Revenge of the Cable Customer 397
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."
Day late and dollar short... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Day late and dollar short... (Score:2, Interesting)
... HDTV *antenna* in the attic ...
Bulletproof Glass (Score:5, Interesting)
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The entire community TV department had been replaced by more call center lackeys answering angry phone calls, and what was more interesting was the main reception area where people could pay their bills has the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...
Re:Bulletproof Glass (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
I'll stay away from the whole customer service thing, but, think about the crime angle.
If you had good enough credit to have a credit card, or even a checking account, you'd pay by mail or online or pretty much do anything other than stand in line. Who enjoys standing in line? Now if the monthly bill is only $100 (you wish), and you're paying in cash pretty much by definition of going there and standing in line, and there's always a line, and there are only two reps (probably more), and the rep takes a pessimistic 5 minutes per bill payment (including a 4 minute nap time?), even pessimistically, that's an absolute minimum cash intake of $2400 per hour. Even if you have an armored car swing by every four hours, that means an armed robber can pull an average of $5K but if he cases the joint out to harvest his cash right before a pickup, thats darn near $10K. At an absolute minimum.
I defy you to find a legal small office that pulls in more paper money per day. There are plenty of retail establishments with way more dollars in checks or credit card receipts, but not in cash... Maybe a large gentleman's club pulls in more cash, but then again, they have more bouncers...
Robbers can in fact multiply, even if they have to use a calculator. And that's why they have an armed guard.
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:5, Interesting)
yeah, that's cool... how do you get the internet? I don't subscribe to cable TV, but I get my internet connection from the cable company, because there isn't any FiOS in my area and DSL is crap, so its either cable or buy a fractional DS3, but why bother when cable internet connection is just as fast, if not faster, and cheaper?
Happy telco customer (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:3, Interesting)
And that's not only in the US that happens - it's also happening in Europe.
Re:Day late and dollar short... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:In My City (Score:5, Interesting)
Very similar issues with Comcrap.
First, when they came out to do my install, I was getting a crappy-as-hell signal. Their techs sat around scratching their asses for three hours, and eventually (only after I'd been on the phone with a supervisor behind their backs) finally went out to check the routing equipment, only to find that some ass-tard had simply shoved shit together any which way out there and had broken the lead on the connection going to my house. Elapsed time before they got that fixed: 7 days later.
Then they started rolling every goddamn thing into the "digital only" package. "Doesn't cost any more" except that you have to rent a specialized fucking receiver for each goddamn room you want it in, or if you want to actually use the CableCard function built into your TV, they actually charge you MORE to rent the fucking cablecard.
Then we get to the network crap.
I had three machines; one recently rebuilt, one laptop, one old machine I use for video-to-TV playback.
Video-to-TV box and laptop are configured to OpenDNS. They worked the moment I wired in. Upstairs box, newly rebuilt, started getting Comcrap's "we hijack your traffic" crap-DNS info, kept trying to make me go through a fuck-ton of meaningless registration crap and "please sign up for a comcast.net email" (don't need or want yet another fucking email address) before crashing both IE and Firefox (supposedly they were "in the middle of updating it" for multiple days).
Took me 3 phone calls. On the third call, after calling bullshit on their "well they must be working on it" lie, it then took 4 hours and 2 levels of jumping up and down screaming "just give me your supervisor or someone who goddamn knows what they are doing" to get the goddamn thing cleared. Went through afterwards, said "fuck you" to their DNS servers, and set both the final box and my router itself to use OpenDNS instead.
Every time I have a service issue, I wind up calling them, and some retard in "customer service" insists "well the tool says your cable modem is fine" (bullshit, both cable TV and internet service are down completely, and yes I already went through your ENTIRE TROUBLESHOOTING METHOD you fucking dingbat, it happens frequently enough that I have the goddamn process memorized after all). Then I insist they pass me to a supervisor, who half the time is a complete ass who's mad I took him away from playing his fucking facebook games, and the other half the time admits that yeah, there is either a "scheduled maintenance outage" (which they never inform us of AHEAD of time) or a problem at the local routing station... which they are too fucking lazy to inform the level-1's about.
