So last winter I had all sorts of problems with Dish Network, our satellite cable provider. If you want a full recap, you can go back to those 2 posts where I detailed everything. If not, just suffice it to say that I had trouble with my Dish box and they kept having to send me new ones mainly because their technicians didn't know how to resolve any problems. (As we sometimes say at my office "they're ate up with the dumbass" -- country bumpkin' saying, I know, but my family is from the deep south!) It took about 3 months to get everything sorted out and in the end, I kept the cable box that I initially had because they kept sending the wrong thing.
So anyways, I'm trying to get us situated to move next week. NEXT WEEK!! I've been so organized with our packing and really feel like I'm ahead of schedule on that. This week I've lined up the repairs that we have to do for the buyers, scheduled the movers, and am in the process of turning off our utilities. Everything has gone smoothly until today when I called Dish to cancel our cable. This should have been fairly simple, right? WRONG!!!
I was prepared for them to ask why I was canceling and not transferring our service to our new house, etc. I quickly explained that we're in a temporary situation (aka ... back home with the rentals') right now and wouldn't be needing service immediately. Then the lady begins to explain to me that I am under a 2 year contract, blah, blah, blah. I stopped her right there -- I'm not under contract! She claimed that I was because they had upgraded my receiver last January. I calmly explained to her that:
a) I had been having troubles with my service and they sent me a new receiver because they couldn't offer any other solution
b) new receiver didn't work and I actually sent it back, we went through 2 more before I ended up keeping my old receiver
c) they didn't explain to me that by sending a replacement (non-defective) receiver that I was agreeing to another 2 year contract
I went through all of this with her and once it was clear that she couldn't do anything, I asked to speak with a supervisor. She ended up putting me on hold and came back claiming that she spoke with a supervisor AND her executive team and that they would waive the cancellation fee since they could not find a signed document on file. I'm pretty sure this was one of those cases where they just try to scam their customers into paying a cancellation fee unjustifiably because this (alleged) conversation took all of 60 seconds.
I'm sure this post is pretty boring for anyone reading but there are 2 take-aways here:
1) Dish Network is the devil
2) whenever you feel that you are being treated unfairly by a customer service representative, ALWAYS escalate your problem to a supervisor -- if you don't ask for them to rectify it to your satisfaction they certainly won't do so
Oh and also, I'm not sure who our cable provider will be when we move but I can tell you who we won't be using!
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3 comments:
My mom had Dish network and also had a load of problems. We've had DirecTV and aside from bad weather outages we've been perfectly happy with them. One thing I do recommend you do if you sign up with them is to pay for the $5.00 monthly warranty. We haven't had to use it the past three years but in the past we did and it was well worth it.
I've had DirecTV for over six years, and I truly don't have a single complaint about it. Even the expected satellite outages during bad weather are few and far between- I can recall maybe four in six years (one was during a quarter of the Miami game this year, so I was spared some of the trauma of watching us get trounced). I also love that I can get Sunday Ticket and watch all of the NFL games on Sunday... I'm sure Ben would appreciate that. :)
Ha Ha... Dish Network is the devil. Love it! I despise dealing with the cable companies. They're such a pain.
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