Ever wanted to murder your internet provider?

[|iR|Focalor]

I have plenty of horror stories dealing with my internet provider. But I swear to Jesus butthole pogo-sticking Christ, if I had EVER had some fucking bastard like this guy trying to wrestle me into submission with his lengthy mentally taxing bullshit company-man spiel, I would've rode to his office, broke whatever door down, found HIM PERSONALLY AT HIS DESK, and beat him unconscious with his telephone. And I would gladly take an assault or attempted murder charge for it. I'd be smiling all the way to jail.

My fucking god, man. This shit didn't even happen to ME PERSONALLY, and it still makes me fuming fucking mad just to hear it.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/a-guy-recorded-his-phone-call-when-he-tried-to-cancel-cable--and-it-s-a-total-nightmare-143731521.html

[quadz]

My fucking god, man. This shit didn't even happen to ME PERSONALLY, and it still makes me fuming fucking mad just to hear it.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/a-guy-recorded-his-phone-call-when-he-tried-to-cancel-cable--and-it-s-a-total-nightmare-143731521.html

Ugh.

Interesting comments from someone who claims to have recently left Comcast after having been employed there as a senior business analyst for 9 years. His post details how the punitive incentive structure affecting the "retention" department leads to this sort of obnoxious behavior from the representatives:


http://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/2arg1k/comcasts_customer_service_nightmare_is_painful_to/ciy33bx

http://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/2arg1k/comcasts_customer_service_nightmare_is_painful_to/ciy3e49

When you call in to disconnect, you get routed to the Retention department, their job is to try to keep you. The guy on the phone is a Retention Specialist (which is just a Customer Account Executive who takes primarily calls from people disconnecting their service.)

If I was reviewing this guys calls I'd agree that this is an example of going a little too hard at it, but here's the deal (and this is not saying they're doing the right thing, this is just how it works). First of all these guys have a low hourly rate. In the states I've worked in they start at about 10.50-12$/hr. The actual money that they make comes from their metrics for the month which depends on the department they're in. In sales this is obvious, the more sales you make the better you do.

In retention, the more products you save per customer the better you do, and the more products you disconect the worst you do (if a customer with a triple play disconnects, you get hit as losing every one of those lines of business, not just losing one customer.) These guys fight tooth and nail to keep every customer because if they don't meet their numbers they don't get paid.

Comcast uses "gates" for their incentive pays, which means that if you fall below a certain threshold (which tend to be stretch goals in the first place) then instead of getting a reduced amount, you get 0$. Let's say that if you retain 85% of your customers or more (this means 85% of the lines of businesses that customers have when they talk to you, they still have after they talk to you), you get 100% of your payout - which might be 5-10$ per line of business. At 80% you might only get 75% of your payout, and at 75% you get nothing.

The CAEs (customer service reps) watch these numbers daily, and will fight tooth and nail to stay above the "I get nothing" number. This guy went too far, you're not supposed to flat out argue with them. But comcast literally provides an incentive for this kind of behavior. It's the same reason peoples bills are always fucked up, people stuffing them with things they don't need or in some cases don't even agree to.

[...]

[They get a low hourly rate] and their actual pay that pays their bills comes from incentives. The retention department (who cancels your service) is punished for every line of business they lose. If your metrics for LOBs you've lost falls too low, you get 0$, 1 percentage point can be the difference between getting 3000$ this month and getting 0$. It's not a sliding scale, there are hard cutoffs.

If the above is true--and while not excusing the obnoxious behavior of the Comcast representative in the recorded phone call--it's easy to imagine how someone might crack under the pressure of knowing they're just a few phone calls away from losing a significant portion of their monthly income if they can't somehow convince these next few callers not to disconnect their service.

Pretty rotten corporate culture.





As a side note, his comments about the money ISP's rake in from artificial tiered bandwidth structures and caps being a means of generating profit that's wildly disconnected from their actual infrastructure expenses, echoes what I've read from other analysts:

the 300gb cap with a 10$ charge per every 50GB block over that is very much already in effect in a large number of cities, and rolling out to more. You get 3 free passes per year, you'll get a phone call/email if you're approaching or go over your limit.
[...]
They're going to increase your bill 3-5% twice a year, it's part of the annual budgeting process even though our costs actually go down. The internet business (as in, high speed customers) is almost purely profit, and it's turned down on purpose like everyone here already knows. Comcast has DOCSIS 3 capabilities and the infrastructure to support it in most major areas (this means gigabit speeds, by the way) - it can be activated simply by pushing the proper bootfiles out to the modems. This can be evidenced anywhere they have competition, they can respond overnight.