The only reason I'm on comcrap at all is that my alternatives in the area are crap. AT&T DSL in my area gets maybe 0.5 Mbit down, if that. Verizon FiOS is a mile away but keeps saying that because they don't "own the lines" in my subdivision, they aren't allowed to offer service. Functionally, Comcrap is a goddamn monopoly, and it shows.
Re:Bulletproof Glass (Score:2, Interesting)
Comcast's lie first policy. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Truth. OTA rocks (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:3, Interesting)
While technically true, cable providers don't make all of their revenue anymore by your standard-vanilla cable connection. They sell you video on demand, extra channels, "HD content" (read: You pay more but since the networks rarely broadcast HD, you don't get much more) and their cable box that lets you record their show (and, strangely, any other box, even the same box bought somewhere else for a fraction of the price, doesn't work, odd...).
You don't buy any of that if you just "abuse" them for their internet connection. Also, I don't know about your location, but here, if a cable company can offer you internet, you could choose from a few more providers, if nothing else our (formerly fed owned) telco certainly has the pipes to offer you the same, if not better, connectivity. They rarely have the monopoly, usually they're only second after the formerly-fed telco (because they are literally everywhere). And to make matters worse, they're now offering "ADSL-TV", bundling internet, phone and TV at a price most cable providers can't undercut (something that was their strongest selling point for the longest time, they were simply the only to offer these three services bundled, three services most people want to have, and their bundle was heaps cheaper than getting TV from them and phone/internet from the telco).
Hence I think the biggest "threat" they are feeling now is that telcos start offering TV-by-internet services that undermine their bundle monopoly.
Why do companies do this to themselves? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:3, Interesting)
My TV is for PS3.
Aside from games, the PS3 is also for streaming video from the media server.
The media server does contain some .avi, .mp4, and .m2ts files of shows that may have been broadcast on tv at some point.
Does that count as watching TV?
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Favorite (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work for a cable company (a major one, I might add), and I had that unfortunate conversation with lots of customers.
What's ironic is that this usually took place in areas where the company I worked for used some local contractors. In areas where the company hired directly, I only heard praise of the technicians, and their punctuality.
Supposedly it's supposed to be better for businesses to hire locally, but from my experience, the local contractors were lazy fucktards.
Re:Why I switched from Cablevision to FIOS (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently moved to Seattle and was looking into fios, but freaking Comcast still has some antiquated exclusive franchise deal with the city that won't let Verizon offer it to anyone. How does this make sense in any world?
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:2, Interesting)
Phones: Vonage
Internet: FiOS
TV: DirecTV
DirecTV's service has been phenomenal. Vonage is rock solid. FiOS is awesome, except when they add a new customer on in my neighborhood, I have a brief outage (long enough for me to reboot the modem) whenever I see their truck. The POP for my neighborhood is next to my house, so I see the truck out there, I know I need to reboot. It isn't a big deal at all, I am not one that expects 5 9s SLA for home internet access. That said, I'm getting somewhere around 98% uptime, and that's pretty fantastic overall. I believe FiOS has pretty much got the entire area wired up now, so the outages have become much more sporadic, occurring very rarely now.
Total monthly bills for each of these services is around $150. I pay more for the NFL Sunday Ticket right prior to football season starting up, so that's why the bill is higher overall. I've been a DirecTV customer for about 10 years now, and I've gotta tell you, you simply cannot beat their customer service, their programming, and their signal almost never ever goes out. (It's gone out once since I moved to NoVA, and that was during a ridiculously bad storm. (The rain was coming down so hard it was blocking the signal. Of course, since I have a DVR, it wasn't an issue at all.
Re:Bulletproof Glass (Score:1, Interesting)
Maybe the US is weird (okay, I *know* the US is weird), but I pay my electric bill in person.
