>>>Our local electric company picks up the phone number and, if it matches an account, asks if that's the one you're calling about. When they're not overloaded (as they were after the ice storm last month), they also do a good job of giving you an update on the status of your outage through the automated system.
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>>The utilities here have picked up the annoying corporate practice of having call centers, so you can be sure the person there has no clue, he has to go through parroted phrases and look at the monitor before he can tell you the time of day. So far so good, didn't have much trouble with them, because the only ones I call are my DSL providers - for the rest, I don't even know the numbers. They still haven't picked the habit of printing that number on the bill. And, amazingly, the outages are either local (we had some serious wind a month ago, five days of between 50 and 90 km/h, depending on the area - no outages at all; big storm with lots of lightning and hundreds of fried modems and more, depending on your vicinity to the discharge - only half a day without power and water, three days without phone, one more day to replace the modem) and they did call back... to my cell phone, so I have the number memorized and it's a local number. Saved that to cut the red tape next time :).
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>Sadly, I do know the electric company's number by heart. Between having too many outages (lots of old trees around here) and tending to call multiple times during an outage, it's etched in my brain along with my childhood best friend's number (which hasn't been used by her family in probably 30 years).
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>The system I was talking about is automated; you don't talk to a person unless your need is very unusual. For reporting outages, I think this is actually a good thing. As I said, they see what your number you're calling from. If it matches an account, they ask and confirm with the house number of the address (that seems to be a common thing here to prevent giving a full address out to someone who might be fishing). If the number doesn't match or you say it's not that number, you enter the phone number and then they confirm with the house number.
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>Once they know the address, they ask a short series of questions to identify the problem. Then, if they know, they tell you how many customers are affected by that outage and how long they think it'll take to fix. On subsequent calls, normally, once they have the house identified, they just tell you how many and when.
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>For reasons I can't begin to comprehend, after an ice storm last month that left over 700,000 customers without power, that last part didn't work. I have to assume they'd turned it off. I'll guess they just weren't in a position to make any kind of accurate estimate, or perhaps they wanted to discourage people from calling for those estimates, since they were getting so many calls. They also have a website where you can check the status of your outage (assuming you have Internet access).
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>>From my US days, in the end I was amazed at Cox's cable internet service (and cable TV perhaps - I wouldn't know, canceled that). The troubleshooter software works on voice recognition, and I think if I wasn't a programmer, I'd give it a pass on the Turing test. Amazing.
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>>On the other end of the spectrum... does Verizon still suck as it always did? They owe me about 16 hours which I spent flattening an ear. Plus some afterwards, which I had to spend rewrinkling it.
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>Verizon does have issues, although after many years of problems with our phone service, they seem to have finally fixed the root cause and we haven't had a phone outage in quite a while, except during that ice storm, which was certainly an exceptional circumstance.
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In this regard I am grateful to live out in the sticks. Until 20 years or so ago this was almost all farmland. When the Chicago overflow pushed this far out (I am about 40 miles from the city) modern electrical infrastructure was put in. No power lines, no old trees. The power has only gone out twice in the 9 years I have lived here. One of the outages was for three days but that was when a transformer station took it in the shorts.