timmac said:
I just told a friend to go with D*. He signed up and told them I referred them and they set up an appt to install the equip (HD TIVO) and on the day that they are suppose to be there, they never show up. The people that were suppose to come called him and said they didn't have the equipment so they were going to postpone. So, he calls up D* and they said he was never scheduled for an appt but that he could schedule him and it was going to take about a month. This was supposibly a supervisor. My friend was upset and saying things and the supervisor said, we never had you scheduled and we think that you're just trying to get something for free. My friend is now staying with cable and questioned my knowledge of D* as a good service.
This is extremely frustrating. Arggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Your friend's experience sounds very similar to mine, about 6 weeks ago I ordered a bunch of HD upgrade equipment from DirecTV, the bill being over $800 (before rebates), but when the guy showed up to install it (several hours late) he barely spoke English and didn't have the equipment, then he said (so far as I could tell) that he was going to try to go buy the receiver at Circuit City and would be back in 20 minutes. He never came back, and by then business hours were over so I couldn't get in touch with anyone. When I finally did get in touch with them the next day they claimed they had called me back and rescheduled for a few days later. So I got angry and cancelled the order, then went and got the stuff from Circuit City myself and got it all working no problem (well that's the short version but anyway). So a week or so later I hadn't got the refund so I called and they said they were escalating it to their finance department, but that was all they could do because it is not possible even for them (the cust service reps) to reach their finance department by phone. I am not making this up. So in the meantime I had a bunch of stuff going on with Circuit City involving refunds so when I called my CC company to get my transactions it doesn't say who they were from so I couldn't tell for sure if the refund had gone through, so I decided to wait for my statement. Statement came last Friday, no refund. I cancelled the order on August 25. So I called back today, and the rep told me...that she would escalate it to the finance department. As I started to lose it she said that I was correct, it did say that it had been previously escalated but she was not sure why it hadn't gone through. But all she could do was escalate it, and couldn't give me any other numbers to call. I think possibly Bin Laden is holed up in the DirecTV finance department, it would seem to be the most inaccessible place in the world. I asked what I was to do if it didn't go through and she said to call back the customer service number in a couple days, but it might not go through because "They are dealing with a lot of issues because of the hurricanes."
A couple years ago I would have said DirecTV's customer service was excellent, I used to go on and on about it to friends, but since they re-won the Sunday Ticket contract they seem to have abandoned all pretense of customer service.
