don’t understand that when a foreigner does not understand a word, that saying the same word over and over does not make it clearer. You need to find a basic synonym of the word.

Well, we worked through those issues little by little. Obviously that is not what was good about the experience.

She stepped me through resetting the modem/router to the factory defaults and then we messed with some settings inside the modem and it all eventually worked out fine. In the process I had to get a new IP address assigned by the router. She asked me which version of Windows I was using. I told her I did not have a Windows machine, but I had Linux and Mac available to me. When I said that I was sitting at the Linux machine and it was the one closest to the modem, she asked me to reboot so that I could get a new IP. Most of the time I get told by other ISPs that they do not support Linux and therefore I would need to do the configuration on Windows, or they would not be able to help me. She did not mind that I was using Linux nor that I manually requested an IP address from the modem instead of rebooting.

I have even been told by a DSL provider (many years ago) that their system would not work on Linux and that I would have to cancel my service with them if I wanted to use Linux. I had been using their service for 10 months at that point with Linux, it was just that I was having problems with the modem for some strange reason. I ended up hanging up with him and figured the problem out myself.

So, Prodigy in Mexico did not seem stunned that I was running Linux and Victoria did not mind that I actually used my own brain to do what she wanted me to do. Usually you have to go through their exact set of steps or they don’t know how to proceed from there.

It is always nice to have a good customer service experience.

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