Aliant Rocks

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything good about [[Aliant]]. Have I ever? But today I had a very good Aliant customer service experience, so it’s only fair and just that I relate it.

I’m going away for a few days, and I wanted to forward all the incoming calls to our home phone over to the business line so that my messages would go to my email, not to the standalone answering machine we have at home. But we didn’t have “call forwarding” on our line.

So I called Aliant (on a Saturday, no less) and ended up speaking to a woman who was, without a doubt, one of the best customer service people I’ve ever spoken to. Not only was she extremely helpful, with no trace whatsoever of the old school Island Tel “we’re the phone company” attitude, but she also figured out a way of putting the feature on our line for free.

The only quirk in the system was that once she’d done the programming required all she could tell me was that the change might take place immediately, or it might take up to 24 hours. Which is a pretty big window. As it happens, it did take place immediately, and so if you call me at home, you’ll get my robotic agent at the office answering your call.

Oh, and one more thing: if you haven’t taken a look at Aliant’s website recently, and you’re a customer, it’s worth a visit: they’ve got tools in place now to let you do everything from paying your bill to adding new features to previewing what your white pages listing is going to look like. Perhaps this is standard-issue stuff in the telephone company world these days, but for Aliant it seems quite novel given their history of a curmudgeonly attitude towards the web.