Once upon a time, I used to work in the murky world of cable and satellite television. How the channels I worked for ever got to air I’m not sure, given that they were almost entirely populated by 25 year olds in their first jobs and with a near-universal penchant for binge drinking. And that was just the presenters. The staff themselves were a good few years younger, and made the on-air team look like responsible upstanding citizens.
Clearly, I was a man amongst boys, with a responsible attitude that marked me out from my colleagues. But on the occasions when I wasn’t drinking and partying, I did have some cause to deal with the people who gave us license to be on air in the first place – the satellite and cable companies.
Now, some of my best friends have worked in the provider end of multichannel TV, and those people including Wesley Two Scoops (accountant from the South of England, rather than former American Gladiators champion) are some of the most intelligent people I know. But even they would say that such talent doesn’t extend to the staff of their call centrescenters.
Put simply, I would rather eat my own armpit hair than have to get on the phone to a cable or satellite call centre ‘worker’. The only way to get them to do anything vaguely helpful is to threaten to leave. Even that empty threat gets a little tiring after the thirteenth attempt to get them to fix a box that, let’s face it, only really gives you access to fifteen year old repeatsre-runs of Hill Street Blues. If it wasn’t for my all-encompassing love of footballsoccer, I would have told them exactly where they could stick their Remington Steele.
Moving to the United States, of course, everything would be different. This is, after all, the land of customer service. Ahem.
As it turns out, the only difference between cable company customer service in the two countries is that here you have the added bonus of walk-in customer centers that allow you to get incredibly annoyed in person as well as on the telephone.
Don’t get me wrong, the phone option is as irritating as ever. The Special One was cut off three times shortly before completing her order, after spending 20 minutes each time battling to make herself understood. If you know The Special One, you’ll know that cutting her off in her prime only makes her angry. And if you’re a customer service center worker, you really wouldn’t like her when she’s angry.
After that experience, the only option left was for me to go into Time Warner Cable’s frankly somewhat frightening customer center. For a start, there was the clientele. After making my way through the doors, I briefly had to walk out again just to check that I hadn’t accidentally walked into the nearby New York Clinic For The Terminally Strange. Even the simple exchange of a remote control seemed to take a twenty minute discussion regarding the position of the old lady or tattooed pensioner’s TV and the difficulty of accessing Bravo.
And then there was the lucky staff member who had to deal with me. We’ll call her Brenda, although given the darkness and bushiness of her moustache, she may well have been a slightly effeminate Brendan for all I know. Brenda tapped away at her keyboard for nothing less than 45 minutes in an attempt to solve a rather simple problem. All I wanted to do was add some additional channels to our TV package, and get a DVR. Apparently this meant breaking our existing contract and paying a hefty cancellation fee. All for the right to pay them more money every single month. Suffice to say that I wasn’t having any of it, but sadly, nor was her computer.
In the end, she decided to escalate it upwards. Her supervisor, maybe? The local area manager of Time Warner Cable, perhaps? No, she picked up the phone and called the sodding customer service center that we’d been ringing in the first place. Inevitably she got cut off after twenty minutes.
To be honest, I feel sorry for the center’s employees. After all, I’m now going to have to send The Special One in.
You’ll probably see the resultant carnage on CNN. As long as you don’t get your TV through Time Warner Cable, obviously.
8:52 pm
Our cable provider actually isn’t too bad so long as you don’t have to deal with the call center staff. Had to deal with their online tech support when our second cable box was DOA, after the first one was too. The guy was very competent and quickly figured out that the box was in fact DOA just like the one I had returned earlier that day, and arranged an appointment for a technician to visit the house. He turned up slightly BEFORE the scheduled time, tried 2 more boxes before finding one that actually worked, and showed us how to work the interactive features which we hadn’t even known about.
A week later the box went dead - after a long and irritating call, the woman at the other end figured out that the technician who’d visited had not updated the computer with the IP address of the box he finally installed, so it got shut down as being unauthorized. She reauthorized it and said we’d get all the channels for 24 hours or so until the box was pinged again, and then it would shut back down to the cheap package we were paying for. Three years later, and apparently they not only haven’t pinged the box but two months ago they reduced our bill by $16/month for no apparent reason. Should I venture into call center hell to inform them of their error d’you think?
12:29 pm
Extra channels AND DVR all in one request. Well, no wonder you had problems. Didn’t they tell you they only do one thing at a time, if at all?
I’ll let you into a secret. Next time you get crap service from a utility company, refer the whole matter to the Better Business Bureau (online complaint form) and it will be sorted before you can say DVR. And, some companies are also supposed to credit you $50 if they fail to turn up for an appointment, or tell you that the cable guy is knocking on your door at that very moment, when he clearly isn’t, as was my case.
7:34 pm
Found your blog through expat Mum. Glad I did. I’ll keep reading.
Don’t get me started about blooming cable companies….but glad I stopped by and saw EM’s top tip for complaining. At least that’ll make me feel like doing something other than throwing the remote at the TV!