Learning to love a cable guy

Phone and cable companies are trying harder to please customers because they risk losing them forever.
The New York Times

The story "Learning to love a cable guy" published August 26, 2006 at 8:47 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[WJeansonne]

Verizon Lost Me as Valuable Customer

I tried repeatedly to get them to properly terminate my MSN/Verizon Premium service so that I could get my hotmail account back from them to sign up of Microsoft Live Mail, but they said they couldn't help. Took it all the way up to management, and they were absolutely clueless. They said Microsoft had to do it, and Microsoft said Verizon had to uncouple the hotmail account. So I cut the cord and went to Comcast's Triple Play ($99 a month for one year) and haven't look back since! This is a perfect example of what the author was describing in his article above--the competition is on!

[BeamerMT]

What about the small towns?

It may be nice to have compitition but where i live (town of about 90k), we have ONE phone compnay (Qwest) which resells its phone services to smaller companies (still same junky service) and ONE Cable company (Bresnan). Now i've had both, and Qwest by far is cheaper then Bresnan, having 1.5Mb i-net service for like 26 bucks with a bundled plan, where Bresnan has 8Mb service for 56 bucks or 10 off if you bundle. Now for me, all i care about is internet and if you look, thats a HUGE price difference, but with no compitition, it never will even out because Qwest owns all the lines in town and Bresnan, all the cable. So for those who live in small City/Towns, i think its safe to say that we dont see ANY compitition what so ever.

[edsoliz]

Time Warner isn't even trying

At least not in my neighborhood. I worked with them for a few months, it once got so busy once the IVR crashed. We can have a hundred calls in queue with 1 hour wait times and the managers won't even bat an eyelash...but when a local news station runs a story about their problems you'd think the building was burning down. I'm looking forward to trying AT&T's television service, .

[TooMuchStout]

How many years has cable been around?

They have been installing cable for what, 20+ years now? Yet there is still a 4 or 6 hour time window? You can push people off the phone in 8 minutes but still can't tell me when the cable guy will be here? I have Comcast in Maryland and hate it. I had the service, the company, the repair techs that come to the hosue. Everything about the company I can't stand. Oh, and how about the insane ammount I'm charged for digital cable and internet. I'm bidding my time until FIOS gets here. I bought a house in January 06, had Comcast install a week after we moved in. Since they we have had over 15 techs to the house to figure out what is wrong with our service. Constant tileing, internet dropping connections or sluggish slow speed below dial up even. 15 tech and probably twice as many visits, unbelieveable. I keep them because it is my only choice. I need the internet for school and work. I enjoy several shows on TV and I would rather not miss yet I still drop almost $150 for half ass service and support. I will NEVER go back to Comcast once I have a choice.

[zshuster]

How many years has cable been around?

you are not alone...I don't think Comcast has a clue about how
many dissatified customers are just waiting for a good alternative

[Chevaliermusic]

Also from Maryland

Same beef - similiar problems. I have Directv Television service now. Cheaper overall - but comcast still charges me for 1 TV even though I don't have the cable connected to anything. Incredible. When FIOS arrives - comcast will cease to exist. (Atleast from my POV)

[J_Satch]

Same Story Here...

...in Virginia. Once FIOS comes to my house (if ever), bye bye Comcast.

[jdscardino]

Ditto

I couldn't even begin to describe the situation my family just had with Comcast in Philadelphia. The uplink to Comcast had some faults to it, and the Internet (and onDemand) would drop out on a constant basis.

Getting it fixed? Impossible. Had tech support telling me my BRAND NEW - out of the box - ethernet switch was causing the problems with my Internet connection.

And they want people to sign up for their VoIP service? Which is $20 more expensive than Vonage? God-forbid there's an emergency and I can't use my phone because Comcast's network is having issues.

And digital cable isn't even "digital." I shouldn't be able to see "ghosts" on my screen from the video compression used to carry that many channels over the same wire.

I'm so fed up with cable and especially Comcast you have no idea.

[mxiong]

I wish Canada has more competitions!

I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Here there are several competitors in wirless, two in cable, and two in Internet. But if you want the triple play, you have only one choice - MTS, Manitoba Telecom Services, a provincial crown corporation. So You don't really have c choice, even though MTS' customer services suck big time.

[brian.lee]

Agreed

Bell and Rogers do it in Toronto but in all honesty they both suck. Problem with Canada in general is that there aren't enough people so sustain more than two major companies for broadband, cable, and mobile phone.

[Too Old For IT]

However

They are so gosh-darn polite as they are giving you crappy customer service.

