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Revenge of the Cable Customer
crimeandpunishment writes "After years of poor service and poor reception, years of hoping the cable guy shows up sometime within that four-hour window, years of constant price increases ... it may be payback time for cable customers. Cable TV companies are trying to treat customers better. Considering the industry has long had some of the worst customer satsfaction ratings of any industry, it may take a while to overcome that reputation. But they'd better succeed. Cable customers are switching to satellite and phone companies in droves. According to industry research, cable companies lost five million video customers from 2006 to 2009."
It's called replacing cable, satellite and everything else with just the internet.
Because the phone company is known for their warm, friendly, helpful customer service. Can't speak for satellite, but my years with DSL with SBC yielded only marginal support at best.
Time Warner, at least here in north central NC, has been making a concerted effort for the last several years, and actually has pretty darn good service. Their broadband is almost never down. They almost always show up when they say they will, you can get someone on the phone typically within 5 minutes, and the people on their phone support seem to actually know what they are talking about. Yes, they are still too expensive, but service hasn't really been an issue for me. We are moving our business phones and internet access to their business class service as it will save us around $30k a year, so we will see how that works out, but other than price for home service, I'm pretty happy with them.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
My wife and I just purchased a Bluray player that does Netflix, Amazon, and several other on-demand video services. I also installed an HDTV in the attic and ran the signal down to both of our HDTVs. We still have to pay Verizon for internet access, but we no longer have a $100+ video bill every month.
I know where I live, Charter has a monopoly on cable. There isn't much you can do about it; They've got the fastest internet. They charge you 50 dollars cash on the spot to hook up a modem and provision it for you. Hard stuff. The service techs they send to your house are dumb as hell too. They couldn't figure out the crappy interface that their newfangled modem / wifi router had installed on it. I laughed quite a bit after they couldn't figure out how to enable WPA2. Although, in their defense, the admin panel was designed by someone who didn't know what they were doing. So, basically, there is a lot they can improve on.
My favorite is being on the phone with the cable company after the 4-hour window: /slams the receiver.
"Hi, I had an appointment, but nobody came"
"It says here nobody was home."
"Listen to me, I took a day off work, in order to sit here and wait for someone who didn't come. A day I could've used to make a 3-day weekend and go somewhere warm. I certainly was in my god damn house"
"Would you like to reschedule?"
"Can I schedule it so that I don't have to take a full day?"
"We can offer you 12pm-4pm or 11am-3pm"
"Will the technician come this time?"
"The technician will arrive within 30 minutes of the 4-hour window"
"So you mean it's a 5 hour window"
"And you need to be at home"
It had some chick, I had to close the tab and reload without images
I worked for a small(er) cable company 15 years ago, in their community Television department. We covered city council meetings, parades, had several shows about life in Cleveland etc. It has changed ownerships a few times, and is now Time Warner, and I stopped in not to long ago to see if I still knew anybody who worked there.
The entire community TV department had been replaced by more call center lackeys answering angry phone calls, and what was more interesting was the main reception area where people could pay their bills has the customer service reps behind bulletproof glass, and there was an armed guard sitting in there.
If you are doing such bad job servicing your customers needs that you feel you have to protect your employees from customers so angry they might start shooting up the place, maybe, just maybe, you might want to try and improve your customer service a bit...
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Simple. The three plan (Internet, TV, Phone) all worked out to be cheaper and better. I got faster and more importantly, more reliable internet. When I was with cablevision/Optimum Online I would get maybe 5Mbit speeds that would flake out during prime time hours since they were over subscribed. Now I get 20 Mbit consistently, even during peek usage hours. The TV was a better quality image, more channels and more innovative products (Multi room DVR rocks). Phone is nothing exciting, but since we also have cell phones with verizon, we get a small discount for linking all our bills together.
Overall, I got the impression that cablevision simply stopped innovating since they were the only game in town, and they did not care that much about their customers. They sure got a big surprise from Verizon, and they are calling us up every week it seems begging us to come back.
Last month I got sick of my Comcast bill creeping higher and higher without my consent or notification. I cut it. I get my TV over the air and the quality is _better_ because it isn't compressed further to cram more channels into a finite bandwidth. I paid 17 dollars for an antenna and 40 dollars for a distribution amplifier. That's still less than a month's worth of cable TV. I went back to a copper landline for increased reliability and a cheaper price. I get my internet from FiOS to stream netflix and other internet videos. I suddenly find myself with entertainment that is better in quantity, quality, and price. Who needs 900 lousy quality channels all with nothing good on?
