Direct T.V. is the biggest rip off ever!

[OCBucksFan]

Up till this time around that was my experience - good freebies to make you feel wanted, nice discounts and deductions for any upgrades.

<skipped to spare the readers>

Me: Yeah - Sure.

As they are now out of pocket, I'll take mercy.

I like it when customer service works so fucking smoothly. :tongue2:

Well, the wife and I have been together like 9 years. I had DirecTV before I met her, about a month after we started dating the Tivo came out. So I had my DVR and paid the 6.99 and I think I paid like 4.00 insurance. At that time you didn't "lease" equipment, hell, I found it stupid when they explained that to me when I got the HDDVR. I thought the point of Directv was that you owned the equipment and when you left it was yours...

anyways.

So, I called them a few years ago when we got our HDTV, and they hit me with "that will cost you 200 bucks, and no we don't have DVR for that, it's one or the other"

So, I said "meh, DVR is too good to give up, I am over it"

They said "We can contact you when HDDVR becomes available"

I said "sure, do that"

A year passes, my TV looks nice. The TV in the living room isn't LCD or Plasma, it's a really nice TV that even in low def looked nice enough for me to not really care.

They called, dropped that "199$ and we can bring it out" crap on me, but I wasn't into that and told them to eat a bag of dicks.

About a year and a half later we were having problems and needed them to come out, they contacted me, told me it would cost me 99$ but could rebate on my current unit. I thought they wanted to take my Tivo unit, but agreed since I figured I could deal.

Well, I was wrong, the guy came out, didn't realize my dish wasn't hi-def, redid my dish and did cabling that made me as a guy who does network cabling say "wow, that's clean" he moved my Tivo into my office, took the card for the regular unit and gave me 3 months of movie channels for taking the extra time that cost me a day of work.

The Rebate was off the old school directv unit I had, they never took it, just the card.

Either way, looks like the results were the same :)

 

[sandgk]

I have 2 Receivers,so the lease fee would apply for me.That is the thing that makes me the most upset,considering I would have paid $200 for the thing. And im not under contract,so I can call and fuck with them if they wanna charge me for all this s...

My advice - call them.

If you aren't under contract you are a candidate for customer retention.

If at first the Customer Rep dicks around politely decline and call back and get another one.

In the end you will hit pay-dirt. Whether you get there on first blush like OCBF or back into a pile of turds and come up smelling all fresh and clean like I did.

But, it will happen. You just have to cut short the can't do anymore than that spiel they give you. You are a candidate for Customer Retention - that is your biggest advantage, use it.

 

[martinss01]

My advice - call them.

If you aren't under contract you are a candidate for customer retention.

If at first the Customer Rep dicks around politely decline and call back and get another one.

In the end you will hit pay-dirt. Whether you get there on first blush like OCBF or back into a pile of turds and come up smelling all fresh and clean like I did.

But, it will happen. You just have to cut short the can't do anymore than that spiel they give you. You are a candidate for Customer Retention - that is your biggest advantage, use it.

bingo, i typically give a company one chance to do the right thing. i call, tell them what i want and if i get anything other than exactly what i want to hear or better i thank them for their time hang up and call right back. i then inform them i want to cancel my account. customer retention will give you at the very least the best deal they are offering new customers to keep you. customer support more often than not won't give you much of anything to stay. sadly its good business from a financial perspective.

for them, best case scenario is you take the deal customer service gives you. pure profit for them if you do. worst case (not counting you actually cancelling) is you call in to cancel your account and they save you with customer retention by giving you what you asked for in the beginning. for those of us who are time warner customers... we generally call in once a year to "cancel our accounts". its almost like a game really.