Concernity

Howdy.

It's been a while. I know I've neglected you, but I've been busy. Of course, you could always write to me in the comments... that would definitely ensure that I update regularly. You scratch my back, I'll bombard you with thoughts from my head. That's the deal. :)

I'm kidding. I'll post more regularly; I promise. I'm cooking up two, shorter (I hope), stories, so look for those, soon.

Today, though, join me on a crusade. Or, at the very least, a rant.

You know that I live in downtown Cleveland. Well, in the building in which I live, they are wired for DirecTV. Best I can figure, a company wired the whole building so that hundreds of TVs could be run off of just a couple sattelite dishes. The company that does this is called Discernity (ah! Now the title makes sense!). It's a set up that allows the property owner to make money off of TV service, and I'm not really clear past that. What it means to me, is this: I pay two different entities for this service, and I talk to two different entities when there's a problem.

The part of this cluster-fuck that I want to focus on is the support side. One must call Discernity directly when something goes wrong. Only, one doesn't call Discernity. One calls an answering service that attempts to connect the caller to a Discernity technician. First RED FLAG. If the operator can't get a hold of one of the technicians, he or she leaves a message for the tech to call the user (me) back. That's all well and good, but you have better odds winning Russian Roullette than getting a call back from these people. Second RED FLAG.

I'm sure you gathered, by now, that I had a problem that needed to be fixed. My service was interrupted sometime on Friday, June 6, and it wasn't fixed until TUESDAY, June 10. That, isn't neccessarily a problem, but here's the email I sent to their customer service manager, which details the whole thing.

To whom it may concern,

Last Friday, sometime before 6:30PM Eastern, our DirecTV service was lost.

I placed a call to Discernity on Saturday at 11am, and was led to believe that a technician would come out that day to look at it. After four more calls, that day, to Discernity, I finally reached someone who told me that no one would be out until Monday. I was not told this during my initial call.

Once Monday came, I called Discernity, again, to get an estimated time of arrival for the technician. No one was to be home, and I wanted to make sure the staff at the apartment would know when to let the tech into the apartment. After four calls, I received a voicemail stating that the technician wasn't coming in, today, so I was pushed back until Tuesday. There was no reason given for this. For all I know, the technician just didn't feel like coming in.

On Tuesday, I called again to get an ETA for the technician. I was told that he would arrive between 12 and 4PM, so I informed the apartment staff. I also asked Discernity to inform me when the work was completed. I never received that call. When I returned home, I had to reset all of my receivers to discover that it was, in fact fixed. I was never informed by anyone that the work was completed.

I then called Discernity again, to find out what the problem was. No one ever returned my call. I got a hold of a tech on Wednesday, and she told me she would find out what went wrong and tell me, but I have yet to hear back.

I am glad that my service is restored, but I am sorely disappointed with the level of support I received. I understand there were issues in other parts of your coverage area over the weekend, but a call back to let me know this, plus a follow-up later would have gone a long way. Also, if one technician calls off, and your support for an area is crippled because of this, that tells me that you are severely understaffed.

I work in the support field myself. I know that if I treated my users the way I was treated over the past four days, and if my users were rendered incapacitated for that long, I would lose my job. I did not have a problem with your service until this week. I like DirecTV. I'd like to continue to enjoy it. While I know you can't guarantee that service will never be interrupted again, I would like some reassurance that you will be better prepared to address the issue and keep me (and other customers) aprised of your efforts, in the future.

It's all about follow up, folks. If you keep someone informed about the progress of fixing their issue, even if little progress has been made, it goes a long way.

Do you think I was overreacting? Drop a comment and let me know what you think. Also, feel free to share your customer service woes. Every company seems so obssessed with customer service, these days, but things like this make me laugh at that "obsession."

And, finally, just be wary of Discernity. They are in a few other areas in the midwest, at least (their locations are on the website).