The problem isn't when the service men show up to fix a problem -- it's that there's a problem at all. We've had internet outages 20+ times a day since Comcast acquired the local cable company. All they had to do was not touch anything and it would've been fine. But instead, they screwed it up, and have sent people to our house on 4 occasions trying to fix it. They have no idea what the problem is. They don't need help that shows up on time, they need help that can get the job done on the first visit.
As a VERY happy Verizon FiOS customer, I can tell you that cable absolutely has something to worry about. The installer showed up when he said he would, did a good job, and the service is absolutely perfect (and actually came out a few pennies cheaper than the cable company's equivalent triple play).
So it's no surprise that the cable company is running ads that say things like "40% of customers switched back to cable!" (they had to *really* mess with the sample set to get that number) and "we've been using fiber since 1991!" (yeah, fiber to the node, not to my house, and yes, people know the difference).
What's the creepy part? I've become a cheerleader for the phone company. That just blows my mind.
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Yep, the cable operators suck big way.
Back in 2001, when I decided to go for Cogeco, Canada (their reputation was better than others), I didn't believe the mess they made me go through. The installation never happened thanks to time mismatches. And customer care rep had hard time to figure out that I am not going to be home for 24 hours and she needs to give me some scheduled time. That made me finally decide not to go for their service and I told her over phone to cancel the installation with assurance from her that I will not be charged for anything since installation did not go through.
To my horror, after a month I started getting their bills. My calls and explanations made them stop bills, but few weeks later, I started getting calls from some lady looking after Credibility issues demanding me why I haven't paid their bills yet.
I fought back with every evidence I had, discussed with their top guys and sorted it out. But looking at what I have gone through with other operators, I feel Cogeco was far better than other lot. Tells you everything.
hilarious
> I've slashed my Comcast to just internet
Well, me too, but the problem is that where I live they charge the *same damn price* for internet-only as they do for internet + basic cable + VOIP. So my doing this is accomplishing exactly jack shit :-/. It used to be $10/mo cheaper for internet-only, but a few years ago they sent around a nice letter letting me know about their price increase. I called up and bitched heavily, but to no avail.
And it isn't like I have a choice of providers. There is comcast, and, umm.... satellite or dialup.
About a year and a half ago, my Comcast internet service failed for about 12 hours on a Saturday evening, so I called to complain. There was no report of an outage, they lied, but they would make a note of it. The next Saturday it failed again, so I called again. They not only repeated the "no report of any problems" lie, they refused to issue me a credit because this was my first complaint (i.e, they claimed I hadn't called the week before).
So I canceled right then. The first available customer service witch made the process as difficult as possible, and insisted a technician had to come to uninstall the internet modem. Of course, no one ever showed up on the appointed day.
Comcast already had their "on-time or $20 guarantee", but when I called to complain, another Comcast witch not only cackled that wasn't I going to get my $20, but proudly boasted that she wouldn't connect me to one of their fake supervisors, and ha ha, in Illinois there is absolutely no one you can complain to. (I did have fun leading them on retaliatory wild goose chases for their equipment over the next few months).
But wait. There is a punch line.
About two weeks after I'd canceled, I got a form letter from Comcast which, after briefly apologizing for the overnight outages, explained that they were incurred during the process of doubling my area's download speed from 10Mbps to 20Mbps.
Heh. If only they hadn't trained their customer service witches to always lie first.
JERRY: Well, said he was waiting about two hours. Seemed a little put out.
KRAMER: Oh, was he? Was he? I guess the cable man doesn't like to be kept waiting.
JERRY: You don't seem too bothered by it.
KRAMER: You remember what they did to me ten years ago? "Oh, we'll be there in the morning between nine and one", or "We'll be there between two and six"! (quiet anger) And I sat there, hour after hour, without so much as a phone call. Finally, they show up, no apology, tracking mud all over my nice clean floors. (malice) Now, they want me to accommodate them. Well, looks like the shoe's on the other foot, doesn't it?
JERRY: Boy, I've never seen you like this.
KRAMER: Oh, you don't wanna get on my bad side.
When "basic" cable costs $20 or more a month and is basically the same channel lineup you can get OTA, why the heck would you bother subscribing when you can take that first $20 bill payment, get a cheap antenna to hide in your attic, and get crisp, clean HDTV for free.
