Our Megalink service went out today the hospital - all calls into the centre were ringing busy. I called in to the Bell Business Repair Centre and gave them our information, and when they pulled our account up I was told “oh, you are on Megalink, you need to call the Data Repair Centre”. No problem, and I did just that.

The Data Repair Centre asked me for a circuit ID, which seemed a reasonable enough request except that I was in the phone room, and the file was in my office. I asked if they could look up the account by address, phone number, account number, or any other information. No, they could only use the circuit ID.

After a short sprint back to my office to pull the file I return to the phone, and discover that none of the information on the invoice is of any use to the service desk person I’m speaking with. They can only help if I have one particular number (that’s probably written on the wall someplace among the hundreds of other IDs).

I ended up calling the billing office to get my circuit number so I could get the service call logged. The billing office was helpful and had all the information at their fingertips.

This is a prime example of a poorly designed customer interface. A system should be able to lookup a customer based on whatever information the caller might have, and not be limited to requiring a particular piece of information. More so, you regular communication with the customer should include relevant information that they might need in order to obtain service from you. In this case, a circuit ID on the invoice would help. Allowing multiple departments use different identifiers for a customer is a bad idea.