Our Cox service has been completely down since Tuesday August 4 thanks to Tropical Storm Isaias, except for 15 minutes yesterday. I understand that the problem is almost certainly due to the local power utility, who was absurdly unprepared for the storm. I know that Eversource needs to cut power and remove trees before many outages can be fixed.
However, Cox has really dropped the ball on communications here. Getting through on the phone is pretty much impossible. Chat sessions via the app are summarily dropped minutes after they're opened. SMS texts go without a reply (or at least, no reply two hours after starting them...)
The app and automated SMS response have no good info either. They started out with an estimate of a few hours, which kept increasing for half a day before becoming "no estimate." After two days of "no estimate" we got a "resolved" message in the morning... when the problem was not resolved, and had not been resolved at any point overnight. (I've got the logs to prove it...) Now it shows a new estimate that's continually increasing again.
I get that big storm impacts are unusual events, but they do happen. Cox is doing itself a real disservice by not engineering their automated responses to handle multi-day events. I get that it could be days to get service back... but can we get more informative messages? An accurate time estimate, even if it's on the order of days? Or even a "we are waiting on the power utility to restore service and they currently estimate..." message?
Not to mention making sure your text/chat systems can gracefully handle demand surges. I don't mean having staff for instant response after hurricane-force winds, but at least not dropping me summarily and giving some estimate of how long it will take for a response? And ensuring that my chat session isn't dropped if *I* don't reply instantly when I've moved on while waiting hours for a response?
I urge others in CT with the same problem to contact your state representative and ask them to hold Cox accountable for storm communications; Eversource is getting all the ire, but Cox isn't blameless here either.
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