Time Warner cable sucks shiny happy person

Calling their "dedicated" signature home help line for the 4th or 5th time today and no answer. This company really does suck as far as customer service goes. But if you want real High speed net in this area, they are the only game. berkeley

First thing I thought of.

SyntheticBlinkerFluid wrote: First thing I thought of.

yeah pretty much

In reply to SyntheticBlinkerFluid:

Says the guy that works for a cable company :p

In reply to moparman76_69:

Apparently you didn't see that episode of South Park.

SyntheticBlinkerFluid wrote: In reply to moparman76_69: Apparently you didn't see that episode of South Park.

My wife doesn't like informative murder porn. And we used to have direcTV.

I hear they are a paragon of customer service excellence next to Comcast.

Comcast is the absolute worst company in the world when it comes to customer service. I'll go without cable before I'll subscribe to Comcast. If the city I live in is tied to Comcast, I'll go to city council meetings and tell how bad they suck. Now they're buying DirecTV. So they'll ruin that company, too.

TW has nobody worth a siht to compare their customer service to, so if theirs sucks donkey scrotums, it is still better than Comcast. I'm sure TW celebrated the recent Comcast bad press instead of using it as a lesson on how to improve their service.

Kramer wrote: Comcast is the absolute worst company in the world when it comes to customer service. I'll go without cable before I'll subscribe to Comcast. If the city I live in is tied to Comcast, I'll go to city council meetings and tell how bad they suck. Now they're buying DirecTV. So they'll ruin that company, too. TW has nobody worth a siht to compare their customer service to, so if theirs sucks donkey scrotums, it is still better than Comcast. I'm sure TW celebrated the recent Comcast bad press instead of using it as a lesson on how to improve their service.

TW may be every bit as bad as Communistcast

In reply to Kramer:

As someone who works for Comcast, yes our customer service sucks. They screw up almost every single work order.

Also, you got your companies backwards, Comcast is trying to purchase Time Warner and AT&T is trying to purchase DirecTV.

I am going through the wringer with Comcrap right now. I turned in my modem and box 6 months ago when I moved. I am now getting notices to return the equipment ASAP. I thankfully still have the receipts for returning it.. but even after bringing them to the office in person, I am still getting notices

Yep that sounds about right.

Charlotte is in the running for Google fiber. One can only hope.

Time-Warner, Shmime-Warner, Comcast sucks the sweat of a dead man's ass.

so far (except for price) I've been pretty happy with Charter … hoping neither Comcast nor TW set their eyes on Charter

service has be excellent … and the price is really the only real complaint

As a former employee of comcrap I can say, yeah, it sucks. I was there at a time when they had to choose between "intelligent" tools or intelligent techs. By that I mean, invest money in training their customer service people, or invest money in building tools (scripts, ticketing systems) that were "smart" enough that trained chimps could take your calls.

I guess by everyone's experiences with the trained chimps you know which way they chose, unfortunately no matter how "smart" the tool is there are too many potential problems and trained people (with good customer service skills) are still needed, a lesson they still haven't figured out. But hey, you don't have to be good when you've got a captive market :)

JThw8 wrote: As a former employee of comcrap I can say, yeah, it sucks. I was there at a time when they had to choose between "intelligent" tools or intelligent techs. By that I mean, invest money in training their customer service people, or invest money in building tools (scripts, ticketing systems) that were "smart" enough that trained chimps could take your calls. I guess by everyone's experiences with the trained chimps you know which way they chose, unfortunately no matter how "smart" the tool is there are too many potential problems and trained people (with good customer service skills) are still needed, a lesson they still haven't figured out. But hey, you don't have to be good when you've got a captive market :)

You hit the nail on the freaking head, especially about the captive market, that goes for everything Ive heard about comcast and everything I've personally seen from Time Warner

ryanty22 wrote:

