Hats off to a cable company

[Karl Laustrup]

While I was in Chicago Sunday, my wife called to tell me the cable had gone out at 7 AM Sunday morning. I told her to call the cable company, which she did and was told they were aware of the outage and were working on it.

I returned home Monday at 1 PM to find the cable still out. I called and found that they were still working on the problem [which I had heard on the radio, on my way home, was a cut fibre optic caused by a traffic accident]. Cable was restored at 2 PM, after 32 hours of being down. That's 32 HOURS OF NO TV AND IN MY CASE NO SMC either. I had planned on calling and getting a reduction on my bill for the lost service in the next day or two.

Imagine my surprise when this afternoon [1/25/05] I get a phone call. It is a recorded message from a honcho at Charter Communications apologizing for the outage and praising Charter technicians that worked continuously to restore service. He goes on to say that all affected customers will have their bill adjusted for the loss of service. I've been without service before and been able to get my bill adjusted, with a little arm twisting.

With some of the other posts here about companies taking care of the customer, I thought this was worth a few minutes of my time. Especially when you consider it involves a cable company, even though I have never experienced anything like some of the horror stories I've read.

So a hats off to Charter Communication.

I am in no way affiliated with Charter Communication. I'm just a subscriber.

[Randy Moore]

Karl,
I am happy that you had to do no arm twisting. Sometimes that comes back to haunt you, at least me it does. With what cable companies charge these days I am delighted to see they thought of the customer instead of just themselves.

Randy

[Jim Becker]

Verizon had a similar outage about a week and a half ago...SE PA and upper Delaware was out from a DSL standpoint for much of the day. A few days later, 'got both a similar phone call as you did as well as an email with the same text. They are finally starting to "get it"...

Dialup was PAINFUL!!! But then again, my phone wasn't ringing either since I needed to use the same line for the IP connection that I would normally have my softphone call me on.

[Ted Shrader]

Karl -

Good for them. A couple of $$ spent in actually performing custimer service goes a long way. There are a few companies that are trying hard.

Ted

[Chris Padilla]

To hear that about a cable company is refreshing. We have Comcast here in the Bay Area (used to be AT&T) and they are advertising all over the place how CS is #1 with them. I think it has improved although it took me 2 calls to get a problem I had fixed.

[JayStPeter]

To hear that about a cable company is refreshing. We have Comcast here in the Bay Area (used to be AT&T) and they are advertising all over the place how CS is #1 with them. I think it has improved although it took me 2 calls to get a problem I had fixed.

Wow, only 2 calls. And then they actually fixed the problem. Oh how I long for the days with (my former nemesis) Comcast. If DSL was available here, I wouldn't be dealing with this podunk cable company we have. After being in my house for a mere year and a half, I could fill a page with examples of pathetic customer service.

Jay (who has had a 100' piece of cable laid across his yard since May)

[Chris Padilla]

Sorry to hear that, Jay! Threaten to rent a trencher and charge them if they don't deal with it! Tell them you get $30/hr to run the trencher, too....