Kiss My Asterisk

Since I need to add to my existing issues with Brighthouse Networks a complaint that their online complaint form will only accept 1,000 characters, here is the full text of the message I'm trying to get to them so that I can send them the link and share my thoughts with the company in their entirety:

I’m sending this feedback from my home cable internet service, which I have tonight, no thanks to your staff. The multiple points of failure in the service I have received from your employees are as astounding as they are infuriating.

On the evening of 12/28/09, I began experiencing odd issues with my cable television service. My DVR allowed me to watch recorded programming and displayed title bars as I changed channels, but every channel showed only a black screen instead of the listed program. Having had issues with my Brighthouse service before, I knew how to reboot my DVR and did so before calling. The reboot stopped with an “alt” error message on the screen.

When my husband arrived home from work that night, he called tech support. He was told that because of the error message, the DVR was bad and that he should come to the local office to swap it out the next day. However, later in the evening we noticed that we were not getting any service on our cable modem. This brought doubt into our minds that the problem was with the DVR, so my husband did NOT juggle our toddler through the process of swapping out the box as he rushed off to work the next day.

On 12/29/09, we called the tech support line again to explain the new development and were told that we needed to have a service call. Over the course of a few conversations that day (and again on 12/30/09), my husband attempted to convince the techs to allow an “outside only” service call. We work odd hours, have dogs and a baby, and are unable to take time off of work to accommodate a service call. Furthermore, with the same problem occurring with two devices plugged into two different outlets, there was every reason to believe that the common denominator was the outside connection to your network. Even upon threat of our canceling our service with you, your employees (or your guidelines) would not accommodate our needs.

Today, 12/31/09, we realized that your company had backed us into a corner with no good options. We could lose time at work, make arrangements for the care of our pets, and find a babysitter so that you could conduct a service call we believed to be unnecessary. Or, we could cancel our service with you and jump through the same unreasonable hoops to have a Dish or FiOS installer come to our home.

With no good options, my husband went to the outside box to see if he could easily determine what the problem was. He found that the wire labeled with our apartment number coming from the building’s main connection was lying, loose and unplugged, in the box. In constant communication with tech support, he worked in the box until he realized the root cause of the problem. On the line coming from the main building connection was a splitter. One of the lines coming from that splitter had a tag for our apartment number. The other line had a red tag labeled with the date “12/28/09”. However, rather than just the “12/28/09” branch being disconnected, the entire main line had been separated, taking our service down along with our neighbors’.

Once he figured it out, it took my husband two minutes to fix it.

Here are the major issues we have with this series of events:
1. When our neighbor’s service was disconnected on 12/28/09, the service technician disconnected our service in error.
2. During our initial service call, we were told in error that we would need to swap out the box, which is functioning perfectly.
3. During subsequent calls to tech support, we were assured that the problem was inside our apartment. Again in error.
4. Your policies dictated that we must go to extreme lengths to accommodate a service call, rather than your being willing to eliminate external causes before inconveniencing us.
5. No point in the troubleshooting process cross-referenced our location with recent disconnections to determine if some type of error had been made.
6. The box containing our cable connections on the outside of our apartment building is not secure and most teenagers would have the tools and knowledge necessary to steal service that we are paying for.

My husband and I are VERY dissatisfied. Short of a few months last year when we lived out of state, we’ve been doing business with Brighthouse for 10 years in spite of the availability of competitive products and services. To have so little regard shown for our time and effort is insulting. Almost everyone we’ve dealt with through this process (spanning 9 calls) has been sloppy, poorly informed, and dismissive. Thank goodness we’re savvy enough to solve the problem ourselves. I shudder to think what an elderly customer in the same situation might suffer.

We would like to know how you plan to make amends for this nightmare. I believe a credit is in order for at least the amount that you would charge a customer for a non-covered service call. Please let us know what arrangements you’ll be making on our behalf.