A Letter to Glenn Britt

(5/24/07 update below)

Time Warner Cable CEO
Glenn Britt

CC: his Technical Service Staff

Dear Glenn,

I have decided that the only way to balance the equation of my getting what I pay Time Warner Cable for and what I actually receive is to reduce the dollar amount paid to $0.

You're fired.

Why? Oh, let's just talk about the last few months (going back 3 years and over 30 on-site service calls would be somewhat tedious.)

Since last fall, I have had a dual-cablecard-and-tivo3 setup. Every time something goes wrong (say, the cablecards suddenly stop receiving premium channels, while the broadcast channels are perfectly OK) I am forced to make an appointment for an on-site service call, usually over a week into the future, during which I have no TV service. During said service call, all the technician does is dial in to the tech service center (the same one I dialed into a week prior to make the appointment), give them the serial number of the cable cards and we hope for the best. I could have done that myself.

My point, and the source of my frustration, is that whatever may or may not be wrong with the technology is moot as far as customers receiving the service they need if you hire uneducated, untrained, unmotivated, unempowered drones to do the job of a voice-response system and call it customer service ("I'm sorry sir, but we can't do that over the phone; you'll have to schedule a service call", etc etc).

Well, I can't hold my full-time job of tending to the animals at Neverland or whatever it is I do for a living and jump through hoops for the amusement of the cost-effectiveness analysts you hired that told you that paying tech support technicians $15/hr and just throw quantity-over-quality brute force at the problem is the way to serve your customers (yes, that's what I was told you pay them, you bastard; meanwhile your compensation for the year leading to April '07 was enough to pay for 304 field technicians for one year).

I'm looking forward to FiOS becoming available in my neighborhood (soon enough; they have it barely a mile away). To quote one of your tech people letting me know about the setup he himself had at his house as we were killing time in my living room on hold with a service center operator: "FiOS is the shit". I'm sure he knows.



In the meantime, maybe I'll get some reading done... (my in-shelf is quite full, and I've got a small stack of New Yorkers to get through...)



(for folks of the same mind as me, especially if you live in Brooklyn, please do drop your comments -- or, if you prefer, my personal address is j u a n m at p a n i x . c 0 m ).

05/27/07 Update: When the technician came to collect the cablecards -- something I was categorically forbidden to do myself because "it requires expertise to remove them and if they become damaged as a result [I] would have to pay for them" he first (1) tried to unscrew the coax from the back of my Tivo thinking that it was a cable box and he was supposed to take it with him, and (2) had to be told which/what the cablecards were, and (3) I had to remove them for him because he didn't know how. This is the fun one has with Time Warner Cable.