A few days ago, I had an experience with Charter customer service/technical support.
Tech support call Wednesday night:
Me: Cable internet's down, blah blah blah
Them: Reboot everything
Me: Doesn't work. This problem is affecting our neighbors too. This happens all the time, the internet goes out for a few hours and comes back up on its own. It's unacceptable.
Them: I'll send a technician to your house so we can get this taken care of
Me: It's not anything wrong with my house or my equipment. Our neighbors are having problems too, it's something in the entire neighborhood.
Them: OK, I'll note that in the call and the technician will come out and check the node in the neighborhood and fix it.
Me: Please note that this problem is intermittent. I don't want them to come out here tomorrow, see that it's working, and leave. It will go out again. It might stay up for an hour, it might stay up for a month. But this happens more often than it should.
Them: I noted that, and they will check the node, blah blah blah. Appointment is sometime tomorrow between 1 and 5.
OK, well, the next morning, I get a call from someone at Charter:
Them: We just wanted to confirm your appointment for today between 1 and 5, is your cable internet working right now?
Me: Right now it is, but it goes up and down, and something is not right.
Them: Would you still like a technician to come out? (no, you can ignore the problem, dumbass)
Me: Yes.
About 30 minutes later, I get an automated recording from Charter, stating that the technician will arrive between 1:30 and 2:45. Yay, they narrowed it down for me.
The calls continue..
Me: They said the technician would be here by 2:45, it's 3:00 and he's not here.
Them: I'm showing that the appointment was until 5
Me: Yes, it was, and then I got a call stating that they would be here by 2:45
Them: Well, it says here 5, you'll have to wait until then
Me: Then if it's still until 5, then why did I get a call saying that it was 2:45?
Them: Our system says 5
At this point, I just hung up. I don't care what the original appointment was for, I was called back and told 2:45. Anything after that is late.
So, at 4:45, just a mere 2 hours late, the technician shows up at my door
Them: Where's the modem at?
(I take him to the room where it's installed at)
Me: Right here, but the problem is affecting the entire neighborhood, it surely can't be something in our house that's causing outages at several homes. The guy on the phone said it was the node outside.
Them: Well, we would need a different technician to work on the node (then WTF did the first guy send a non-node tech out for?)
Them: Is this (router) connected to this (cable modem)?
Me: Yes
Them: Is there a computer I could use
Me: Yep, this one (my PowerBook. I hate letting others use my stuff, but I suppose I didn't have a choice)
Them: Is this connected to the internet (he was confused by the lack of an ethernet cable between my laptop and router)
Me: Yes, it's wireless
Them: (pauses for a minute, clearly dumbfounded by our simple home network setup) Oh, OK.
He then goes downstairs and messes with the wiring
Them: I found your problem, a splitter was hooked up wrong
Me: So our splitter (which, by the way, even if the splitter was wrong, which I doubt, charter must've screwed up since they're the only ones who mess with it) was causing the outages for both our house and our neighbors house?
Them: No, it couldn't do that. They must have a bad splitter too
Me: So everytime our cable internet goes out, and we check with our neighbors and theirs happens to be out, it's just a coincidence that both of our splitters failed at exactly the same time?
Them: Um, I guess
Me: What about the node that the guy on the phone mentioned?
Them: He doesn't know what he was talking about. If it keeps happening, we'll have to send out a node technician (isn't that who I asked for in the first place)
Me: OK, I'll call back if I have problems. Bye.
I guess when you have a monopoly on high speed internet in the area, good customer service isn't necessary.