If there's not a serious change in legislation or regulation, I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel.

[|iR|Focalor]

Yeah, they know they have everyone by the short and curlies, and service is even worse when you live in an area like I do where one DSL provider basically has a monopoly. Literally NO ONE ELSE offers DSL in this area, you either go with their DSL, or you get suckered into paying for sub-par satellite internet service.

Speaking of which, think I heard something about how at one point years and years ago, federal regulations forced AT&T to break up due to anti-trust laws because they had shamelessly demolished any hope for anyone else to compete with them, at which point you had companies like Southern Bell, Northern Bell, Pacific Bell, etc. And fast-forward to modern times, the parent company has bought back all the subsidiaries and now runs them all separately to skirt through the loophole in the law, but still basically have a monopoly on all telecommunications in the US. Verizon, Sprint, whatever, it's all really the same thing and the competition is just a mere illusion. Any competition they might've had, just like before the antitrust case, they buy them out or "merge".

And for anyone reading this who might not know what a telecommunications merger is like... it's like if Hydrox, who makes REALLY REALLY shitty versions of Oreo cookies, were to purchase the entire Oreo cookie company... and then they still make Hydrox cookies at the Hydrox factory, and start making Hydrox cookies at the Oreo factory too and sticking them into printed Oreo bags. Everyone buys them and says, "Man,... these Oreo's taste like shit!" And no matter how shitty they taste, people still HAVE to buy them, because for some reason you just can't get by without having some cookies.

Or maybe that was a bad analogy. Shut the fuck up and have some cookies regardless.

[Barton]

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-28335713

Comcast will surely come out with a blanket apology. I doubt that they will have to change the way they do business in customer service, since they are too big of a company to be dissuaded by negative publicity.

 

[fdrjk]

holy shit that rep sounds desperate.

its like bizarro tech support, the calm customer trying to talk to the aggressively confused rep.

[ex]

That rep is insane.  I work in sales/customer retention, but would never imagine trying to go after any customer that hard.  I've worked in this kind of industry for many different companies over the years, and the general rule of thumb is the "3rd time's a charm" rule, i.e. try hard twice to get the customer to stay/join, but by the time you have tried a 3rd time, you are badgering the customer and might as well let him go at that point, because you aren't going to win him back anyway.

I lost count how many times this guy tried to go after him.  Amazingly, this isn't considered harassment legally.  It's very untactful and showing the level of insanity that a high-pressure sales environment can produce, but holy shit, it's not that important.

There are obvious pay incentives.  Sales would be a pointless industry if there wasn't some kind of commission structure.  The way Comcast was described by the guy quadz posted sounds very scary, though.  Straight-up dropoffs?  I would refuse to work for them if that is true.  The company I work for pays you a set rate of commission per-sale with "royalty" commissions off the monthly billings.  The base rate is average, but the commission ability helps to make up for it, which is fine.  That is pure insanity if that is how Comcast conducts business for its employees/customers.  And here I thought other companies were bad...that sounds downright psychotic.

No matter what the situation though, I would just deal with making less money rather than go after a customer that many times.  Most jobs would fire you for this behavior.  Then again...amazingly, there are some that won't...

CarSafe:

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/auto_warranty/carsafe.html

http://www.bbb.org/stlouis/business-reviews/auto-service-contract-companies/carsafe-in-saint-charles-mo-310250957

Those agents are truly some scary folks.  CarSafe is out of business now (thanks to the horrible way they chose to conduct business).  They would literally SCREAM at the top of their lungs at you if you came at them with any type of objections, or even basic questions, to what they do and how their service works.  And of course, their "extended service plans" wouldn't fix shit on a car, so you basically would have to pay them thousands of dollars for a service that they would promise to fix things for, only to find out it was all flat-out lies and you would have to pay out of pocket for your repairs anyway, AND pay off CarSafe as well.  After all, you signed a contract; there went your rights to objection.

