Hi all,
I have been a dish customer for about 20 years. I moved out of an apartment a year ago in preparation of getting married and called to pause my Dish service for a few months while I transitioned. I was married in the fall and moved into my wife's house. It took a while to get moved in and settled, but now I am ready to do the dish mover and get service reconnected in my new home. About a month before I was ready to start the process, I got an email that said my bill was late. I have gotten $0 monthly bills from Dish the entire time of the service pause, so didn't notice until too late that I was suddenly being charged my full monthly service fee.
I figured a mistake had been made, and when I called in to get service moved and turned back on I could clear it up. When I finally did call in, I had a very poor experience. I was told by the support rep that my service had been disconnected due to non-payment. I laughed and said that I had paused the service months before, so there was nothing to disconnect.
He then said that the service was automatically resumed after 9 months and that I had been told that would happen when I called to pause the service. I don't remember being told that, but I may well have been since it was a crazy time and I was calling lots of services to get things turned off as I moved. I explained that I hadn't realized that I needed to call to extend the service pause and that my dish receiver had been in a moving box since I paused it last year (Dish should be able to pull up the records that show that it has been and still is offline) and that if they would remove the charges for the months that I had the service mistakenly turned on, I was ready to schedule a reconnect and would start paying in full once I was connected.
The customer service agent offered me a $50 cost offset, then refused to let me talk to a manager when I insisted that was the next step. When I told the rep that I wouldn't proceed without talking to a manager and was considering disconnecting the service, he said that I could pay the balance or cancel service, but he wouldn't let me talk to a supervisor. I just want to get service turned back on now, but I don't think it reasonable to have to pay over $300 for TV services that I didn't receive as my receiver was in storage. I also understand that DIsh was paying license fees for those two months that they want to recoup, but that just begs the question as to why Dish would, as a matter of policy, turn someone's service back on without them calling in to turn it back on.
So, I think where I have landed is that I am going to go ahead and pay the balance for the 2 months they say that I owe, and just cancel the service. Dish would seem to prefer to get 2 months of dead money from me rather than reactive me with a $0 balance so that I can start paying them again in perpetuity.
Two lessons learned though. First, before you suspend the service, drop the package down to the minimum so that if they turn it back on before you are ready you are getting billed the cheapest amount, not the full package price ($150/month in my case) for your normal programming package. Second, there has been a decided change in tone at Dish customer service since I last called in. To have an escalation refused and no attempt made to resolve the issue in a mutually beneficial way was jarring and a surprisingly negative experience.
Am I being unreasonable?
I have been a dish customer for about 20 years. I moved out of an apartment a year ago in preparation of getting married and called to pause my Dish service for a few months while I transitioned. I was married in the fall and moved into my wife's house. It took a while to get moved in and settled, but now I am ready to do the dish mover and get service reconnected in my new home. About a month before I was ready to start the process, I got an email that said my bill was late. I have gotten $0 monthly bills from Dish the entire time of the service pause, so didn't notice until too late that I was suddenly being charged my full monthly service fee.
I figured a mistake had been made, and when I called in to get service moved and turned back on I could clear it up. When I finally did call in, I had a very poor experience. I was told by the support rep that my service had been disconnected due to non-payment. I laughed and said that I had paused the service months before, so there was nothing to disconnect.
He then said that the service was automatically resumed after 9 months and that I had been told that would happen when I called to pause the service. I don't remember being told that, but I may well have been since it was a crazy time and I was calling lots of services to get things turned off as I moved. I explained that I hadn't realized that I needed to call to extend the service pause and that my dish receiver had been in a moving box since I paused it last year (Dish should be able to pull up the records that show that it has been and still is offline) and that if they would remove the charges for the months that I had the service mistakenly turned on, I was ready to schedule a reconnect and would start paying in full once I was connected.
The customer service agent offered me a $50 cost offset, then refused to let me talk to a manager when I insisted that was the next step. When I told the rep that I wouldn't proceed without talking to a manager and was considering disconnecting the service, he said that I could pay the balance or cancel service, but he wouldn't let me talk to a supervisor. I just want to get service turned back on now, but I don't think it reasonable to have to pay over $300 for TV services that I didn't receive as my receiver was in storage. I also understand that DIsh was paying license fees for those two months that they want to recoup, but that just begs the question as to why Dish would, as a matter of policy, turn someone's service back on without them calling in to turn it back on.
So, I think where I have landed is that I am going to go ahead and pay the balance for the 2 months they say that I owe, and just cancel the service. Dish would seem to prefer to get 2 months of dead money from me rather than reactive me with a $0 balance so that I can start paying them again in perpetuity.
Two lessons learned though. First, before you suspend the service, drop the package down to the minimum so that if they turn it back on before you are ready you are getting billed the cheapest amount, not the full package price ($150/month in my case) for your normal programming package. Second, there has been a decided change in tone at Dish customer service since I last called in. To have an escalation refused and no attempt made to resolve the issue in a mutually beneficial way was jarring and a surprisingly negative experience.
Am I being unreasonable?
