Last week, you may recall my writing of a small ordeal in getting our FiOS phone line fixed. The problem was not so much that the line went out - in a storm, lines break - nor was it the response time of the company. It was the broken process Verizon used, where they demanded entry to the house just in case the problem was indoors, though I had to go away for several days to the Carlisle show; and apparently they needed this entry (a) just in case the problem was indoors, and (b) because as a mere customer, I obviously could not be trusted to see that the green light next to “NETWORK” was off while the green light next to “POWER” was on.

Not long after writing that weblog entry, I got a call from Verizon, a routine “moment of truth” phone survey of the type I used to set up. I answered the questions and was asked if I’d mind getting a followup call from Verizon. Surprisingly, I got such a call two days later, from a supervisor at Verizon. He was interested in what had happened, and readily agreed that the symptoms (complete service outage during a storm, with no power problems) was almost certainly “up at the pole.” He was respectful of my time and intelligence, and I suspect that the repairs process is being rewritten as we speak - or has already been rewritten.

If nothing else, this shows that there is hope for any organization where at least some people care enough to do the right thing - whether by a complex, trendy process (cascading balanced scorecards) or by a simple old standby (customer surveys and process reengineering).

Now, if only they would fix the programming in my router and TV box… but given their freedom from outages until now, and their handling of this one, I’m not in danger of wandering over to Cablevision any time soon.