Friday, June 11, 2010

Dear Time Warner Cable

Posted by Laura / 5 comments » / , customer service, internet, open letter, people, psa, work

To Whom It May Concern:

Time Warner, I was going to write a letter to you detailing how much trouble we’ve had over the last month and a half trying to get our service to work consistently. However, having worked for the company, I know that any information I could get regarding where to send letters would go off to some possibly mythical person whose address, if I recall correctly, is somewhere in North Carolina, and who never actually makes return correspondence. Even when I worked for your company, I was pretty sure that he wasn’t a real person. I felt that I shouldn’t have to deal with that, and that leaves me with a few options. I can try to call up the food chain, but I know for a fact that will do absolutely no good. It’s easier to contract Creutzfeld-Jakob disease than it is to get a supervisor on the phone. I know that sending a letter to the walk-in centers would do no good. They can’t do anything but hand the letter to their own supervisors who will probably not do anything about it, and to be honest – what we want is someone who can do something about this to be able to fix some of these problems. And they can’t. It’s just not in their job scope to do so.

So where does that leave me? The internet. So, here is my little letter to you, detailing our frustration with all of the brick walls we’ve run smack into while trying to rectify the issues with our internet service.

Very early in May, we started having recurring issues with our internet service. It started to go down for long periods of time, and modem reboots most certainly did not help bring it back. At first, it was happening between 9 and 9:30PM on an almost nightly basis. That was pretty annoying, but it did eventually come back. We called once while it was down and the person on the phone sent a hit to the modem and was ready to call it good. Of course, I know that didn’t really do anything since by the time she sent the hit, our service had already popped back in. But, since it did come back, we were willing to say “okay” and let it go. Then it continued to happen. A few days later, we called back. We were able to get a trouble calls for a few days later in a late enough window that we would both be home for it. The tech checked our signal levels (because of course it wasn’t down while he was there), and took a filter off of our line that had been put on when we got our cable in September 2008. He said we were all better.

Everything was fine for a couple of days, so we thought maybe he was right. I wish. It started happening again. We called in to customer service and this time we were able to “escalate” our issue to tier 2. Tier 2 did some looking around and couldn’t find anything wrong. Go figure. So we scheduled another tech call. Our second call was about the same as the first. He monitored our lines and determined that as far as he could tell, everything was fine. He checked the lines outside and declared that they were a little loose. He said that was probably the issue and that we were all better! We were, understandably I think, skeptical, but we took him at his word. He was very polite so that helped his case.

Within days, the issue began again. We called and managed to get up to tier 3 this time. Once again, nobody could find any problems with our service, but a ticket was opened anyway after we explained what happened. It took Johnathan showing his technical savvy to get them to take us seriously, which is an entirely different issue. We were getting pretty frustrated by now, and since the next tech call would be our third, we wanted to ensure we would get a senior technician. The first problem with this was that we were given an up to three-day window for a supervisor call-back to schedule the call. So not only would we have to wait up to three days for the tech supervisor to call, but we would also then have to wait until whenever s/he could schedule our service call. We were willing to wait, because we just wanted the issue resolved, but also requested a service call in the meantime so that the tech could replace the modem.

The tech showed up on time, although didn’t call (none of them ever did call ahead of time), and we figured it would be quick. Little did we know that this call would be the biggest disaster yet. First of all, he wanted to crawl into the closet where our line came in. That was fine. He decided that a splitter that was put in at our installation was probably at fault, so he took it out. Whatever, as long as it works in the end. He checked our signal and declared it fine (which was never in doubt, as when the internet was working it was at normal speed, but the issue was that it would not always work). He decided he wanted to pull up some diagnostics. So he asked to use Johnathan’s computer. I thought that was strange, but Johnathan acquiesced. Then there was a moment of horror for us – he was unable to use the keyboard because some of the letters had rubbed off. And since I was booted into Linux and in a game that I would not be exiting out of, he was forced to have Johnathan type things in for him. So … he gave Johnathan the URL, ID and password to a tech diagnostic tool that the area techs used on calls. It seems strange that he was so willing to give this information out to customers, not least to put it into their personal computers. Then, he was prepared to leave after “proving” that there was nothing wrong with our service. We insisted that he replace the modem, which was the whole reason for the call in the first place. We like to cover our bases, so wanted that done – just in case. He did so, but begrudgingly and it was very clear that he did not think it was necessary and was only doing it because we insisted. Then he proceeded to condescendingly explain how to plug things in and in what  order they should be plugged in. We explained to him that not only do we know what we’re doing, but he was being rude and we asked him to leave. It was that or do something more drastic, and nobody needed that.

We continued to have problems with our service and called customer service several times to update customer service of this fact. Our most recent call was on Thursday, June 3, after our internet went down the night before and still was not back as of 7AM. I was scheduled to work from home that day and it was the first time I needed the internet to work since we’d started having that problem. Johnathan called because I was so angry that I would have said mean things to people who don’t deserve it, and after assuring the girl on the phone that we did not need any troubleshooting, that no, a hit would not fix it and neither would restarting our modem, and would she please just schedule a trouble call for us, he left for work and I wandered up to Caribou Coffee to do some work for there. Our call was to be that day between 2 and 4PM, so I planned to work from the coffee shop until I was able to wander back to the apartment. Thankfully, the internet came back at about 11AM so I was able to work from home for the rest of the day, but I knew my afternoon could be interrupted at any time, so I tried not to get too involved in anything. 2PM rolled around and I started pulling back on the number of things I was involved in. 2:30, 3PM, 3:30, still no tech. I know the window means that the tech can arrive anywhere between 2 and 4, and that it does not mean that he has to be done by 4. Prepared with this knowledge, I waited until 4PM until I got angry. No tech showed up. I checked our door – no tag. There was no van on the street and no van in the parking lot, so I surmised that I would not be seeing a tech.