Since cable availability has been ubiquitous for so long, I always thought that broadcast TV was a dying art; and subsequently that the HDTV rollout was a death-throw or at best an exercise in futility. Now, having canceled my IPTV based cable over a year ago and relying solely on broadcast TV and the internet, I can say that I will have a very hard time ever justifying $50 to $70 a month for cable channels of actual interest.
Suck on that, cable companies.
I hate Charter, our local cable company, with a passion. We still use them for Internet only because we don't really have another choice. As soon as something else becomes available we'll drop them like a hot potato.
I didn't hate them originally... We've been Charter customers for years - basically because that's the only option for cable TV in our town. We had Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) DSL for Internet, and Charter for TV. I wouldn't have changed anything, but we were moving out of town and couldn't get DSL there. Had to switch to Charter Internet.
On the move day we had a call scheduled with Charter.
We had Vonage for phones, so I'd explained to them that they couldn't call that phone number to confirm that somebody was home. I gave them my cell phone number to call.
We waited and waited... Couldn't make as many trips with the U-Haul because somebody had to hang around the house. Nobody ever called. Nobody ever showed up.
Turns out they were calling the disabled Vonage account, instead of my cell phone.
We scheduled a second call... Made sure they had the cell phone on record... Took out the Vonage number entirely...
They showed up this time. But then they decided that we were actually some previous owner who'd failed to pay some bills. So instead of hooking up our Internet (the TV was already working for some reason) they turned off our TV.
We had to go down to the local Charter offices with various forms of ID to prove that we weren't actually that previous owner who'd failed to pay the bills. Then we got another install date scheduled. And they actually showed up to install things - about a month after we'd moved at this point.
And since we used Vonage for our phones, we were without phones (besides my cell) for that month.
Since that time we've had an assortment of issues. It's horribly unreliable. So much so that we gave up on Vonage and got everyone cell phones.
And the prices keep going up. Eventually we dropped them for TV and went with DirecTV.
The Internet performance is crap. When I call technical support I have to use my old cell phone number to look up the account, because they can't manage to update their records. Their technicians aren't even in the same state as me, so they never know if we're having issues in the local area or not. They just want me to reboot my modem - over and over again. And then they tell me that my wireless is bad, when I don't have any wireless, and try to sell me an upgrade.
Seriously, I will drop Charter Internet as soon as it is possible.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
I pay an extra $10/mo because [my cable Internet is] not part of a bundle
Where I live, Comcast charges an extra $17/mo, which comes dangerously close to the price of lifeline cable.
I take the money I'm saving and buy shows a-la-carte on the xbox 360 or apple tv.
Can you get sports that way?
I've been trying to explain this to my girlfriend for a while, I have a good grasp but can't explain in a way that makes sense, so if someone else can help I'd appreciate it.
Cable companies suck, they know they suck. Wouldn't they try to build customers by giving decent service? I understand the idea of cutting costs, but if a service person has to come out anyway you're not saving anything by scheduling poorly. You have a list of service calls for the day, an estimated time to fix each, and a truck with just about everything the guy will need.
Simple scheduling where you arrange the visits in a reasonabl order (going out of town or coming in, not going back and forth) should be able to give you a 2 hour window maximum, without the 30 minute +/- on the outside. Even if you have to get a confirmation from the national service hotline and then an actual schedule from the local office, this is very basic stuff. You're sending someone out, you're scheduling a number of hours for the guy to work, this is known in advance. If the guy finishes a call early, moves on the the next house early, and the customer isn't there, you're actually costing real money by visiting and then having to re-schedule. From a business perspective, I would want to minimize costs by making sure the visits happen, and if one of the guys has a large number of "person not home" visits, I'd start putting a GPS recorder in the van.
So why did it get to this point? What business driver is there to make people wait and take off time and re-schedule? It's been a joke for years, enough that by the time of the Seinfeld episode everyone just nodded and said yep I know what you mean. Even if they haven't had to wait they've heard stories because their coworkers had to be off.
In other words, why would the business sabotage itself in this manner, in a way that doesn't give them any advantage? Obviously choosing the right people to hire is important, as is making sure they do what they are supposed to - but this is part of any job, any industry where you can't stand right over the people and watch over their shoulder. Normally, the CEO makes decisions for the short term so they can exercise their stock options and then cash out, but this isn't even a short-term strategy. This is intentionally running the business into the ground.
