Thread by @sjdayday

So, in the end it took almost 3 extra weeks to get internet service at our new address. I’ll talk about it in several threads; this one is a story of customers as parts and work on phone lines as parts.

https://twitter.com/sjdayday/status/1277334479321788417

Originally, we were supposed to have AT&T internet service when we arrived on June 26, but it was July 15 before it was actually working. As before, each person I spoke to was trying to be helpful. So what happened, and what does it suggest about how things could be better?

There were two things needed for the installation — router equipment at the house, and a line from the central office to the house carrying the internet signal.

There were problems with each thing.
1) The equipment to be installed was shipped to the wrong address, and had to be re-shipped to the new address — that was the first thread (some repetition here for context).
2) The line to the house was not working until July 15.

The line not working was a surprise, because I had been told that earlier in the week before we arrived, two people had worked on the line to get it ready. One person had come out, then called a second person out to fix another problem.

Some days later, I was told that no, no one had ever come to the house. Someone suggested perhaps the two people I had been told about, had gone to a different house? Despite asking multiple people, I was never able to get to the bottom of this.

I had been told on June 28 that someone would be out to bring the router and to get the internet service working sometime on July 1. Late on July 1, I called to find out what was happening, and was told that no, no one would be coming that day.

At that point I was told that by sometime between July 6 to July 8 I might have the router. Later in the week, I was told that there was a problem with the circuit that would be providing our internet service, and that it was estimated to be fixed sometime around July 14.

I finally got the router around July 8.

In a later call, I asked when the line problem would be resolved, and was told that there was no close date in the system, so the default close date was sometime in 2036. I explained that I might be dead by then, and asked if I could escalate to get it done sooner.

After escalation, the first line problem was fixed on July 10. I called on that day to find out what was going on, and was told that I needed to schedule a follow-up visit to the house, to get the service working. The soonest date available was July 14.

In the meantime, I had also made several calls to get the ordinary phone line working. We live in a rural area, and want to be able to make a phone call even if the power is out. This is sometimes called POTS — Plain Old Telephone Service.

When I had made the original order back in early June, the sales representative and I had not understood each other, and the order for this line had ended up being for a service that requires power (VOIP — Voice Over IP). I had had to cancel and re-order the service.

Placing the corrected order required another credit check, and again I had to unfreeze my three credit reports.

In the middle of the problems with the internet service, someone came out and got the telephone line working for ordinary phone service. He was very helpful. We had a conversation about the internet service, and he explained what would likely still have to be done.

Both the ordinary phone line and the internet would be using the same wire to our house — in fact, he could tell that our router was already on the line, sending signals to the AT&T central office (but not succeeding, because the other end was not yet set up).

Finally, on the morning of July 15, another person came to the house, and after working both inside and outside the house, got everything prepared. Later that day, the system was updated, the lights went from red to green on the router, and the internet service began working.

What is a useful way to think about how this might have gone better?

Let’s ignore the difficulty I had for three weeks, trying to get my work done without reliable internet service (the only service I had was from using my cell phone, which usually had at most one bar, sometimes none at all). Instead, let’s look at AT&T’s side of things.

Perhaps 20 people ended up spending at least 15 hours between them on the phone with me to get this all straightened out. That’s a considerable cost to AT&T— probably at least as much as the several hours that were spent by the people doing the actual work on the line to my house

Almost from the beginning, the situation was too complicated for the automated phone system to be helpful, so I always ended up talking to a person, which is costly.

In the last thread I talked about frames, which are ways that people organize their thinking in a given situation. For example, in that last thread, I talked about frames that are often used when we’re talking about software — the Building, Project, and More frames.

But before we focus on software, we can see an even more basic frame at work everywhere in the process of getting this internet service. The PartWhole frame says that a whole is made up of parts, and the parts fit together to make a whole.

PartWhole is used in many other frames. For example, Buildings are built of parts, and Projects break down into steps, which can be thought of as parts.

Breaking work into parts became formalized not long after AT&T was founded, through the time and motion studies of Taylor and others:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientifi…

Time and motion studies look at each task of a process separately, and try to define the optimum actions and time needed

The focus is on breaking down the whole process into its parts, and optimizing each part. There is often an assumption that this leads to the most efficient way to get the whole work done, but that’s worth another look.

