Helping a friend set up his new 20″ iMac at his house yesterday, we had occasion to call SBC Yahoo!, his internet service provider (ISP), to collect some technical details and verify the correct settings for accessing the e-mail account that goes with the service.
I resisted calling them until I couldn’t think of anything else to do, because my experience with large ISP’s technical support is that it is universally abysmal. But now I have to retract that, because we got through to a tech almost immediately (less than 2 minutes from dialing), and Gail was friendly, helpful, and extremely competent.
My usual experience is you wade through the phone tree and then hold for 20 minutes, only to have someone reading a script tell you to power cycle your Xmas tree lights. In this case, Gail answered all of our questions quickly, specifically, and correctly, before my usual hold time was up.
PacBell’s DSL experience used to be terrible, so something more than just changing their name (to SBC) has happened to improve the service — probably the influence of Yahoo!. If you’re thinking about getting broadband internet service, the SBC Yahoo! pricing is excellent, and I can definitely endorse their tech support.