A New York home business owner loses connection with customers.
Will you be next?
by Michael Alesko
Alternatives to AOL
Here are ways to avoid the
headache caused by the traffic jam on America Online. They are offered by
Dr. Patricia Morreale, a director of the Stevens Institute of Technology
Advanced Telecommunications Institute in Hoboken, N.J.
* Get a new Internet provider and set up an e-mail forwarding address that
can follow you from provider to provider perpetually.
* Register a domain name to further enhance your forwardability.
* Consult the O'Reilly & Associates Internet guides for good information
on navigating the web and using e-mail, and for tips on how to self-enable
your e-mail forwarding if your provider won't help you.
* Maintain at least a couple of e-mail accounts as backups to each other.
* If you're an Internet-dependent business, have a contract with your provider
that guarantees service and provides for restitution if the provider causes
a business loss.
* Obtain insurance that covers loss of business due to Internet access problems.
* Explore possible tax deductions tied to your access impacts, such as unanticipated
costs of doing business to fulfill a legal obligation. |
Analysts look at it variously as a technology, management, ethical or legal
issue. What-ever else it is, the recent America Online logjam surely emerged
as an acute migraine headache for members who are part of the nation's technology-reliant
home-based workforce.
Home businesses rely on online services for e-mail and general Internet
and World Wide Web access. Many online services host web sites through which
home business owners sell and market their products or services. With even
a single project interrupted or sale lost because they can't get online,
the potential for serious business loss looms large.
Just ask Peter Masse. An AOL user for four years, he operates Sensible Business
Systems, a Cortland, N.Y., home-based enterprise that markets accounting
software to colleges and other organizations. He hosts a web site on AOL
that he uses for order placing; he uses his AOL e-mail address as a customer
service line; and he communicates via AOL e-mail with partners in four other
states. He reports severe interruptions on each of these fronts.
"AOL is taking a small business person like me who has come to depend
on them and has thrown a big curve at them. So what if they are promising
refunds? Big deal. That doesn't make up for the inconvenience to me and
my customers.
"I have one college waiting for a proposal as we speak. I really need
to communicate with them by e-mail to complete it. What am I supposed to
do?"
AOL's congestion cost him $500 in out-of-pocket expenses for new marketing
materials after signing on with another provider, Masse said.
"The big cost has been the extra time I have to to spend staying in
touch with my customers who rely on us for technical support. Looked at
this way, I have lost numerous hours that I could have been billing other
customers."
As a temporary and partial fix, Masse has acquired a second e-mail address
from a local provider. He uses it to respond to customer service inquiries
coming in through his AOL address.
"But even with this, I'm often unable to download the incoming inquiries
for a day or two, so I'm still not looking very responsive." Neither
can he just drop AOL, he says, as he has many clients relying on his e-mail
address and web site there.
Masse isn't the only home business to go through the headaches of the AOL
fiasco. And, according to industry experts, he won't be the last. Observers
say AOL's problems are symptomatic of larger issues in the exploding online
communications arena -- not just a passing blip on the screen caused by
one provider's one-time failure to prepare itself for unexpected service.
The good news, they say, is that there are a number of remedies for the
headaches. Some are immediate, hands-on solutions that users can largely
self-direct; others will involve providers' willingness to get their act
together and respond to burgeoning consumer complaints.
"America Online has the most visible and widely covered problems right
now, but they are far from the only one," says Thomas Petzinger Jr.,
a columnist for The Wall Street Journal who recently took on AOL
for its ethical lapses in promoting service it couldn't deliver. Petzinger
received more than 600 e-mail responses to his AOL critique.
"I heard complaints about many other Internet service providers having
problems keeping up with their demands, including all the major providers."
Dennis Cagan, president of Software.Com in Santa Barbara, Calif., says online
services and Internet providers underestimated the need for an extremely
reliable system. "They've skimped, not expecting reliability to become
a differentiater. But for a while at least, it will be. They're going to
have to make those investments."
For the University of Rochester's Dr. Ravi Kalakota, author of three books
on electronic commerce, the issue -- and the solution -- is one of responsibility.
"There is a whole chain of people involved in your electronic message
getting through. Nobody takes responsibility for the lost message.You enter
at your own risk. So when you sign up with a provider, talk to them about
taking responsibility. Force the issue. And count on getting some interesting
answers."
TOP |
