Eltopia's Technicians: When Corporate Communication Breaks Down

Gary North

Dec. 24, 2010

Two days ago, I discovered that the Website at Eltopia, my ISP service, has a major glitch. The company offers a service, TheOfficeNet Accounts. I have no idea what this service is. It does not matter. It is blocked.

The company has not renewed its SSL certificate. So, when you click the link, https://office.sslisp.com/custinfo/login.asp, you get this message:

There is a problem with this website's security certificate. The security certificate presented by this website has expired or is not yet valid.

Security certificate problems may indicate an attempt to fool you or intercept any data you send to the server.

We recommend that you close this webpage and do not continue to this website.

Click here to close this webpage.

Continue to this website (not recommended).

More information

If you arrived at this page by clicking a link, check the website address in the address bar to be sure that it is the address you were expecting. When going to a website with an address such as https://example.com, try adding the 'www' to the address, https://www.example.com.

If you choose to ignore this error and continue, do not enter private information into the website.

For more information, see "Certificate Errors" in Internet Explorer Help.

This message is guaranteed to kill sales.

I phoned Eltopia's Customer Service department early in the morning of December 22. Nobody was there. (All Customer Service should be 24x7 in a company that provides 24x7 services, as an ISP does.) So, I warned them on their voice mail. Result: nothing. Nobody in Customer Support bothered to warn the suits.

Or -- could it be? -- the person contacted in management said, "Who cares? It's only money." Doubtful.

Managers do not structure payments to Customer Service to gain the cooperation of Customer Service. So, Customer Service people pursue their own self-interest: do as little as possible for salary received. The consumers know there is a problem, but they can't do anything about it. Senior management in America is simply blind to the problem. Service gets worse because of this.