One of my usual peeves is dealing with customer service.  So when I come across good customer service experiences, I suppose I should give credit where credit is due and write about them as well.  I had two good customer service experiences this week.

The first involves AT&T’s CallVantage VoIP service.  I’ve used them for my business line for a little over two years now and it was mostly trouble free.  The only problem I had was that I’d get bad call quality if I didn’t reboot the Telephone Adapter (TA) every month or two.  On Tuesday morning, though, I started getting crackling and hissing on the line when I tried to use it.  I did some basic troubleshooting and resolved that it appeared to be a physical problem with the TA.  So on Tuesday afternoon I called the CallVantage support number.  I was pleasantly surprised that it only took me about two minutes to reach a real person after navigating the VRU.  The second pleasant surprise was that the AT&T representative listened to me describe the problem and was able to diagnose that the port was bad on the TA (it also helped that I was able to let the rep listen to the noise on the CallVantage line by holding my phone’s microphone up to the speakerphone attached to the TA).  The rep put in a request to have a new adapter sent to me overnight via FedEx and explained what I would need to do upon receipt of the new unit.  Sure enough, FedEx came yesterday afternoon with the new adapter.  I installed it and called CallVantage support again.  I again got a representative within a couple of minutes and he was able to active the new TA within about 10 minutes (most of it was waiting on the TA to download its configuration data).  So, overall, I give AT&T CallVantage high marks for solving the problem quickly and efficiently.

The second incident involves my Surefire L4 LumaMax.  On Monday evening I tried to use it but the beam was very weak.  I thought it odd, because the batteries had been just fine earlier in the day, but I decided to change them anyway.  When I put the new batteries in, the light came on as soon as I screwed down the head and the switch wouldn’t turn it off.  I opened the light and pulled the batteries and when I looked inside I noticed that the tailcap spring was bent sideways, causing it to come in contact with the body and create a short that was causing the light to stay on.  So I unscrewed the tailcap to see what was wrong with the spring and when I did little bits of plastic and metal fell out.  The switch assembly had disintegrated.  I had read on some of the flashlight forums that people had experienced failures with the Z57 tailcap but I had thought mine would not have the problem since it had been working for a year (most of the people with problems seemed to have them within days of purchase).  I went to the Surefire website to get their contact info.  I started to call their tech support line, but it was after hours for them (they close at 5:00pm Pacific, which is 7:00pm here), so I tried their email support.  By Wednesday morning I hadn’t heard from them so I went ahead and called them.  I got in touch with one of their techs within about a minute and as soon as I described the problem he said they’d send me a new tailcap assembly.  Even after confirming my address, the whole call was probably only about five minutes.  So, I give Surefire’s phone support high marks, but I will have to deduct a demerit for the email support experience.  Frankly, I was kind of expecting this to happen, since a lot of people on the forums had complained about their email support, but enough people had managed to get a response that I decided to risk it.  Still, if Surefire isn’t going to consistently answer their emails, they ought to just remove the email option from their website.  Anyhow, once you get in touch with them, Surefire is known for having good warranty and technical support.