How's the customer service from your cable or satellite provider?

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by PaulKTF, May 29, 2015.

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  1. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    Who's your cable or satellite provider and how is their customer service in your experiences? I'm particularly interested in hearing from people in the U.S.

    I have Time Warner Cable and i have to say that their customer support has been excellent over the past few months (much to my shock and surprise). They've been remarkably helpful in dealing with issues and getting problems resolved.
     
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  2. PHILLYQ

    PHILLYQ Forum Resident

    Location:
    Brooklyn NY
    My service is so good I haven't had to contact them at all. Couple minor problems that I was able to resolve by rebooting. I have Verizon FIOS.
     
  3. PHILLYQ

    PHILLYQ Forum Resident

    Location:
    Brooklyn NY
    The uptick in service for you may be due to their desire to merge. The FCC has not looked kindly on cable/ISPs looking to merge with lots of customer complaints.
    I used to be a subscriber of Cablevision and service was terrible, took 30 minutes just to get a human on the line. The FCC got lots of complaints, they leaned on Cablevision and service improved drastically.
     
  4. My provider, Comcast, has so-so customer service. If something goes wrong I am first confronted by a multi level automated phone system that has never, ever, not even once been able to help me with my issue. All the "options" relate to other things. When I do eventually get to a person I am transferred multiple times before I reach someone who actually listens to my issue rather than trying to placate me with something that is not going to fix my issue.
    When they have had to make a home visit they usually arrive with an attitude, the last guy was really good however. The service tech looks sloppy, acts put out for being there, does not listen to the issue and thus spends a LOT of time searching for non-issues only to eventually find I told them right from the get go where to begin searching. If I have a issue with their equipment I am asked to deliver it to the station for replacement rather than them delivering proper working equipment to my house. When I get to the station the people working there are on auto pilot. They reply in a dead pan manner with platitudes and non-answers. They simply swap out the good for the bad and can not understand that you may have a question or two about the exchange or about the new equipment, "you can go on-line to find that out" is spoken freely there. There is ONE guy there, a HUGE (looks like a football lineman) guy who is quite knowledgeable, friendly, and willing to help. He actually is proactive and gives rather than waiting to answer. The last guy who was at my house was the one mentioned earlier as good. He was well dressed, well spoken, polite, knowledgeable, helpful, friendly and knew what he was doing. He actually saved my Comcast relationship for if this guy had been poor I would have someone different to do business with. The reason I say so-so service stems from them providing the bare minimum to keep the equipment working. The guy does show up but he usually sucks. The equipment does usually work but it also gives more trouble than is should and is difficult to remedy. The actual feed is often times compromised for hours/days due to nothing apparent. When service is restored there is no reason, explanation, or alteration in fees for services "purchased" but unable to use.
    Comcast is scraping by with the bare minimum and they seem to be okay with that.
     
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  5. AJH

    AJH Senior Member

    Location:
    PA Northern Tier
    We have Directv and when I had to call customer service I found it to be quite good- they were very responsive to my needs.
     
  6. rhubarb9999

    rhubarb9999 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Atlanta, GA
    I have had Directv non-stop since 1997. Anytime I call service they kiss my butt as soon as they see how old my account number is.
     
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  7. Coricama

    Coricama Classic Rocker

    Location:
    Marietta, GA
    I've had DirecTV for several years and they have always had excellent customer service. Plus they have the NFL package. I would jump ship if they lose that no matter how good their customer service is. How many days to kick off now?
     
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  8. Jerryb

    Jerryb Senior Member

    Location:
    New Jersey
    Verizon-excellent.
     
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  9. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
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  10. wwaldmanfan

    wwaldmanfan Born In The 50's

    Location:
    NJ
    I have Comcast. The picture quality is inferior to Verizon FiOS and Cablevision, but those services are not available to me. There's a thousand channels, but only 75 commercial-free movie channels. Out of those, the majority have a shrunken, or letterbox picture, which I don't understand, because the aspect ratio on most of those is the same as a full 16:9 TV screen. Is this something with bandwidth limitations?

    The phone service is almost useless. You can have two lines, but if a call comes in on a busy line, it can't switch over and ring on the open line. I've had this feature on my 2 land lines with Verizon for decades.

    The Comcast internet service is pretty good. I get 125 mb/s download speed on Ethernet.

    Customer service is a joke, though. Call and you get someone in India who's barely intelligible. I've been a customer for 25 years, so I asked them to extend the promotional rate for another year, as a courtesy, rather than increase it by $40 a month. They said, "Sure", but when I got the bill, they had increased the charge. I called to complain, and they rolled back the rate, but when I turned on my TV, they had disconnected my service! Another call fixed that, but I don't like playing games like this.
     
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  11. Lightworker

    Lightworker Forum Resident

    Location:
    Deep Texas
    Comcast's "Customer Service" department sux big red slimy dead Mexican donkey dix.
     
  12. boyjohn

    boyjohn Senior Member

    Google should start a kickstarter campaign to raise a couple trillion dollars get the whole country wired with high speed fiber, i would gladly pay to put the telecom/cable people out of business.
     
  13. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    It's coming.
     
  14. Iceblossom

    Iceblossom Member

    I'm overall quite satisfied with Comcast -- especially since I have no choice in the matter as I refuse to do satellite, maybe it was just because it was so long ago but I've tried both Dish and Direct and hated them both, one because of the poor quality reception and the other because of billing/customer service issues. My mother has a small outfit called Wave, and its channel line-up and On-Demand features are so sadly lacking.

