This past week certainly has provided us with some interesting experiences as Aliant business customers. First there was the "line sharing" problem - for some reason, my home phone number was being shared with a completely different line elsewhere in the city. After notifying Aliant tech support on Sunday, the problem was finally fixed on Tuesday. I hadn't bothered switching my home phone to voice-over-IP yet, but I'll definitely reconsider now.

And now, round 2: a member of our staff works remotely in a rural area and uses an Aliant dialup account for internet access. Yesterday the dialup account stopped working; after 15 minutes on the phone with Aliant tech support, it was eventually discovered that the Aliant sales team had deactivated the account for some unspecified reason. Apparently, no one outside the Sales team has access to reactivate the account - and, in a sadly-typical display of Aliant bureacracy, the Sales team is currently on Holiday and won't return until next Tuesday. In other words, we're out of luck until then.

So to summarize what Aliant apparently believes is an acceptable level of service to business clients:

- make no attempt to contact a business client before making major changes to their services
- make the change on the day before a holiday weekend
- don't give anyone else within the company access to reverse the changes
- don't provide the client with any way to fix the problem (or even find out the reason for it) until after a 4-day weekend

Aside from being a ridiculous comedy-of-errors, that is inexcusably-poor customer service - especially to clients who are paying premium fees for supposedly a higher level of quality / reliability.