When I go down there, I've never, ever seen someone pay in cash. Ever. Except me, once.
My estimate of their cash intake is perhaps $100 an hour. Way less than what the mini-mart/gas station take is.
Now, you are probably asking, WTF are people paying with? Well, I'm paying with debit (can't do that remotely), and some others are paying with credit card (they don't accept that except in person). Others are paying late bills and don't want their electricity cut off (except in the winter, when the utility is not allowed to cut off the electricity completely, so they install a device that gives you power every other hour or so), so they're doing it all in person to get it done quickly. Those people are usually paying by rubber cheque, or sometimes cash.
Any robber who is thinking ahead enough to consider how much cash is being deposited also knows that clerks that handle serious amount of cash generally have to make a drop safe deposit every $100 to $300. And that the clerks have discreet and easy access to a silent alarm. So, without cutting torches we're talking a take of maybe $500-$600 (on a lucky day). With cutting torches, by the time they've got the safe they're pretty much in a cruiser.
Trust me, anyone who's worked in any job dealing with money outside a bank (and, nowadays, inside a bank too) knows what I'm saying is gospel. Ever wondered the real reason why nobody will take your hundreds? Counterfeiting is just one side of the story. It's because they only have $50 in $5 bills, $20 in $10 bills, and $30 in change (modify that a bit for those in the USA as you don't have $1+ coins) in the drawer. Breaking one $100 bill for a small item kills that drawer for the day until the manager shows up with more change.
If you're wondering how cashiers deal with change, there's two ways. Either the manager is lazy and leaves a coin "purchase" shelf stocked with coins/bills for you to trade larger stuff in the drawer for (eg: $20 bill for $20 in coins), or they have a more professional change machine that you can feed money into so the employees can't steal, which happens a lot when you have to hire people with criminal records due to the criminally low wages (Criminally low because most people in these jobs get paid minimum wage and are expected to come into work early and stay late, unpaid).
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:5, Interesting)
mmmm..... nope. No. Just internet, with video on demand. Hulu. Netflix. All the other free-stream-online-until-they-get-shut-down sites.
It's the new normal. Broadcast is dead. It started dying with tivo and the dvr, and dropped dead and stinky with ubiquitous broadband and solid, simple and reliable VOD services.
I've had no landline phone since 2003 and I haven't watched broadcast TV for
Is hulu big enough yet to have original content? FOX NBC CBS and ABC will have to truly embrace the streaming stuff, and I think they have to a certain extent, so perhaps they won't go the way of the newspaper!
sucky DVRs (Score:2, Interesting)
maybe in the us, but not in canada... :-( (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Favorite (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have mod points to burn at the moment, but I will just say this: your post is not funny. It is insightful, underrated, interesting and even informative (if the reader is living in a barrel), but it is not fucking funny.
Alternatives with responsibility (Score:1, Interesting)
20+ years ago, my local service was a fly by night that had managed to browbeat several local governments into accepting a sole provider rider in the contract. To say they were bad qualifies as understatement of the civilization. This continued until the local power utility put in a system to monitor consumption and load. One of the techs for the power company ran a small TV repair shop on the side, and noticed that A) lines were going to almost every house in the county, and B) they had a buttload of bandwidth open. He convinced his boss that the co-op (yep, co-op. trust me, this comes in later) just needed to buy the head end and set top boxes and they could offer a new service...AT COST. The FBN raised holy hell, promising lawsuits and blocked access. Co-op lawyer, (a good one, dealt mostly in civil rights cases) replied, all the way to the state Supreme Court, that blocking over the air and FCC licensed satellite transmissions was illegal and you can't sue a government agency for supplying services and the co-op was a semi-government agency.
Long story short, the FBN was out of business in about six years, the co-op still thrives, although rates have gone up (ya gotta pay programmers) and the big boys stay the hell away from that area. Service is great because co-op board members are elected every two years and want to keep their jobs.