Customer Service... (Cable Company)

I have another story about the move into our new home. This one deals with the fun part of every move changing and setting up the utilities and services to the house.

For the most part everything transferred over just fine. Except for one part… Cable service. Now one wouldn’t think this would be a complicated matter.

1) We already had an account with Cablevision
2) The former owners of the house also had Cablevision for cable service
3) We were moving from one end of the Village to the other

Seems pretty simple and probably happens many times per week.

Well it turned into a hugh complicated mess… go figure...

When we moved to New York we signed up for cable television and cable internet access. Everything was great, we had very few problems. When we were set to move into our new house, they told me it was going to be a breeze. They checked to make sure there was already a hook up there. The girl was friendly and mentioned that the previous owner had recently shut her account off so transferring us over was no problem, someone would be over the following Friday to set everything up… Oh boy…

The same day that I called they shut off the account at our apartment. Not a big deal since we would be moving the next day anyway. After we moved I decided to check out to see if the cable worked. It did… Sort of... The basic cable worked but our digital boxes were useless. The Internet would also not work yet.

I called them on the day they were to come out to work on the cable and they said that it was the following Friday they would be coming out… Great.. I had to get the Internet up and running for Holly to be able to do her work!

So I call customer service. Talked in circles for a while with a person who was clueless and finally got the supervisor who was nearly as clueless at the rep I was speaking with… Grand…

She insisted that I could not get to the internet without having the tech’s come out to set up the equipment. I told her that I have been a computer tech for eight years had am very capable of setting up this end, nothing needs to be adjusted here, it’s on the cable company side that a line of information needs to be changed to make it see our modem.

She insisted that she knew better. So I entered this line of questioning:

Matt: So what you are telling me is that I don’t have any cable access right now, that is why I can’t get to the Internet.
Supervisor: Yes.
Matt: So I also can’t see anything on cable until they come out here?
Supervisor: That’s right (sounding smug)
Matt: So explain to me why I’m watching CNN over basic cable, in my house that has no cable connection. Supervisor: (long pause) I’m not sure.
Matt: So I can receive information from the cable company, this tells me that I’m connected. The modem that I have has the Mac Address: (whatever the hell it was) and should be able to have YOUR team connect it to this account.
Supervisor: (sheepishly) I’ll have to do some checking and call you back.

Needless to say I never got a call back, but I had the Internet running an hour after I was off the phone.

I HATE INCOMPETANCE!!!

This seems to be the running theme with our cablevision company. For three months we were fighting with them over the billing. It seems that they created a new account for us and never cancelled the old one. Then tired to charge us for the cable boxes that were never returned…
WE WERE STILL USING THEM!!!

I swear it was like pulling teeth with these people. After four months of fighting we finally have everything figured out but it was a royal pain.

I dealt with the technical issues at the start but Holly dealt with the billing issues. It was a team effort and we finally prevailed. It seems like the old saying of: “the customer is always right.” Has been changed to “the customer is always wrong and we will screw them over whenever possible.” Sad that it feels this way, but it seems more often than not that this is the case.

Please feel free to comment. I’m curious about how others are experiencing their customer service with other companies.