JThw8 wrote: As a former employee of comcrap I can say, yeah, it sucks. I was there at a time when they had to choose between "intelligent" tools or intelligent techs. By that I mean, invest money in training their customer service people, or invest money in building tools (scripts, ticketing systems) that were "smart" enough that trained chimps could take your calls. I guess by everyone's experiences with the trained chimps you know which way they chose, unfortunately no matter how "smart" the tool is there are too many potential problems and trained people (with good customer service skills) are still needed, a lesson they still haven't figured out. But hey, you don't have to be good when you've got a captive market :)

You hit the nail on the freaking head, especially about the captive market, that goes for everything Ive heard about comcast and everything I've personally seen from Time Warner

On one hand it's hard to argue against their point. By way of background I was the guy hired to build those "intelligent" tools and argued against a fully tool/script based approach because I'd never seen it work. Their average turnover in a customer service position is 6 months, that's not enough time for someone to get trained let alone proficient so I understand but IMO their focus should have been on improving the turnover rate and employee morale (you think it sucks being a customer? try working there)

The other thing they did was hire a consulting firm who put 20 of their best, highest rated, customers service techs in separate rooms all with them same technical issue to solve. Resolution times varied from 5 to 25 minutes with each tech arriving to the eventual solution in a different method. They did the same test with 20 trainees and a well written script and all were resolved in the same time, under 2 minutes, in the same way.

Of course that testing method is greatly flawed as they knew the problem so they wrote a very targeted script. In reality you cannot script every possible issue so you need knowledgeable people to fill in the gaps.

Its actually not a simple problem to solve, they have one of the, if not the, highest call volume support operations in the world. While developing the ticketing software they used at the time I was actually invited to speak at the manufacturers annual conference on how to overcome the "limits" of the software in a high volume environment because no other large operations had been able to do it (then they found out the answer was us completely re-engineering their product and weren't quite as keen on us speaking) I'm not making excuses, it's the business they've chosen, they are making tons of money, they need to invest in a solution. But it is a very difficult problem to solve.

Yeah Time Warner is much the same, Chili Head and My best friend works for them as one of their Signature Home consultants (supposedly their best customer support level). So I think I know the answer already but is most of NJ comcast only?

In reply to ryanty22:

As far as I know yes.

JThw8 wrote: As a former employee of comcrap I can say, yeah, it sucks. I was there at a time when they had to choose between "intelligent" tools or intelligent techs. By that I mean, invest money in training their customer service people, or invest money in building tools (scripts, ticketing systems) that were "smart" enough that trained chimps could take your calls.

Years ago when I moved into my last place.. everybody on my street would lose internet, VOIP, and all the other services but the cable itself. This would happen anytime there was a rapid temperature change and it would take days to resolve itself. In the meantime, all these contracted techs would be out climbing the poles, checking the boxes, and running new cable.

I finally asked a tech over the phone about it. Telling her that there were techs up and down the street, that maybe the problem was not in my house, but somewhere down the road where it could affect everyone. the reply. "If there was a problem, the computer would tell us". Later that year, somebody took down a couple of poles down the road while driving drunk.. and the problem never came back

ryanty22 wrote: So I think I know the answer already but is most of NJ comcast only?

I believe there are pockets of Verizon Fios here and there but otherwise, yeah, mostly Comcast. I will say that as long as you dont need to call support it's been pretty reliable for us. Just the support experience and cost suck.

In reply to JThw8:

the problem isn't so much the solution they chose. its that no other competitive force exists to exert feedback pressure on changing what doesn't work for the customer.

Their solution works for their own perceived internal interests:

-process more calls by volume -spend less time on each call -assure stable capacity by oversimplifcation of job tasks to 'rote' without comprehension being needed. Thereby assuring large turnover does not noticeably hamper capacity. -lower financial footprint of all the above

Sometimes the purest path to these things run in opposition to the interests of a customer, but the only way the customer's interested are factored into those things above is if they are compelled, especially on the scale of a company like Comcast.

You know the internal Motto of our company was "Think Customers First". I haven't heard anyone say that in a couple years.

Trust me, as a technician, anytime I've tried to "think customer first", either it doesn't go any farther than my supervisor or I get in trouble.

mad_machine wrote: Later that year, somebody took down a couple of poles down the road while driving drunk.. and the problem never came back

…sounds like you owe somebody a beer.