From the free market perspective, most people haven't had options and are only just now beginning to be able to switch to something else. So is it just apathy due to knowing they have the only option available for most people? If so, why wouldn't you future-proof your customers by treating them correctly? How does this help your business?
We're talking about cable television, not cable internet.
Except you can't get cable internet without cable television unless you pay a "line fee" that in some cases equals the price of lifeline cable television.
While living in my last apartment I had SpeakEasy DSL which was my only connection to the outside world, because of some weird local (Houston) ordinance that parceled out cable service monopolies to multi-tenant buildings to a handful of local cableco's who survived entirely on gouging apartment customers and didn't even bother advertising their service to people with a choice (house dwellers). If I wanted TV type entertainment torrents and usenet downloads served my needs just fine, would be even easier today with Hulu, Netflix instant and Amazon VOD but I digress.
After renting a house and moving in with my GF we had to cancel SpeakEasy because we were too far from the CO and ended up on Time Warner. At the time their service was actually really good overall. The tech showed up in the middle of this four hour window and we were online within an hour. Couple times we had problems they were cleared up pretty quick. Internet service was almost as good as SpeakEasy, speed was fine, reliability was a little better but no static IP options and the uplink speed was too slow for running a server. Overall though life was good in cable tv land. Then they did that weird switcheroo with Comcast and it all went to hell. Within about a year everything started to go to crap. TV service got worse when comcast "upgraded" to their branded interactive guide service which was slow as hell to update, put in a worse and more expensive VOD feature. Internet stayed OK at first but then we had a really bad month when we were out for over a week due to a botched network upgrade on their end. They wouldn't admit that it was a network wide problem though and didn't mention a big outage on their telephone support line voicemail system but hold times were so bad they were rolling the tech support queue over to accounting (WTF?!) after an hour just to get a live person on the line which was worse because they had no information and no ability to help.
What finally pushed me over the edge was maybe a month after the huge outage when internet service crapped out again. Ten minutes of poking around on my part and I realized our modem had just lost it's provisioning because we had a solid connection but our IP had changed network routing was restricted to a private IP pool. Plugged a laptop directly into the modem and found too that DNS was being hijacked to a webapp for the installer to use to provision the modem. Should be an easy fix for phone support. First I spent an hour on the phone with a tech that not only ran though the while reboot and check that your cables are plugged in bullshit but also suggested I upgrade flash if I was having problems with internet video. After that she told me she would open a case with a higher support team. She gave me a case number and told me I'd be contacted within three days. On the fourth day of no service and no callback I got on the phone again and when I finally got through was told no such case number existed and was in fact in the wrong format for their ticketing system to begin with.
After screaming for a minute and going through the same scripted bullshit I was finally given to tier two support. She was more helpful but insisted on trying her own thing and kept assuming the problem was on my end. Every ten minutes of not making progress I'd beg her to reprovision the fucking modem but she kept insisting there was no record of my modem being moved into unprovisioned space. After a solid hour she setup a conference call with a network engineer and then fucked up the three way call and disconnected all of us. Per normal crappy tech support farms she had no direct call back number and had no ability to call out on her line. So back in the queue I went. Finally I got a support goober that just did what I told her and had her boss reprovision the modem - big surprise that solved all my problems.
Shortly after that we got a flier annoucing that AT&T was rolling out U-Verse service to our neighborhood and we signed up within the first week of availability. Tech came out on time and
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Rant mode on, but it's on topic.
I live in the UK. I used to get cable internet service from Virgin Media (the only cable provider in the country, because they bought up all the others). I would *love* to have had the quality of service that you guys above are complaining about from Comcast et al.
Understand that Virgin Media works great until it breaks. Up to 50Mbps wherever you are, low latency, dropouts rare. When it breaks though, getting it fixed is a nightmare. And it *will* break. They don't keep track of what models of modems they've given people; they never send existing customers new hardware to replace obsolete models; they change the wire protocols without notice; they push broken firmware updates.
Tech support is outsourced to India. It's manned 24-7, but wait time is at least half an hour at all times. The "people" at the other end of that phone line are barely more sentient than M-x doctor. Diverge from their script, even the tiniest bit, and they'll tell you you're not supported and hang up on you. To get through their script, you must either lie to them or unplug every single piece of gear you have except for a Windows PC connected directly to your cable modem. You then spend half an hour having them tell you to unplug and re-plug all the connectors and reboot it five times. At the end of their script there's still a 50% chance that they'll tell you your PC must be broken and just hang up on you, rather than agree to do anything about it at all.