[mjd420nova]

One big point to make

One way to keep the customers happy is to have the individual who answers the phome to be able to answer all the questions, be it phone, cable tv or internet service. Also to have them knowledgable enough to look at a location and determine that a major outage has occured and advice the customer thusly. The scenario is thus: A automobile accident has taken out a telephone pole that has not affected the customers power or phone, but has taken down cable tv and internet service. The ability of the operator to put together a large number of calls coming in from one geographic location could go a long ways to answering the customers question of how long service is going to be interupted. Most often this doesn't happen and on-site service calls are booked when not neccesary.

[techguy83]

response to this

As someone who has worked in the call center field, I know how frustrating it is.

You mention that the tech answering the phone should be able to let the customer know if there is an outage.

However, several times it is not the tech's fault that they cannot do that. I remember sevral times where things like you said happened and we had extremely high call volume about it and we would let management know and then the management would send in the notice and have to wait until a rep went out there to check. Most of the time the rep would just be lazy and say there was no issues.

[Too Old For IT]

... and another thing

Get some customer support that does not asnwer the phone with "Hello my name is Pashi, how is it maybe I can help you today?", and then proceed to read from a script in English so accented that it is impossible to understand.

[BeamerMT]

Small Towns

I know in alot of small towns, they have (according to what i read) started to bring in their own service, mostly faster then what is available from the big companies. I know in my town of 90K, we have Qwest and Bresnan, Qwest for DSL at 1.5Mb with resonable prices and Bresnan doing cable at 8Mb with rather high prices.. as you can see there is a huge difference in Internet speeds alone and with no compitition here it makes Qwest (who owns all the phone lines) preatty much the only thing you can get if you are cost wise.

[Charles58]

Learning....cable guy.

This article doesn't apply to Cablevision. Same old "we are the only game in town" attitude. With less then two weeks til the start of pro footballs season they refuse to carry the NFL channel. Can't wait for Verizon Cable.

[Charles58]

Learning....cable guy.

This article doesn't apply to Cablevision. Same old "we are the only game in town" attitude. With less then two weeks til the start of pro footballs season they refuse to carry the NFL channel. Can't wait for Verizon Cable.

[dougbunger]

Customer Service = Lip Service

The article mentioned the sleeping Comcast repairman in DC and I live in a Maryland suburb of DC where Comast has a new service policy. On the day of the scheduled appointment, the tech calls before arriving. If you miss the call, he cancels the appointment. A dispatcher then calls to reschedule the appointment on another day. Unfortunately, the tech is not required to leave a voice mail, so if you are not sitting next to the phone every second from 8am until noon, there is a huge opportunity to have wasted your day.

On Friday, August 25th, I talked to a guy at Comcast customer servive, who explained that "98% of Comcast customers had requested that this policy be implemented" and that if I didn't like it, I was simply in the 2% that could never be satisfied. He further explained that customers would either learn to stay by their phones during the assigned times, or they would become dissatisfied and move their service over to Verizon. By his interpretation, this would mean that "Verizon will end up with the unreasonable customers" (like me) and Comcast will have the good (compliant-- baa, baa) customers.

Of course, my television is still "down". He finally admitted that the operators had messed up when they told me that I was not allowed to bring the dead digital box into the office for an equipment swap. As such, after 45 minutes on the phone, he gave me a $20 service credit, and permission to come to the office to swap the box on Monday.

The cable and phone companies still have a long way to go before they realize they are no longer monopolies. That's when they will start treating customers as an asset rather than a liability.

[zanzzz]

Customer Service- Just The Icing On The Cake

How nice it is to hear the heart-warming stories of respectible customer service. I would trade that in a minute for what really matters- great product at low cost. Why can't we have real high speed broadband at a fraction of the existing prices which is what most industial societies already enjoy?
It's fine that ISP's in the US are finally addressing the "icing" on the cake now how about giving us a better "cake"?

[zanzzz]

Customer Service- Just The Icing On The Cake

How nice it is to hear the heart-warming stories of respectable customer service. I would trade that in a minute for what really matters- great product at low cost. Why can't we have real high speed broadband at a fraction of the existing prices which is what most industial societies already enjoy?
It's fine that ISP's in the US are finally addressing the "icing" on the cake now how about giving us a better "cake"?

[J_Satch]

The answer is simple...

...within their given markets, the cable and telephone companies are basically monopolies. We could very easily have great service at a low price but where's the incentive for the providers to offer this.

[Too Old For IT]

Time Warner has had the opportunity

... on more than one occasion of obtaining world-class customer support people (me for instance) and has chosen not to do so.