Every carrier proposal promises a dedicated account manager. Twenty-three years in, I've never seen that promise survive an outage. Here's what's behind it - and the five questions that expose it.
By Jonathan Eubanks · June 5, 2026 · 9 min read
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By Jonathan Eubanks, Buckeye Telecom · June 5, 2026 · 9 min read
Somewhere in every carrier proposal — usually page two, right after the logo wall — there’s a line that says you’ll get a dedicated account manager. A single point of contact. Someone who knows your business. A name and a cell number.
I’ve been in Ohio telecom for twenty-three years. I have read hundreds of those proposals. I have never once — not one time — seen that promise survive contact with an actual outage.
This week I posted a short version of this on LinkedIn and the replies filled up with the same story told fifteen different ways: the account manager who was great for the first ninety days and then stopped answering. The “dedicated” line that routes to a national queue. The escalation contact who left the company eight months ago and whose name is still on the support page.
So let’s take the long version apart. What the promise actually means, why it stays broken, and how to know what you’re really buying before you sign.
Here is the part nobody puts in the proposal: your dedicated account manager is a salesperson.
They carry a quota. They are measured on new bookings and upsells — not on your ticket times, not on your uptime, not on whether your January outage got resolved in an hour or a day. The moment your signature dries, the comp plan points them at the next signature. That’s not a character flaw. It’s the job description.
The math makes it worse. At most national carriers, a mid-market account manager carries somewhere between 150 and 400 accounts. If yours carries 300 and works 50 weeks a year, you are entitled — mathematically — to about four hours of their year. That’s the “dedicated” part.
And then there’s turnover. Carrier sales floors run on a tournament comp model, and the people who don’t win leave. Practically, that means the account manager who promised you the cell number is unlikely to be in the seat by the time your renewal comes around. The new one will not know your business. You’ll train them, they’ll leave, and you’ll train the next one. I’ve watched customers run that loop four times inside one 36-month term.
When something breaks, the account manager isn’t who answers. The queue answers.
The queue is having a rough decade. Average handle times at telecom contact centers are running eight to ten minutes in 2026 — and that’s handle time, after you’ve waited. J.D. Power’s most recent customer-care study showed satisfaction falling for the first time in years, right in the middle of every carrier’s “AI-powered support transformation.” Billing disputes alone make up nearly half of telecom complaints, and complaint volumes are climbing by double digits year over year.
You can see the result in the subscriber numbers. Charter lost another 120,000 internet customers in the first quarter of this year. The interesting part is what didn’t drop: commercial revenue went up. Businesses stay after households leave — not because the service is better, but because leaving is harder when you have locations, circuits, and contracts stacked on top of each other. The carriers know that. Retention by friction is a strategy, and it works.
So the real support model at scale is this: a queue for the problem, a salesperson for the renewal, and friction for everything in between.
Every multi-location business eventually runs the same experiment, usually involuntarily. A circuit drops at 2 a.m. — a distribution center, a clinic, a restaurant group’s POS, doesn’t matter. Someone calls the number on the support page.
Here’s what the next four hours look like at a big carrier: an IVR tree, a tier-one script (“have you power-cycled the modem?”), a ticket number, a four-hour callback window, and — my personal favorite — a dispatch scheduled for a window two days out, for a circuit that is down now. If you ask for the dedicated account manager at 2 a.m., you get voicemail. They’re asleep. They’re in sales. This was never their problem to solve.
I’m not telling you this to dunk on the people in the queue. Tier-one agents are doing exactly what their scripts and metrics tell them to do. The problem is structural: support is a cost center at every big carrier, and cost centers get minimized. Your outage is a line item to be handled at the lowest possible cost per contact. Nobody in that chain is paid more if your business comes back online faster.
Three reasons, and none of them are fixable from inside a big carrier.
The incentives point the wrong way. Carriers make money on circuits, not on service. Support quality doesn’t show up on the revenue line, so it gets funded like it doesn’t matter — because to the income statement, it doesn’t. Every dollar taken out of support drops straight to margin, and the churn it causes shows up quarters later, somewhere else, as somebody else’s problem.
