I’ve had the “pleasure” of dealing with Time Warner customer support two or three times in the last month.  (One time the queue was too long and I gave up.)

The one thing I liked

Time Warner lets you contact customer service via online chat rather than sitting on the phone.  It still takes forever, but at least one can do something else during that time.  The first time I was #41.  The second time I was #37 (and decided not to wait.)  Today I was #15.  The pace crawled today compared to the first time.   Now that we’ve gotten the good stuff out of the way, let’s go through what happened.

Contact #1

Saturday September 18th I contacted customer service to make sure they knew the cable was out in my building.  This was about a day and a half after a tornado hit my area.  Both Verizon DSL/Time Warner Cable were out in my building and DSL had just come back.  (luckily power was not affected.)  Now I figured someone else had already reported the cable being out, but was just checking in case.

Result: The rep said he would credit my account for the inconvenience.  That’s nice, but I have to complaint to get a credit?  They know the whole building didn’t have cable.  It should be automatic.  I’m a bit peeved you have to complain to get a credit.

Contact #1.5

My DVR was ok so I watched some recorded shows.  On Monday, I thought “surely it will have been fixed by now” and decided to reboot the cable box.  After all, it helps with computers.  After rebooting, my cable box couldn’t tell what time it was, what was on the DVR or that I was even a customer.  Not good.  I tried to contact customer service to ask about this, but the queue was too long and I gave up.

The high tech notification system

I found out the cable was back Tuesday when I threw out the garbage and noticed the super of our building put a sign on the elevator saying the cable was back.  Thank you!  I had tried when I got home and the cable was still out.  I wasn’t going to try again that night.

Contact #2

I got my bill e-mailed and no credit.  Sigh.  I thought we went through this on September 18th.  The rep I chatted with this time (Pablo) says there will be a credit of $19.42 on next month’s bill.  If  it isn’t done then, I’m giving up the time and calling on the telephone to speak to the supervisor.  That would be time to ask for *another* inconvenience credit for the time I’ve wasted with their lousy support.

False promises

The chat form asks if you want to be e-mailed a transcript.  I clicked yes and never received anything.  Why offer it if you aren’t going to send one?

And finally

And finally, I’d like to commend Con Edison,Verizon and the city/parks/etc for their prompt work in fixing things, removing trees/debris and overall making the area.