Just some observations about the Sympatico service. Some of this really
amazed me, I work as a PC Tech and have been called out several times in
the last few weeks to sort out problems with Sympatico, that should have
been solved by Sympatico Customer Service.

1. Does a Call Centre in India really provide adequate customer service
to Canadian customers?
I sometimes have great difficulty understanding the agent, and I'm sure
they also have difficulty understanding me.

2. The standard answer to any email problems nowadays seems to be to
switch the customer to the Sympatico-Hotmail service. I have some major
issues with this:
a. I have been to 2 customers recently where the Sympatico Rep had
instructed the customer to disable their Anti-Virus software completely.
Maybe this wasn't the intention of the rep, I suspect the customer was
supposed to disable scanning of outgoing mail only, but when I arrived
on-site they were both completely unprotected. Could this problem
possibly be a communication problem ( see point 1 above??)

b. The, supposedly enhanced, service offered by the Hotmail based
service uses very aggresive Spam filtering. In one case a customer was
not receiving email from a business customer of his. Sympatico support
told him the mail had been filtered by the Junk filter and that he
should check his Junk Mail Box. For customers who use the Web based
service this is fine, the Junk Box is fairly obvious - however this
customer uses Outlook Express, and he had no idea that there even was
such a thing as a Junk Mailbox anywhere, he also had no idea how to
login to the web based mail portal. I tried a few tests locally with
some of my customers and it is astonishing what gets filtered out as
junk - I have used some Open-source mail software with excellent junk
filters, could a company with the resources of Sympatico not invest some
time and resources into developing a reasonable filtering solution.

3. In 3 cases when the Support agent has not been able to resolve the
problem I have been told that the problem needed to be escalated to next
level tech support, and that the customer would receive a callback
within 24hrs. No calls were ever received. The last time I was told
this, I asked to speak to a supervisor, hoping for some confirmation
that a callback would actually happen - I was put on hold for 5 minutes
and then cut off. That was 3 days ago, and surprisingly, the customer
has still not been called back (actualy I think he may have cancelled
his service anyway!).