The scale is the product. A national carrier’s pitch is reach — every market, every lit building. But the same scale that gives them the footprint makes individual accounts statistically invisible. A 12-site Ohio company is a rounding error inside a 29-million-customer book. You can’t be a rounding error and a priority at the same time.
Nobody owns the relationship. The account manager owns the quota. The queue owns the ticket. The carrier’s NOC owns the network. The billing department owns the invoice — and won’t talk to any of the first three. When something goes wrong that crosses two of those boxes (and the expensive problems always cross two boxes), there is literally no person inside the carrier whose job is your outcome.
A free Buckeye stack audit maps your escalation gaps, your SLA reality, and your renewal exposure on one page — every circuit, every contract, every “dedicated” promise tested against what’s actually in writing. We don’t resell a single carrier’s product line, so the answer is shaped by what’s true, not by what’s on quota.
If you’re evaluating a carrier or sitting on a renewal, ask these five questions in writing and watch what comes back.
1. “Name the escalation path.” Not a process — names. Who do I call after tier one, who after that, and what are their response commitments? If the answer is a diagram with no names on it, the names don’t exist.
2. “What happens to my account manager’s comp if my service goes down?” The honest answer is “nothing.” Make them say it. It reframes the entire conversation.
3. “How many accounts does my account manager carry?” They may not tell you. The refusal is the answer.
4. “Show me the SLA credits actually paid out last year.” Every carrier waves an SLA. Almost nobody automatically pays the credits — most contracts make you file for them, within a window, with documentation. An SLA you have to chase isn’t a guarantee. It’s a coupon.
5. “Who answers at 2 a.m., and where are they?” Then — and this is the important part — test it before you sign. Call the support line at night. Time it. You’re about to commit 36 months to whatever picks up.
Quick win: You don’t have to wait for a renewal to run this test. Call your current carrier’s “dedicated” support line tonight after 10 p.m. with a routine question. Start a stopwatch when you dial. Note how long until you reach a human who can actually see your account. That number is your real support plan — not the one in the proposal. The whole test costs you fifteen minutes, and you’ll never read a carrier proposal the same way again.
I’m obviously not neutral here — supporting multi-location businesses is the business my family built. But the model difference is simple enough to state plainly, and you can hold any partner (including us) to it.
Real support means the person who picks up the phone has answered it before — same person, same business, last quarter and next quarter. It means somebody is paid on the relationship, not the transaction: at Buckeye, the carriers pay us a residual on the circuits we manage whether you came to us or went direct, which means our entire incentive is keeping your stack working for as long as you’ll keep us. The full explanation of how we get paid fits on one page, because it’s simple.
It means when the 2 a.m. call happens, the person who answers already knows your sites, your circuits, and which carrier’s NOC to lean on — and leans on them with the weight of hundreds of accounts’ worth of business, not one. That’s the part a single business can’t replicate on its own: a carrier can ignore one customer’s ticket. They can’t ignore the partner who controls a book of them.
None of that is exotic. It’s just what “account manager” was supposed to mean before the comp plans got to it.
The dedicated account manager in the proposal isn’t a lie, exactly. The person exists. The dedication doesn’t — because nothing in the structure behind them is built to deliver it. The queue is the product. The salesperson is the wrapper.
You don’t have to accept that as the cost of doing business. Ask the five questions. Run the 2 a.m. test. And if the answers come back the way they usually do, remember that the alternative isn’t going without support — it’s getting it from someone whose entire business model collapses if they stop answering your calls.
Mine has been answering them for twenty-three years. Call +1 (614) 224-2003 — you’ll see what I mean.
— Jonathan
Looking for help with this? See our page on managed IT & business phone for Ohio businesses.
Jonathan founded Buckeye Telecom in 2003 after years in the Columbus telecom industry — first at 5-Star distributors learning the carrier side, then carrying his own quota in telecom sales. He still works directly with clients — backed by the Buckeye team.
Talk to the Buckeye team — the owner is involved in every engagement, and there’s no advisory fee.
Prefer to talk now? Call or text 614-224-2003.