Posted in a survey after reporting an issue to time Warner:
As someone who works in the same EXACT field as your techs I am EXTREMELY dissatisfied with support. I provide technical support for an ISP located in NYC who deals with both commercial and residential customers. My issue is with your tech’s inability to troubleshoot a issue properly, which may be related to the tools you use and a poor turn around on repair issues.
First I’d like to say the only satisfaction I have is the removal of the automated system, which only purpose was to filter customers before they can get to tech support and infuriate customers who already completed level 1 troubleshooting. Let me start at the beginning. While using my home connection for over 5 years I must say that the stability of this circuit is the only redeeming quality. I do notice significant slowdowns but manage to over look them while watching my high definition cable and DVR box which functions more as a high def VCR during an earthquake, but I understand that is not your department.
At some point while working from home I noticed I was having extremely slow surfing speeds. I managed to ignore it till later on in the evening I started trying to book a flight and experienced timeouts. Since I am a tech (not a tier 1 tech either), I do understand the importance of ruling out your own equipment and a basic power cycling never hurts anyone. This was performed prior to calling in and I was still having issues when I called.
When I called in I was instructed to perform these steps that I already completed, but your tech was nice enough to listen to me and understood I did these steps already (unlike many of your other techs). At this point I was instructed to perform a speed test using http://speedtest.nyc.rr.com/ . While waiting for this test to finish for over 5 mins and showing a download speed of .25 Mbs, I was told this is not normal (obviously) and was told that this may be sent to a tier 2 tech. At this point I informed your tech that my test had kicked speed up at the end and finished showing a down speed of 8000kbps. I noticed that your speed test does not report your average speed but only reports your highest speed. I could not get a tier 2 escalation since my testing results were “within margins”. Being told this only seconds after hearing your tech say this should not take this long is ridiculous. If I have a customer who is experiencing timeouts, there is obviously an issue and other testing should be done rather than a relying solely on tools that can, in this case, give false positives.
I thought this issue to be resolved after this call. This was obviously not the case. Immediately after this call I noticed significant packet loss. Packet loss, as we all know, can lead us to believe we have slow speeds. While testing I was seeing loss up to 40% which renders a connection useless. I called back and was sent to what I believe to be a tier 2 tech. I was informed by this tech there may be a bigger issue on my end and he will need to setup a dispatch. Imagine my disbelief when I am informed that the soonest dispatch I can look forward to is Nov 5th. I told your tech this is unbelievable. He informed me dispatches are on a first come first serve basis and even assigning a higher level tech to this job yielding an even later commit.
As someone who works in this field and deals with several carriers on all types of services on a daily basis, I must say this is a piss poor way to treat your customers. I understand that this is a residential line and has a different TOS as oppose to commercial services but this is a joke. Even dealing with Verizon, who usually has some of the worst commits I’ve seen working Telco, I have never seen a commit of 10 Business Days, excluding the weekends your techs dispatch on as well. I can’t dare imagine telling my manager the soonest we can have a tech to a customer’s site is over 2 business days but I do understand that your company does have a significantly larger customer base, which is why I would imagine your company having a larger dispatch department.
I expect an explanation as to why my service is treated as second class. Is a 10 business day commit normal for your company? I wanted to get this repaired ASAP because despite being my personal connection I do use this for work and I am going away from Oct 31st – Nov 7th and will be working from this connection the moment I get back. It looks like I will be having problems with this plan at this rate.
Tags: #timewarner #crapservice #yiwantfios
