Josh Sherman
I’m all about capitalism but I’m sick and fucking tired of constantly being met with the resistance from a sales person.
Case in point, we moved this month and needed to transfer our Internet service.
Pretty simple situation, nothing needed to change on our plan, just the address that the service was to be connected to.
I would expect something like change of address / service transfer to be something I could simply schedule online. Knowing the new place previous had service from the same provider, I wouldn’t even expect the need for a technician to come out.
But of course we needed to call to initiate / schedule the transfer.
Our Internet provider is Spectrum or Charter or Time Warner. I don’t even fucking know anymore. These mergers and acquisitions would be terrific if they’d flip the switch on the branding instead of remaining an amalgamation of companies long forgotten.
Probably worth noting that we don’t have telephone or cable service, just Internet, because it’s 2017.
I assume due to the all of the recent activity with the companies involved, internally our service plan showed a mere 50 up/down versus the 300 up/down we have due to an ancillary package I had added when we initially moved and the company was actually Time Warner Cable.
Because of this, the sales representative that was handling the call saw an opportunity to make a sale and pounced.
We could have saved 5$ per month if we switched to some other promo plan that would have doubled our [not accurate] speed from 50 to 100 and provided us some mystical VoIP plan AND a free router.
Nothing in life is free.
So let’s dissect this new plan a bit shall we?
So right out of the gate, we’d save 5$ per month. This would put us into a 12 month promotional period and the rate would go up at the end of 12 months. I know this because that’s how the plan I am on now worked and our rate went up by 15$ per month at the end of the promo period. If the same is true, we’ll be paying 10$ more per month after a year.
I’m still not sure what the fuck the whole VoIP thing is. Sounds to me like they are tricking us into getting phone service with them. I assume the phone service would require me to buy a phone or lease a phone from them or something. We have T-Mobile and we can do WiFi calling already.
Regarding the modem, we already own our own cable modem and router. Why? Because I’ve paid for that shit in the past and have decided I’m not going to in the future. But they want me to take a free modem. I assume the free modem is shittier than the one I bought outright and I have to assume somewhere in the pricing is a line item for the hardware lease.
Not to mention the fact that our 300 up/down service would be cut by 2/3 down to 100 up/down.
SOUNDS GREAT LET’S DO THAT.
The best part is that my wife was the one handling all of this and made mention that somebody in the background had mentioned how they have a quota.
A quota for what? Upgrades? Tricking people into services they don’t want or need?
All we wanted to do was transfer service. We weren’t cancelling so not like this was a retention situation.
Perhaps all of this would have been avoided if they had their shit together and had an accurate view of our current plan.
Actually, I digress, I doubt anything would have changed. Bet they would have still tried to sell the fact that we could have cable with a DVR and a phone or some combination therein that would have miraculously saved us money!
Perhaps is the existing local cable monopolies would start putting customer service before sales they wouldn’t be faced with their impending extinction.
Sad truth is, they had actually dodged a bullet with us moving. Google Fiber just came to our old neighborhood and I was ready to pull the trigger on switching.
Based on this experience, if Google Fiber makes it to our new neighborhood, I’m going to be the first person on the block breaking up with Time Warner / Spectrum / Charter / whatever they’ll be called by then.
