If you’re a business, make it easy to buy your services.

At Hofmeister Family Dentistry, we use a cloud based practice management program called Dentrix Ascend. That means we need a fast and reliable internet connection in order to run the software that acts as the lifeblood of our business. When we bought the dental practice, the previous owner used an AT&T DSL connection to supply access to the internet. That wasn’t strong enough for us, so we switched over to a 1G connection through Comcast. It worked well for us. It powered our connection to Dentrix Ascend, enabled our transition to VOIP phones (powered through a local service provider), and allowed us to install a smart TV through which I stream The Masters and March Madness during business hours. Like I said, it worked great.

But of course, through my deep desire to change things for the sake of changing things (in addition to a non-trivial reduction in overall fees we pay for these services), I decided to consolidate all of our voice and internet services under one umbrella administered by Comcast. This meant the following: (1) upgrading our existing 1G internet connection to a 1.25G connection; (2) transitioning our VOIP services from the local service provider to Comcast Business Voice Edge; (3) transitioning our mobile phone services from AT&T to Comcast Mobile with Verizon; and (4) transitioning our e-fax services from a local service provider to Comcast.

At the onset of the transition, I was assigned an overall lead, a program manager, and a bevy of customer support phone numbers I could use to answer any questions I would have along the way.

The 1G -> 1.25G internet connection upgrade was a breeze. A Comcast technician showed up during the allotted window, switched out the box, and helped test the new internet connection. Step 1 complete.

The Elevate -> Comcast Business Voice Edge transition was equally simple. I had a scheduled phone call in which the phone numbers were ported over to the new service and I was given a high level overview of the self service portal through which I setup the Automated Attendant, call routing, recorded greeting messages, voicemail messages, and notifications. The few questions I did have were easily and quickly answered by the customer support teams I was told to call should any questions arise. Step 2 complete.

The AT&T -> Comcast Mobile transition took no time at all. I called the Comcast transition team, provided them the AT&T account and transfer pin information for the two phones. The Comcast team worked their magic in the background. And 10 minutes later our phones were now powered by Verizon e-sim cards as opposed to AT&T e-sim cards. Step 3 complete.

Step 4, unfortunately, has been nowhere near as easy. At the onset of the transition conversations, I was told Comcast has an e-Fax service that I can use (for the purposes of faxing - which is indeed still a thing in the Medical/Dental world). I was under the impression that it would work comparably to the phone transition (i.e. a simple porting over of the number from one service to another). Alas, that was not the case. I found out that the e-fax service is administered by a 3rd party and that I would need to purchase those services. The cost is marginal, but that fact was not made clear at the beginning of the conversation with the Comcast sales lead. But whatever, I’ll pay the $5/month fo the e-fax service. I attempt to self service the purchase through the Comcast E-Solutions website. But I receive an error message. So I call the customer support number to explain the issue. I’m first connected with an E-Solutions sales representative who tells me that we need to get a technical support representative on the line. The technical support representative immediately tells me that this is a sales issue and punts me back to the sales representative. I get a new sales representative on the line who quickly diagnoses the issue as a technical support problem and sends me back over to a technical support representative (despite my explanations and protestations of having gone through this rigmarole already). The technical support representative at least has the courtesy of asking me two additional questions before telling me that I’m not eligible for e-fax services because the internal billing system under which my account is housed at Comcast is not compatible with the 3rd party that administers the e-fax solution. I asked him how I can transition my account to the billing system that is compatible with the 3rd party. He told me that was impossible. I asked him why Comcast isn’t allowing me to buy a service from them and the technical support representative said he wasn’t preventing me from buying their services and then he hung up on me. I’m still working with my Comcast account representative to figure out how to implement an e-fax service. But it’s very likely I’ll have to go pay a different company to do it for me.

When I was working for Health Care Services Corporation, I ran the operations team overseeing enrollment, membership, and billing for the retail market. This market served individuals who paid for their health insurance on their own (not associated with an employer). That meant that those individuals needed a way to pay their premium on a monthly basis. When I took over the team, one of the primary call drivers from our customers (as well as a key driver of dissatisfaction), was how hard it was for them to pay their premium. The technology we used to accept premium payments was so cumbersome, unintuitive, and glitchy that a large number of users just ended up picking up the phone to pay their premium (as well as complain about how hard it was to pay their premium). When I learned about the premium payment process and how hard it was to complete, I worked with our internal technology team as well as external vendors to implement a new payment schema that made it way easier to do something as simple as paying a bill.

The point of all of this is to say that businesses should make it incredibly easy to purchase their services. There should be no roadblocks in between someone looking to buy a service and the business selling the service. I volunteered to move my voice and internet services to comcast. No one sold me on it. It’s like showing up at a casino with a wad of cash, walking up to the blackjack table with open seats, and the dealer telling me that I can’t play because I only have $20 bills and their till can only accept $10 bills. It’s bananas. If you’re a business, make things easy on your customers. Make it as easy as possible.