Dear Time Warner Cable ISP, This is why you suck

Dear Time Warner Cable ISP,

This is why you suck. So my On Demand service still does not work since the most recent “upgrade” to the Time Warner On Demand interface. So I got into chat yet again. Of course, this was after it would have been nice to use On Demand. I don’t have a lot of times I can take a break in this economy and the whole point of On Demand is for it to be there for the asking when I actually do have that time. If Dish Network offered good high speed internet, I would probably already have canceled your service.

I do like that you have added chat support. I am well aware that the problems are nothing the customer support people have done. I actually think a lot of TW customer support people are remarkably good at their jobs, given how many people loathe your terrible service. It is still difficult to listen to an angry voice and not feel bad, even if the person is not yelling at you, so I think it is much more humane to have chat available. Plus I dislike talking on the phone, so kudos on that. But the kudos end there.

When today’s pleasant-but-unable-to-magically-fix-TW support person told me there would be a brief survey on the chat after we were done, I told him:

Half the time, the survey works. The other half the time, it times out anyway. Which means either TW’s survey is defective or TW’s cable internet service is.

Here is what I wrote in my survey about what TW could do better (after checking Very Dissatisfied):

Have your systems work. Consistent television and internet service would be, ya know, what I am supposedly paying for. My internet is intermittent and my On Demand doesn’t ever seem to work when I want it. And your reps in chat seem to try, but they just can’t fix all your technical problems. It would be nice also if paying on the phone wasn’t a ridiculously long and annoying interface with misleading and inaccurate account info on the automated end and extra charges on the human side. I also know there is a 50% chance this survey form is going to time out and nobody will ever read what I’ve written.

So of course, when I hit submit on the survey, this is the error message I receive:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error ‘80040e57’

String or binary data would be truncated.

/sdccommon/inc/db/dbcommon.inc, line 254

I’ll probably send this to your Twitter because whoever runs that seems more on-the-ball than whoever put together your chat survey. But, yeah, if you are wondering if you should keep chat, you should; not having to have those annoying conversations on the telephone is one of the only things I like about your service at the moment.

In the current economy, people are thinking more carefully about where their entertainment dollar goes, and Time Warner is really failing to delight the customer. If you all need some consulting, let me know. Whoever is setting your priorities now could clearly use some help.