DirecTV = Terrible Customer Service

DirecTV has an exclusive on NFL Sunday Ticket in the US. They use this very effectively to grab subscribers from cable and to lock them in for 2 years. I’m one such person.

NFL Sunday Ticket is great, when it works. It’s expensive, but it’s the only way I can watch Cowboys games in San Francisco, plus I love the Red Zone channel. Today I missed both because of an incorrect satellite configuration (a configuration that was done by DirecTV).

I called DirecTV to resolve the issue and request a pro-rated refund for the week since I didn’t get to see what I wanted to see. They wouldn’t issue a refund. The person on the phone was nice and seemed to understand, but said she couldn’t do anything. It’s great to be a monopoly.

It’s clear that DirecTV has adopted the mindset that customers will do anything to keep getting NFL Sunday Ticket and that they’re locked in to the service, so why bother doing anything to keep them happy. They’re probably right, but this is exactly why monopolies and exclusives are bad for customers. Another great example is AT&T and the iPhone.

When I asked about my contract and service level, I learned I have 11 months left. I found out I could downgrade and save $33/mth (of course, I’d lose some channels). When I offered them the choice of issuing me a refund for 1  week of service for NFL Sunday Ticket vs me downgrading by $33/mth going forward, they still wouldn’t issue the refund. I immediately downgraded my service. They just lost $33/mth * the 11 remaining months on my contract or $363 in revenue to save issuing a one-time refund that couldn’t have been more than $15-$20. Plus they’re going to lose me as a subscriber at the end of that 11 month period, so they’re going to be losing even more future revenue and a little piece of all important market share. Unbelievable!

They certainly took care of me well, but I’ll never get that time back. From what I can tell, you can’t back up your apps, so I’m going to have to go through this again the next time it dies. And based on the battery problems that iPhones have, it probably will happen again. I’m really glad I bought Apple Care to extend my warranty. Now I should probably write down all my apps.

We all make mistakes but doing things that are plainly unethical, that’s different. I found this on CrunchGear. Here’s what happened:

A site called The Daily Background found evidence that Belkin Bizdev guy, Michael Bayard, is paying folks 65 cents to write good things about Belkin routers.

Here’s Belkin’s response (also from CrunchGear):

We’ve acted swiftly to remove all associated postings from the Mechanical Turk system.

We’re working closely with our online channel partners to ensure that any reviews that may have been placed due to these postings have been removed.

I wouldn’t say that they fixed the problem. Yeah, they got rid of the reviews but they didn’t mention firing the employee (which I think should be a given for something this stupid and blatantly unethical), nor did they mention refunds for customers that may have purchased the products based on the false reviews.

The moral of the story – be careful what you do on the Internet.

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ’’It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’’ were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to how we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ’’Sunny’’ episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I’d like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case – FX Networks – was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball…

Well done.

According to an e-mail sent out to subscribers last night, Netflix is eliminating the convenient feature and removing all additional account profiles in September. And to add insult to injury, the additional profiles cannot be migrated to a new account. So all the effort you may have put in to rating hundreds, if not thousands, of movies and carefully crafting the perfect queue will be obliterated. The rental history will be merged with the main account owner, so your recommendations could suddenly change to reflect other profile users’ tastes.

I’d be really pissed if I had to recreate my queue. Maybe they want people to go back to Blockbuster.