If you're lucky, you'll get sent an "engineer". He won't have a 4 hour window of arrival -- oh no, it's all day, any time between 8am and 6pm, and his best trick is arriving at 9am THE FOLLOWING MORNING. When he arrives, he's woefully underprepared, with only about a third of the equipment he ought to have (he will complain about this). He will fiddle with your modem, attach a meter contraption to the cable, and possibly change the little widget they fit inline with the cable to make up for the signal strength being too high. If you're unlucky and this does not work, he'll spend a few minutes using *your* phone to ring someone and explain to them that he doesn't understand what's going on, he'll noncommittally say "they'll look into it", and he'll leave. If you want to chase up (and thence have a hope that they'll sort things out), it's back on the phone to India, but the goon at the other end doesn't seem to understand the concept of records -- so you're back to square one!
Last year I was unlucky, and had a problem that was slightly non trivial. I counted. After three visits by these "engineers", SEVEN hours on the phone to India, one whole week waiting for second level support to ring back -- and they rang while I had something on the boil on the kitchen, I asked them to call me back in ten minutes, I never heard from them again -- they still had no idea what was wrong. After a month of no service despite constant chasing I rang the sales line, and cancelled, and told them precisely why. My call got escalated immediately, and the manager offered to send along one of the engineers who handle their much more expensive business service to take a look, but in a further two weeks' time; I cancelled my contract anyway, but accepted the engineer appointment since it was free.
Seven weeks after my connection had originally broken, and one week after I had DSL fitted -- slow, but with real support (www.aaisp.net.uk -- they're very good) -- the proper engineer arrived, picked up my cable modem, fiddled with it for a couple of minutes, and said "yeah, there's a return path fault on the modem. I can replace it if you'd like." I spent some time staring at him open mouthed before I managed to explain to him why I wouldn't like him to do that. I think he was pretty shocked at the quality of service I'd received.
Never, ever, ever use Virgin Media.
.. just ask The Hammer how it's done.
Comcast's customer service is so bad they drove a 75 year old lady to taking a hammer to the local office.
End of line..
As far as I can tell; no TV service provider makes a DVR as awesome as my MythTV box. Once you've got automatic commercial skip -- you never want to go back. Naturally, this means I only get OTA local channels; but there just isn't enough decent programming on cable or satellite to take me away from automagic commercial skipping. For the few non-OTA shows I do want to watch (SCIFI stuff mostly) -- I use hulu. I've had this setup now for about 4 years and have saved a ton of dough.
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you might think that with the arrival of "new competition" (bell getting into tv, various cable companies getting into residential phone, etc.) we might be able to get better deals & service... ...well, no. not a chance. rates & service still suck and are getting worse (bell canada offshoring customer service to india, etc.) in cable, telephone, cell phone, internet... etc.
my best chance right now for "improved customer service" is to look into ota hdtv, but for now, "outlook hazy, better chance next time" (i live in the ottawa region, which sucks for ota hdtv).
whilst people in the us complain tv / radio / cell phones, they don't know how good they have it compared to canada.
I work for a small cable carrier with roughly 8,000 subscribers. Competing with Dish and Direct TV is a nightmare for the cable industry as a whole. Satellite providers are not regulated in the same way as cable providers despite offering the same product to the end user.
Our area is roughly 40% retired old white people and 40% Hispanic. The FCC prohibits a cable carrier from offering a $20 package with just Spanish language channels like Dish Latino. Instead, we must first sell a customer a basic and an expanded basic package before allowing the customer to buy any kind of premium or special interest tier. When you throw in all the national networks that are only sold by the package to the cable company, we can't be competitive.
For instance, we have a very small population that actually cares about MTV or VH1, but we can't offer Nick which is very popular without the first two. ESPN is one of the worst. Roughly $4 of your monthly cable bill goes straight to that one channel. But, to carry ESPN the cable company and eventually the customer are required to buy the other ESPN channels like ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPNews, etc. at $0.50-$1.00 each
I'm not going to say cable companies are a misunderstood hero, but article in the OP barely scratches the surface of the issues.
It's EVIL!! I'm pretty sure I saw the word "Comcast" embossed on that piece of carbon-ized Evil at the end of Time Bandits. I do hate them so.