Thursday, August 25, 2011

Followup with Time Warner

Just before lunch yesterday, I received a call from John, a representative of Time Warner Security. They had apparently found the Reddit post and my blog entry, rolled a truck to my building, and was ... less than pleased.

We had a brief but pleasant conversation in which we both agreed that if my cable were to be disconnected again, I should call him directly so that he could have the matter resolved in a more reasonable manner. He said that they had found my note, verified that in fact I was a paying customer, replaced the red tag with a green one, and that my line shouldn't be disconnected again.


Overall, while I was dissatisfied with the offered repair time when the outage originally occurred, I was pleasantly surprised by their response at my less than elegant solution. That said, I would not recommend doing what I did.

8 comments:

  1. I am curious why you would not recommend doing this. If you were to fight with the person on the phone all day long, there is no way you would be able to get in touch with John, or get his phone number to call him if this happens again. They didn't seem like they were going to come out and see you, but since their lock was destroyed, suddenly people have free time to come out and see you.

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  2. because when a customer gets bullied by a company it's just bad CS. when a customer does it, it's criminal.

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  3. because when a customer gets bullied by a company it's just bad CS. when a customer does it, it's criminal.

    And when it happens on the internet for all the world to see, it's bad P.R.

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  4. It's like the (probably urban legend) story about the guy who saw people breaking into his shed to steal tools. He called the cops, and they said no one was available immediately, but a patrol car would be out in 30-45 minutes. He hung up, waited 1 minute, called back and said, "No need for the patrol car, I shot the burglars."

    Five minutes later, there were four patrol cars at his house. The cops caught the burglars red-handed. The conversation supposedly went like this:

    Cops: "We thought you said you shot them?"
    Man: "I thought you said it would take 30-45 minutes to get a patrol car out here?"

    I kinda hope it really happened. :)

    Oh, and I'm glad you got your cable sorted out, too. ;)

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  5. Forget criminal actions, TWC actually monitors twitter for user problems. They aren't ALWAYS on the case, do converse with the "We're not at fault" tone, but when the word gets out like that, bad press typically clears up the negative approach to your choice of words/actions.

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  6. old caveat, actions speak louder than words, for better or worse you got results. i think that you took the right course of action.

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  7. I've been following this because of my experience with TWC which were similar to yours, I think I saw it published on Reddit. I also (lol) believe us to be neighbors. I hate to shill for any telcos since they are by nature all bastards, but a lot of my issues went away when I subscribed to ATT&T's uverse service. Honestly they are still jag-offs but I haven't had the snickling b.s. issues like this since I switched. I believe that MAYBE being one of their higher tier? customers have allowed me a greater voice wit cust serv. Many of my friends on the west side who have subbed with Verizon's Fios feel the same. anyway and FWIW I don't pay much more than I did before the switch, something to think about...

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  8. In the past, I have had very good experiences with AT&T, or at least when they used to be called SBC. I had paid for their 6mbit DSL service for a few years in grad school while living on campus, because the free campus internet required Cisco Clean Access installed on all connected machines. How good was the SBC DSL service? In the 3+ years I used them, I experienced a single disconnection, which was because someone drove into the telephone box at the bottom of the hill. That outage lasted 2 hours.

    My coworkers have had good experiences with the uverse service, but it's not available where I live. Basically, my options are Time Warner and DSL through AT&T at 1/4-1/3 the speed of the cable.

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