    My main complaint with Comcast is the price. But, hey, everyone has to complain about cost, right? We do have the triple package for internet, cable, and tv. Except for one issue we've always had good customer service and prompt attention to outages or issues in our area. The longest outage we ever had was when one of the neighbors chopped a tree down on the line, that was maybe 6-7 hours. The one bad experience was a couple of years back we really looked at our bill and at the number of boxes we had, they had been charging us for one that had been turned in. I remember clearly standing in the hot, cramped, crowded office and both the customer service rep and I laughing at the huge old cable box I had turned in. They do not deny the model I had -- and that it was out of date and not reusable -- but they charged us $376 dollars (in addition to the monthly box fees for the past several years they had already gotten out of us) for this now 20 year old or so box despite my attempts at correcting the situation.

    LOL, other than that though, no real complaints. I know, I'm one of the rare ones.
     
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  15. wwaldmanfan

    wwaldmanfan Born In The 50's

    Location:
    NJ
    What! I don't understand that. The cable box rentals are part of your package price. If you have additional boxes above your allotment, you pay a monthly surcharge per box. Why did they charge you $376 in cash for returning a box? I would have told them to shove it.
     
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  16. Splungeworthy

    Splungeworthy Forum Rezidentura

    Comcast-excellent. Believe it or not.
     
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  17. Vinyl Addict

    Vinyl Addict Forum Resident

    Location:
    MA

    I don't
     
  18. DreadPikathulhu

    DreadPikathulhu Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    When I moved across town a year ago, I figured it would be easy since I had Comcast on both ends.

    They refused to let me keep the Comcast e-mail address that I'd had for ten years because I was switching to a new address, and all the chat "support" person could do was say nothing. He was in India and obviously had a script to read from, and any deviation was not allowed.

    I'd also made the mistake of paying my final bill at the old address in full, and it was paid for the month in advance. They couldn't credit the new address for the amount I overpaid and the refund check they claimed they sent mysteriously went missing.

    A support person yelled at me and hung up when she found out I was on a Mac when I called with issues with my Internet cutting out.
     
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  19. progrocker71

    progrocker71 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    I have no TV service, just internet from Time Warner. I've never had to call tech support.
     
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  20. pscreed

    pscreed Upstanding Member

    Location:
    Land of the Free
    Verizon Fios. I rated good, but really the only thing I don't like is the price.
     
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  21. Dave Garrett

    Dave Garrett Senior Member

    Location:
    Houston, TX
    Comcast's first-level tech support does indeed suck, but the main reason I usually called them was to report an outage and get an ETA for resolution. I haven't had to do that since they rolled out the useful Xfinity My Account app, which clearly indicates if an outage has been detected in your service area and what time they expect to have it fixed.

    Their senior-level tech guys are quite good, if you can manage to get through to one of them. A few years back my service was completely out for a month (yes, a month) in the wake of a hurricane which had dropped a tree branch on the cable up on the pole in my back yard and cut it. I had several techs out to look at it, and every one of them said "Yep, it's cut, but we can't fix that, we'll have to send another crew". After several weeks of this I'd have switched to another service if there had been anything else available (this was before AT&T U-Verse had been rolled out in my area). I finally stumbled across an internal phone number used by service crews to contact the dispatch control center for the entire company. When the guy that answered realized that I was a customer instead of a Comcast tech, he was not happy, but to his credit he didn't hang up on me. After I politely but firmly explained the situation and how long I'd been without service, he promised to get the cable cut in my yard fixed ASAP, and sure enough the very next day I had *three* work crews in my yard and was up and running again within a couple of hours.

    One other tip - Comcast's Twitter account @comcastcares is monitored closely, and if you have to contact customer service, you may be better off tweeting to that account rather than going through the usual phone tree hell, depending on the nature of your issue.

    CSR issues aside, I've been reasonably happy with Comcast's service. Until we get Verizon FiOS or Google Fiber, it's the fastest option available for internet, and the Digital Preferred tier + HBO gives me all the TV programming I care about.
     
  22. The senior-level tech reps at Verizon are great; the rest of their reps can jump in a burning lake of fire for all I care. The phone reps are almost all entirely clueless and can and will lie when necessary to get you off the phone.
     
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  23. Metralla

    Metralla Joined Jan 13, 2002

    Location:
    San Jose, CA
    I have Comcast and never have had any issues - except the cost. $75 a month and I basically watch 4 channels - but that's the way it goes. I only wanted to comment because there was a knock on my door yesterday and it was a Comcast rep. He knew who I was (from the apartment number) and said he was making a house call and was there anything I wanted. Well, I said my remote gives me problems when I try to press the #2 and and he wanted to have a look at it. He was a bit gobsmacked by my Lamm amps, BAT preamp and Sony 5400 with the Coincident Super Eclipse speakers and said some nice things. But he was more shocked by my old Sony Trinitron and said (quite rightly) "I guess you don't watch much TV". Quite a nice visit.
     
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  24. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    Cool! I'd have given him the URL to the forum (seriously). :)
     
  25. progrocker71

    progrocker71 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    I pay $40 a month for internet, plus I have Netflix ($7.99 per month) and Amazon Prime (approx $8 per month). I also have a pair of rabbit ears to get local HD broadcast channels. That takes care of most of my TV entertainment.
     
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