Looking at how this internet access process went, we can see things being broken down into parts. Because the parts are not put back together as a whole, the result is a lot of wasted time and money for AT&T, and wasted time and frustration for the customer.

As a customer, I’m a single, whole person, but I have a different AT&T account for each service. I have a single credit score, and a decades-long history of paying bills to AT&T, but for every account my credit is checked again.

If I have frozen access to my credit, I have to get off the phone with AT&T to go unfreeze my credit with the credit bureaus and then call AT&T again to restart the order process.

When I am passed from the automated phone system to a person, or from person to person, I am asked again for my account number and account PIN.

These are examples of the customer not being treated as a whole person, but as a collection of accounts, or a collection of separate conversations — as a collection of parts.

What about the work on the phone line — is it treated as a whole? “The customer wants internet access at a new address.” No, the work is also broken into a number of parts.

Information about the work is in separate places, and each person seems to have access only to parts of it.

It took multiple conversations and about an hour, to confirm where the router equipment was supposed to be shipped. Despite lots of honest effort, the final answer was wrong — the equipment wasn’t being shipped to the new address, but to the old address.

After I arrived at the new address, and realized that something was wrong, I had many conversations, ending with over an hour and a half with a very sincere person who explained, with regret, that the fastest path would be for him to cancel the old order and start a new one.

The internet service work was now two orders — two parts. The first order was cancelled, and everything done under it was now harder to find and talk about.

Under the old order, I was told that the house had been visited by two different people on the same day — the physical work for the internet service order had been divided into two parts.

(The good news, I was told, was that all that remained to be done was for me to install the router. But later, people could find no record of either of those visits, and apparently, no preparation had yet been done.)

There were a total of three orders, two for Internet service (the first one ended up cancelled), one for Plain Old Telephone Service. Each had its own account.

Although both of the active orders (internet and POTS) were for the same physical wire, the person who worked on the second order didn’t know about the first order until I told him.

The physical work was divided into three parts — there were at least three people who traveled to work on the service over seven days: one to fix the first line problem, one who installed the land line (POTS), and one who installed the Internet service.

After installing the internet service, the third person then fixed the POTS service, since it had stopped working as part of the Internet service work.

Dividing the physical work into three parts makes sense in the PartWhole frame. One trip, perhaps to the central office, to fix the internet line problem. A second trip to the house to install the internet service. A third trip to the house to install the POTS service.

What would it mean to try to put some of these parts back together into a whole? There were many places where this was attempted — the minds of the people I was working with, and in my mind.

On the phone, in each of a number of long conversations where we tried to move the ball forward, each of us was trying to see the big picture of what was going on, and how we could get it fixed as soon as possible.

Both people who came to the house had an understanding in their minds — they knew and talked about the steps the other person would need to take to do their work, and what problems they might encounter.

To some extent, the computer systems that these people were using attempted to show a big picture, but there were many problems with those systems.

Not being able to tell where the router was actually shipped to.

Showing that the house had been visited twice, when it actually had not been visited at all.

Scheduling visits to the house that later did not happen.

Leaving it to me, the customer, to say that there were two types of service on the same wire, to make sure that both ended up working.

Locking my record in the system, such that no one could make any changes for almost 24 hours, even though no one was doing anything.

Being unable to complete the original order, so that creating a new order was the fastest path forward.

On the phone in one part of the country, being unable to help with orders for POTS service in another part of the country.

How might the systems be changed such that they show the whole picture, with all the parts necessary to get the work done correctly on time? What might that have looked like?

There were several weeks after I placed the initial order before I arrived at the house in late June. The router might have been mailed to the new house, as I requested.

The physical work might have been done by one person, going first to the central office, detecting and repairing the first line problem, then coming to the house for the work on both types of service.

On that one day, one person would have required some more travel, but probably not that much. The central office is probably less than three miles away from the house:

att.com/support/articl…

Overall, there would have been less travel than adding up the travel that each of three people ended up having to do.

At the house, both the installation of the POTS service and the internet service could have been done. Final verification would have had to wait for my arrival, since I had said I could install the router myself.

This could have been completed in the weeks after my initial order. I could have arrived, set up the router, and begun work. AT&T would have avoided the expense of 15 hours of phone calls with me, and I would have had service three weeks earlier.

That’s all for this time, for customers as parts and work as parts.

Next time — AT&T as parts, and jobs as parts.

@ATT #ATT

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