Random: TiVo's Customer Service, Archaio

Original date: May 30, 2006 10:30 PM by sonnik

I was just watching the local Fox affiliate's local newscast. They had an interesting story about a company called Archaio.

Apparently, Archaio specializes in digitizing blueprints. While the company seems to focus on a number of applications, the televised story focused on rescue or emergency situations. (Of course, in true local news style, they found a way to tie in a plug for Fox's '24'.) Their software is to blueprints as what OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is to text documents. The software apparently gives a real-time three dimensional rendering; with additional information such as calculated distance.

Back in February, there was a hostage situation here in downtown Phoenix. Apparently a representative from Archaio was in the very same building a few hours earlier pitching the virtues of the software as it applies to emergency situations.

Customer Service: The other day I was cleaning house on monthly subscriptions, making sure I wasn't paying monthly fees on services I wasn't using. I canceled TiVo and Sirius (opting for only XM Satellite Radio), and an old web hosting service, among others.

I recently switched from Cox to DirecTV service. I found one of the remaining DirectTV TiVo units at an online retailer and activated that. Having been accustomed to TiVo's service, I likely wouldn't be satisfied with DirecTV's R15 DVR service. Anyway, when I called TiVo, I was very impressed with their customer service. They had short hold times and competent clear-English speaking representatives. They offered an automated poll at the end of call, apparently in effort to continue this level of service.

I tried Sirius at the end of last year; I've been a big fan of XM Satellite Radio since shortly after they launched their first satellite. I opted to try the two side by side for a few months with all the Howard Stern hype. I've opted that XM's content suits my style more. Sirius's customer service was still good, but the representative didn't seem fully confident of herself. They put my radio into a "demo mode" for thirty days, in an effort to get me to give them a second chance. They also tried to offer a poll, but it didn't seem to work. Overall, I'd rate the customer service at "acceptable".

Finally, as I mentioned in this post I was a little sore with my old web hosting provider. They apologized for the unannounced migration, and tried to offer me free service. In my opinion, unannounced changes to a server are unacceptable. I had to spend three or four hours fighting for access to my Movable Type administration and trying to retain all my content.