Today my Internet service goes down. It’s up at 10:30 last night. Come downstairs to work this morning - down at 6:30.
I call Charter, and during my various holds and transfers they politely blare advertisements about how incredibly fast their service is. So much faster than anything else ever. Great thing to hear while my service is down.
Oh, and did you know Charter is X times faster than DSL, and they don’t require a second phone line? Of course, DSL doesn’t require a second phone line, either. But I’m certain many people think it does.
Needless to say, if the wire Charter ran into my house, directly into my cable modem, is bad before it enters the house, Charter will pay. If it is bad inside the house before it enters the modem, I get to pay them for the courtesy of my service being down. Sounds fair to me!
A month ago I called Charter Communications to ask them to split my cable and internet billing. Since I’m working from home, my internet bill should be a write-off. I just wanted to make things very clear for the tax man.
The first time I called, I was put on hold by the agent. Then I was hung up on. The second time I called, I was transferred to “mumble, mumble billing,” since apparently regular billing couldn’t do this difficult work of splitting my bill. Unfortunately, I ended up actually being transferred to “mumble, mumble support.” They asked me why the heck I was transferred to them, to which I said, “How should I know?” Another transfer and I’m hung up on again.
So I hit the online chat support. Spotty response from the representative, but he says “Sure we can do that for you.” I then asked if I can specify the payment options on each bill. I was told to “call my local office” and given the same national 24-hour support 800 number that I previously called. Of course, I said “Sorry, but that number is not my local office.” Response? “Can I help you with anything else?” Thanks.
Get my next bill and everything is on the same bill. I figure it’s time to hoof it to the local office and figure out what’s going on. The local office says “We don’t do that for residential customers.” Now, I’m sort of pissed that they don’t do what I’m asking. Who cares? But I’m really pissed that they lied to me about doing it in the first place. Charter Communications lied to me. I’m soon to be an former Charter customer.
Update: My neighbor has an outage as well. Nice troubleshooting Charter. I hope they try to charge me for a service call when there’s an area outage. That’d be great.
Technorati Tags: Charter, Charter Communications, cable internet, dsl
Comments (4)
I hate Comcast because they took away HD channels that I previously got from Time Warner, and their internet service has been less reliable than TW. But my worst telecom experiences have still been with Sprint and Qwest. They should burn.
Luckily we’ve minimized our services by dropping land-line phone. I’m tempted to get an antenna simply so I can drop the time sink that is calling cable company support.
We had a billing issue with our Sprint cell phone. We called, waited 15 minutes to get a rep, and after initial discussion they put us on hold…and hung up on us. Did they call us back? No. No, the telephone company was not able to realize they hung up and call us back. Clearly they have our number.
Interestingly, when we called back in we got right through to a rep (no 15 minute wait even though the messaging told us it’d be 15 minutes). So their call management system may be smart enough to realize a call was dropped. The second rep was actually more helpful and she got it all figured out rather quickly (and correctly, I might add).
In any case, I absolutely dread calling anyone from phone or cable companies. If I found a company in that arena that provided excellent service, I’d pay 50% more than market value. Of course, ideally I just eliminate the need for said service entirely.
Thanks for this post. I’ve been second guessing my decision to drop charter. This helps a lot.
FCC stands for f### charter communications poor quality outages call centers out of the us and shoddy billing practices cable is old school let it go they were there own worst enemys there employees hate them more than there customers they tell you one thing do another cable companys in general are dieing a slow death R.I.P