I think the best term that sums up the American experience is "buyer beware."  Have to be very careful with yourself and your money to make it in the good ole U.S. of A.

[|iR|Focalor]

Not really related to "internet providers", but kinda-sorta related.

http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/21/dish-loses-turner-channels/

Found out about this last night as I was channel surfing and noticed that Cartoon Network and Boomerang were nowhere to be found and where they were was currently occupied by some kind of Dish Info channels, none of which explained what the fuck was going on and why those channels were gone. Not a big huge deal. Really only one show on any of those channels that I ever kept up with: Squidbillies. Maybe you've heard of it. But sometimes late at night if absolutely nothing else was on, I'd watch Family Guy or American Dad on one or two of the cartoon channels.

Kinda pisses me off. They gave NO warning about it. They give NO explanation about it unless you go online and look, like I just did. And I wouldn't be upset at all about it except for the fact that I've seen this all before with Dish, how they can't reach "agreements" with people and end up having to cut programing out temporarily or permanently. They did the same shit with Atlanta Braves baseball and the local Peachtree TV channel several years back. Then when Dish finally starved them into submission, the contract only lasted one season and then Braves baseball was back in TV limbo again. Before that happened, I could see EVERY LAST Braves game on TV. Afterwards... now I barely get the option to see 10 games A YEAR.

And kinda like in baseball... I'm keeping tally of this shit. This is strike TWO for Dish Network. At strike three, they ain't out, I am. I (and everyone else) pay too damn much to these pricks to be stuck in the middle of their corporate strongarming bullshit. They wanna pay dirt cheap prices for their channels and maximize profits while offering service for the cheapest price around, and I get it. But I'm starting to believe that it would be worth it to pay a little more to another satellite provider and have the peace of mind of knowing that I'm always gonna have the channels I expected to have when I signed up to begin with.

[Alpha]

Me and my brother had an experience last week. I went over to his place because he was having issues with his PC and internet. For about 3 weeks his ping has been 250 or there abouts which was not normal for what it used to be. So I do virus scans for him ect ect. cleaned his pc up a bit. Then i did a few traces to tastyspleen server through winmtr. I then posted the results on a forum and on their face book page to see what was going on because he was getting massive packet loss. Next thing I get a phone call saying they were going to sue us for defemation if we did not remove what was posted. I was like WHAT? They had to be joking right? After an hour on the phone saying that the numbers in the trace done where not possible and all the numbers were made up, they were saying they were going to sue us for defemation because its bad advertising for their ISP. I couldn't believe the phone conversation I was having with these morons.

In any event i ended up removing the posts because It was just going to be one major issue and they were dead serious about taking us to court over a simple winmtr which showed how bad the connection was. Companies like this should not be in business

[|iR|Focalor]

Ha!

Pretty sure they can't sue you for defamation. Dunno what the laws are down under, but it sounds like bullshit intimidation to me. At any rate, that's why it's good if you have the money to do so to have a lawyer on retainer. I haven't needed a lawyer for anything in years, but after some of the shit I've dealt with in the past, I know it's always best to have one on your keyring just in case. At the very least if you get tossed into the county drunk tank, you can always call them to post your bail if there's no one else. Eh... It's an expensive key to have on your keyring just for bailing you out after a night of drunk and disorderly conduct, but you never know what else might happen. I personally consider it to be as essential as car insurance or homeowners insurance. You usually don't need it, but if you do, you can be completely fucked without it.

Some of these companies actually outsource to "reputation companies" (dunno exactly what you call them) that troll the web, finding ways to get negative content taken down, posting repeated bullshit positive reviews, etc etc.

Honestly, if I were you, I'd post MORE shit in as many places as possible. When they call you back, tell them you don't appreciate them calling you to make repeated threats and you're gonna contact the police and press charges for harassment and stalking.

[quadz]

After an hour on the phone saying that the numbers in the trace done where not possible and all the numbers were made up

I'd be happy to run mtr traces from tastyspleen.net to your brother's IP if you like.

Having traces from both sides can tend to pinpoint the problem pretty well.

[Alpha]

I'd be happy to run mtr traces from tastyspleen.net to your brother's IP if you like.

Having traces from both sides can tend to pinpoint the problem pretty well.

yeah sure, why not.