Probably most broadband customers have had the experience. Your service is out and you're sure the problem is on your ISP's end, but all their support geniuses will do is re-read the same troubleshooting script of things you can try for the umpteenth time. But most of us haven't had to go for 25 days without service, spend more than 40 hours talking to innumerable techs, and escalate the case up to a corporate executives before someone finally decided to flip the right switch. That's the nightmare scenario one reader recently lived through when her DirecWay satellite service went south.
On day one, DirecWay made a satellite change that immediately had the effect of knocking out the reader's connection. "I was without both e-mail and Internet," the reader wrote. "Each technician in turn took me through his own various steps of "standard troubleshooting protocol"; I wasn't allowed to talk to the same person twice and DirecWay's support system doesn't allow them to call out to follow up with me even if they'd wanted to."
Although repeatedly asking to speak to supervisors and higher-tier support, the reader could not get seem to get her problem escalated above and beyond those who kept sticking to the script. "On day five without service, the ninth representative I'd spoken to sent my case to engineering," she wrote. "By day 11, no one had called, so I called DirecWay customer support yet again to find out what engineering had determined. But engineering had shot it back down to advanced support for additional troubleshooting, where it sat languishing. On day 12, the 20th support representative with whom I'd spoken decided that my satellite strength was not strong enough to communicate with the new satellite. This representative said he'd arrange for an installer to come out, at DirecWay's cost."
When the installer arrived a week later, he determined the diminished signal strength was due to the weight of the dish causing it to slowly sink into her roof. But fixing that did nothing to re-establish her Internet connection. Fortunately, the reader had not been sitting idly while waiting for the installer to show up. "On day 13, I had finally done what business associates and friends had been urging me to do for days," she wrote. "I elevated the issue myself by calling corporate headquarters at DirecWay, Hughes Networking Systems, and DirecTV Group. At that point, my stats at the time stood at 21 reps, 18 of whom were advanced support or supervisors, and over 15 hours on the phone. To my shock, the representative in "Executive Customer Care" said she could not evaluate my complaint because she's not technical! I asked her if she couldn't understand by my stats alone how bad this was. Her reply: 'What do you want me to do, tell you I sympathize'?"
At the same time, the reader was continuing to call DirecWay support. "One of the technicians decided that the problem must be that my two-year-old DirecWay modem had gone bad," she wrote. "Funny -- it was working fine before DirecWay changed my satellite .... On day 21, I finally heard from the Hughes assistant vice president of customer care for whom I'd been leaving messages for over a week. He did an admirable job of talking me down from my anger and explaining why my remaining DirecWay troubles were my responsibility, not his, even though he readily agreed that DirecWay had so far 'dropped the ball at every turn.' He finally did agree to add two months credit, in addition to my downtime, to at least help defray my costs in moving my dish to a pole mount to save my roof. But he refused to provide any other compensatory gesture for my aggravation, such as a free upgrade to the next version of DirecWay like I suggested. It was my fault because of my obsolete, out-of-warranty equipment ... DirecWay equipment I bought from them less than two years ago."
Of course, as you've probably guessed, it turned out the old modem wasn't the problem at all. "On day 25, the new receiver modem arrived," the reader wrote. "It didn't work. I called the Hughes vice president and, after some hesitation, he said he would have one of his 'senior guys' call me. In less than an hour, this technician determined the settings at their Network Operations Center had been set wrong. He had them reset everything for my account on a new frequency, and I instantly had the connection. He said he thought that 'a little more fact-finding' could have been done earlier."
Like many, the reader doesn't have a whole lot of choices when it comes to broadband, so walking away from DirecWay is not easy to do. Instead, she's written letters to the top execs at Hughes Network and the DirecTV Group describing her ordeal in the hopes of alerting them to their service problems. "What I want is a real apology," says the reader, who has received no response to any of her letters. "It appears though that my litany of troubles has fallen on deaf ears. This fiasco cost me dearly. I'm a consultant working out of my home - I estimate I lost nearly $4,000 over this. That's not to mention the lost sleep and emotional trauma for me and my husband. I want someone there to recognize that these hours and days and weeks were not only costly to me, but to them in the many fruitless man-hours of futile support while I was held hostage with no way out of their maze."
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