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It’s been only a few days since we are finally done with (already famous) skype outage - and here’s another story which reflects how some companies doesn’t quite get it right when it comes to delivering great customers’ experience…

Following recent acquisition by Google, a VOIP company GrandCentral send a note to (apparently) all their customers, saying their “phone number for life” will be replaced within 8 days - no questions asked. If you use the number as your business phone… if you already distributed it to 100s of you friends… doesn’t matter! Your phone number “for life” will needs to be replaced (by another “phone number for WHOLE life” - of course…).

I’m pretty sure (or actually I hope), there’s an important reason for this kind of urgent phone number replacement (Google probably want to get / own as much as they can out of the deal) but did anyone actually thought about what all their GrandCentrals’ customers would think about such (let’s face it) arrogance? After all, if my phone number is actually not for life but just a year, then why not LEAVE the GrandCentral and join some other, more serious VOIP provider?

I’d do that.

And I’m sure its an option that a lot of GrandCentral’s customers is considering now. The interesting question is - how could Google / GrandCentral not know that it might all end up in loosing a big chunk of their customers. Was is actually planned decision - where risk of loosing customers was balanced with profits of moving to new (Google’s?) infrastructure - or was it a technical failure?

UPDATE: seems like the whole number replacement action wasn’t related to Google’s acquisition and it was purely a technical failure. And its not affecting all GrandCentral customers but only few (400) of them. Hmm… The question remains - even if it didn’t affect you, being a GrandCentral customer, would you trust those guys that your number is really “for life”?

Funny thing, today for the first time since couple of years Skype didn’t work for me. It just hanged and couldn’t connect to the P2P network. Funny thing but it was the same case with all my friends and everyone I know (I asked about 5-8 people and they all experienced the same problem). At first we didn’t know what’s happening.. few people were panicking too soon, only to find out its a software problem of skype which is going to be “fixed soon”.

Anyway, what’s even funnier is that I realized that this “incident” was enough for me to look around for some skype replacement - maybe some SIP operator, or anything that actually _works_ 24/7. I realized that my “trust” in skype was very limited. Just like it would be very limited to amazon if it “hanged” for 24h. Or to ebay. Or microsoft. Or anyone really…

I realized, like millions of others, I’m extremely picky and disloyal customer - fail me once, and it might be your last chance. Show me something better which I can use instead of your service, and I will move away for good.