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Charter's Mega Merger Support is a Comedy of Errors

While Charter promised incredible synergies and improvements if it was allowed to acquire Time Warner Cable and Bright House, we've noted how the tangible results of the merger have been incredibly underwhelming. So far the company has scaled back online support across social media, frozen ongoing broadband upgrades at Time Warner Cable, and socked customers of acquired companies with major, often non-negotiable rate hikes as soon as they exit their existing contracts. That's when it's not busy socking customers with strange and unnecessary new fees.

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Wander into our forums and you'll begin to notice that integrating Time Warner Cable, Bright House and Charter customers under the company's new "Spectrum" branding has a decidedly Keystone cops vibe to it.

Charter's utterly inconsistent dedication to promotional rates has many users frustrated and looking to change providers. A large number of these users are being hit with a new $200 "activation fee" for switching services that never existed previously. Many of these users say they'll receive completely different information on pricing nearly every time they reach out to the company.

"You CAN'T get something coherent from the website, and if you call, you will get different information EVERYTIME you call," complains one customer in our forums. "Try it. Ask the same thing, call again 10 minutes, you will not get the same answer."

"I expect some things to be a little out of whack but every representative I spoke to sounded like it was their first day on the job and they had no clue what was going on,"complained another customer. "It seems like training employees was not a priority for Charter in this transition."

Some users are sharing their support chat transcripts highlighting how they're asking the same question multiple times, but getting completely different answers. Here, for example, a user asks how much it will cost him to upgrade from 200 Mbps to 300 Mbps service and is told he'll pay $298.80. The user asked the same exact question to Charter support the next day and was told the cost would be $186.65 plus a $50 installation fee.

That user appears fortunate, since other users in our forums have tried three times to have that same question answered but are repeatedly told they need to call Charter (an experience that may or may not offer a different outcome). And even if you are actually able to order, many wind up with the sort of experience had by this Bright House Networks customer:

quote:
I called earlier in the week to upgrade from 200 to 300. At first I was told I needed to pay the $199 activation fee & it was $79 a month. I called back & spoke to someone else & they waived the fee and I was still going to be $79 a month. I have my own modem & they had to send someone here. They came & tried to swap the modem, but I wouldn't let them. (I have a Netgear CM600 which can handle 300mbps.)

I had to call them back because I still wasn't getting 300mbps. They told me they had to come out again & all the guy had to do was close the order & then the 300 would work. So they came out the next morning & he said that my modem should work & he closed the order. He came back on his own a few hours later to tell me that Spectrum emailed him to say my modem wouldn't work with 300 and he had to swap the modem. He did the swap & I still wasn't getting the 300. I called them & they never had me in for 300 in the computer. The tech I spoke to put the 300 on my account & I asked him how much it would be & he said $99. I told him I was told it was going to be $79. Then I spoke to the retention dept and they gave me a credit for $20 a month for the next year.

After all of this my speed hasn't changed from before.


On a positive note, many users say that perseverance pays off. Users say they sometimes have better luck if they actually visit a store, but that too can often yield inconsistent results. Others say it's just a matter of persistence, and that users can get significantly better deals if they're willing to bang their heads against a wall of incompetence for a long while.

As we've long noted, cable customer support is already among some of the worst in any industry thanks to companies prioritizing mergers and acquisitions over quality service. That's the same story that has played out in the cable for decades, yet learning collective lessons from these experiences somehow proves illusive. As companies rush to consolidate and merge, the treatment of the customer very quickly becomes a distant afterthought as executives prioritize milking marginally competitive and frequently captive markets to please often ultra-short-sighted and impatient investors.

Charter's latest $79 billion acquisition appears to be no exception.

Most recommended from 43 comments



Takuro
join:2016-10-17
Chapel Hill, NC

5 recommendations

Takuro

Member

Game the System

On a positive note, many users say that perseverance pays off. Users say they sometimes have better luck if they actually visit a store, but that too can often yield inconsistent results. Others say it's just a matter of persistence, and that users can get significantly better deals if they're willing to bang their heads against a wall of incompetence for a long while.

I was going to say, if they were that incompetent, just keep calling in until some idiot offers you 300 Mbps service for $15 a month. Just keep trying. Maybe their billing department is equally as bad and they'll actually send you a check instead of charging for service. Lol.

Hall
MVM
join:2000-04-28
Germantown, OH

2 recommendations

Hall

MVM

Forums here

Yet DSLR thinks that combining the user forums for the companies in the next few days makes sense....