I woke up yesterday to find that our broadband internet service, provided by Time Warner Cable was not working. I performed my normal troubleshooting (Working in IT tends to give me an edge in this department) and after several minutes, I decided to call TWC customer service to see if there was any service outages. After navigating the voice prompts I finally was connected to "Daniel", a seemingly nice guy with a slight Latino accent. He "tested" my cable modem and verified it was working and also confirmed there were no service outages in my area. Having a customer service background, I tend to go through life trying to have some sympathy for those doing customer service based jobs so I let "Daniel" ask me all the mundane questions and I did everything he asked.
After a few minutes, I was cold transferred to a Latina (with a much thicker accent...I never understood her name) in L2 support. Again, I allowed her to ask me all the questions "Daniel" did, including verifying my name, service address, home phone number, and account number. After a while she informed me that my cable modem was "quarantined". I asked her why and she said that she did not know, but most of the time it is because of viruses and spam. Knowing this was not the case, I informed her that I was working from home and needed my broadband connection to do my job. She then gave me the toll free number to the security department. Why she could not do this, I don't know. I thought that customer service was about a single point of contact?
Nonetheless I called the number as was greeted with a very long and unprofessionally recorded message asking me to leave my contact info and a brief description of the issue and they would call me back. I left the required info and hung up. In the mean time I pulled out my Sprint Aircard so I could at least log on to work and check mail.
A few hours later I received a call from an Anglo female who told me that I had been mailed several notices to come in and have my cable modem swapped out. I told her that my modem was mine...I bought it 8 years ago and there was nothing to swap out. I also told her I was only sent one notice (about a week ago) and we already called TWC customer service to see if needed an upgraded modem and we were told beyond the shadow of a doubt that we were fine. The lady from security told me there was a breakdown in communication at the CS level and my modem (a DOCSIS 1.0 compliant Linksys) was not going to work on the new network they were rolling out and I needed and upgrade. I was informed that TWC does not charge for the cable modems like Comcast does (or did) so I could just drop by any TWC office and get one. I informed the woman at security that I was working from home and needed my internet service up and running to do my job. She agreed to release my modem for two weeks until I could get another. My wife picked one up that afternoon and I hooked it up a few hours later. No problems getting it to authenticate. As a matter of fact, my speeds are much greater than they were with my old modem.
I was pretty torqued when all this started, but am over it now. I guess what occurred to me is just a reflection of what most American's deal with when needing customer service or technical support.