Later that night, owing to the still inconsistent service and lack of tech during our trouble call, Johnathan called Time Warner, this time to cancel. We’d had enough. He called AT&T, our only other option (unless we’re willing to deal with dial-up), and scheduled service to start. To our dismay, we got an incredibly helpful rep on the phone this time. Her name was Kim and she was easily the best representative we spoke to during this whole fiasco (the online support via Twitter being second-best, only because they had no way to get us in touch with anyone locally). She was able to assess the problem and discover that there was an ongoing problem with our node dropping people between – you guessed it – 9 and 9:30PM on a regular basis. Well. Color me shocked. We asked her to disconnect our service effective June 10th, at which point we would have new service installed and our DSL modem would have arrived. We also asked her to tell us the details of the trouble call that never was. This was the best part of the call, I think. She told us that the call had been canceled at 2:20PM. Right during our window! The reason listed was “outage”. We were given no notification whatsoever of this cancellation, and as a result, I was fairly unproductive for two hours of work. If I had taken the time off, I would be even angrier, since it meant waiting around for that whole window, only to have the tech not show up. I also know that had I called any time during that window, I would have been told that I had to wait until after the window had passed because the tech had the whole window to show up. So there was no way for me to find out.

Our internet went out shortly after we got off of the phone with Kim, but at that point we had just resigned ourselves to not having consistent service and consoled ourselves with the knowledge that we would be getting service from another provider shortly thereafter. We had very little connectivity on Friday (a minute now and then, but nothing lasting), none on Saturday, Sunday or Monday. Tuesday, we’d had enough. What was the point of paying for service if you had none? So we called Time Warner. Only to find out, as it were, that our service had apparently been end-dated as of Thursday the 3rd, which meant we’d really not had any service that whole time. I’m not sure how to explain the small pockets of uptime that we had, but I’m taking the person on the phone at her word. We’ll be returning the modem this weekend and finally be done dealing with Time Warner Cable.

I have tried to be nice about this. I used to work for the company, and while it was a major relief to me when I no longer had to deal with the red tape and bureaucracy, I have been a major defender of the cable company. I know how things work and which things are under their control and which are not. I know what to expect from customer service and what to expect from the techs. I won’t claim that our issue was routine – obviously it was not an easy fix or it would have been fixed, I have full faith in that. But the ability for so many people to drop the ball and continually accuse the same things (our router – which was not and is not the issue) of causing the problem, including a tech supervisor, is unacceptable. On Wednesday, we received a call from a tech supervisor who claimed to have monitored our signal for thirteen days and saw no issues. He defended the technician who we asked politely to leave our apartment, and implied that the tech who canceled our call was that selfsame person. Somehow this was justification for why he canceled our call with absolutely no notification. I’m not sure. He also let us know that the problem had to be something that was outside of Time Warner’s control (implying, once again, that our router was at fault – or worse, that we, who work in IT and are up front about that, would not have verified that our computers were functioning properly).

Something that has really bothered me through this whole process is that no matter how polite, no matter how calm we remained on the phone, we were often met with surliness and defenses of varying sorts. The people on the phone are apparently so often harassed that even those who are not irate are dealt with as if they are about to say something completely inappropriate. And continually, the third-party router was blamed as the problem. Even when we were getting no signal to the modem, even after unplugging the router and plugging directly into the modem and the signal did not return, the router was blamed. Third-party routers are the scapegoats of all internet issues with Time Warner Cable. I knew that when I worked there, but I did not know the scale of this fact. We will be connecting our third-party router to our DSL modem, and I guarantee that it will work without consistently dropping our signal at the same time nightly. I’m genuinely shocked, given this behavior, that our browser of choice (Firefox and sometimes Chrome) and our operating systems of choice (Linux) weren’t called into question as well.

All in all, Time Warner, you can see that we have been dealt with very badly. We were treated like idiots and it was implied at one point that the problem was essentially imaginary. I have realistic expectations of the level of service that we would receive. We don’t expect perfect customer service on the phone, but we do expect a reasonable level of uptime with our internet. I do not expect 100% uptime – that would be unreasonable. I don’t expect for Time Warner to credit me for power outages or because I go out of town and don’t use my service. I do expect the service that I am paying for to work, especially at $40/month. AT&T costs a little bit more and the max speed is a little bit slower, but so far our interactions with them have been pleasant.

I am disappointed that my relationship with Time Warner Cable ended the way that it did, both as an employee and as a customer. There were a lot of problems with the customer service and tech support that we received and we do, in fact, blame the corporation for all of it. There is no excuse for the attitude of the people on the phone, of the technicians and certainly of the tech supervisor, whose behavior I find the most reprehensible.

We have terminated our relationship with your company and plan to do everything we can to avoid getting your service again. This is a shame, because you have some interesting ideas and some good services. But if they don’t even work then what’s the point?

Your company could do with a major customer service overhaul. I won’t hold my breath.

Sincerely, and with the hopes that you will take this seriously,

Laura, who really just wants working internet service

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