Longtime Maui activist Sally Raisbeck took to Facebook to describe her recent brush with Oceanic Cable’s customer service. You have to wonder whether this level of customer service meets the company’s obligation to consumers under their franchise agreement with the State of Hawaii.
Yesterday I found the TCM channel could not be accessed on my TV. I tried to call Time Warner customer service. They told me I could wait or I would be called back in one hour seven minutes if I left my number. I left my number and yes, they called me well over an hour later. I encountered a decision tree and eventually got a human being. I explained my problem and she transferred me to “technical service”, this time no call-back option.
I waited again over an hour on hold. So I decided to try their website and sent a message.
While I was waiting on the phone, I looked to see if they had a Facebook page. While I waited I amused myself by commenting on each of their posts that “Your customer service is unbelievably bad. If you weren’t a monopoly I would never subscribe to you. WHAT HAPPENED TO TCM?” I posted this comment on each of about 20 of their posts, then I got a message from Facebook that I was being accused of spamming, and was therefore locked out from commenting.
Boy, does Time Warner ever suck! I guess I have to investigate the Dish people. Damn, and I have to go to Hawaiian Tel for phone and internet too. Damn.
I would suggest several related actions. First, Sally should complain in writing directly to Oceanic. Then send a copy, with a cover letter, to Senator Roz Baker, who represents much of Maui and also chairs the Commerce and Consumer Protection Committee. Suggest that Baker follow up with Oceanic regarding their obviously under-resourced customer service. Then send the same complaint to the Cable Television Division of the Department of Commerce & Consumer Affairs, along with copies to DCCA Director Kealii Lopez.
Then sit back for a bit and see what happens.
Any other suggestions for Sally?
In the meantime, if anyone from Oceanic happens to be reading this, you might want to contact Sally Raisbeck directly.
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Shift to DirectTV. $30 a month for 140 channels. Then bundle your phone and internet at Hawaiian Tel … also $30 a month for life.
No company should have a “franchise”/lock on such a service. Let’s get a class action lawsuit together.
I totally agree.
I have suffered through a year of lost channels, no signal, recordings being lost…the list is endless. And the idiots at Oceanic just blame the equipment!!!!!
If anyone wishes to start a law suit i would add my name in a second.
“In the meantime, if anyone from Oceanic happens to be reading this, you might want to contact Sally Raisbeck directly.”
Unfortunately, Sally is NOT alone in dealing with Oceanic’s rotten customer service, which is no surprise from a company with this much market control.
My suggestion is that people in Hawaii do the following to deal with this and many other ridiculous problems in the islands that only come to the forefront when a disaster finally strikes: Get Together as a Group and Stand up for Yourselves —– don’t accept $hit like it is and tell people who don’t like things in Hawaii to just move elsewhere!
Hawaii’s long-time approach of don’t-complain-about-problems-just-whine-when-they-cause-an-expensive-public-disaster needs to be tied to concrete and dumped into Kaneohe Bay. We need to stand up for ourselves. Unless, of course, we really want to keep things this way.
(BTW, thank you very much, Ian, for bringing this person’s problems with Time Warner to everyone’s attention online. You do excellent work and you deserve more thanks for helping people. We don’t give you enough kudos.)
Unfortunately, DirecTV does NOT have an Internet/TV package in Hawaii. You can only get TV from them in Hawaii, and you have to go elsewhere for Internet, which is basically Time Warner. Hence, the near-monopoly continues until DirecTV does Internet AND TV.
Again, Hawaii citizens need to Group Up and Stand Up. Otherwise, you can forget about change being on the front burner.
yes, HawTel does have a phone/Internet package, but land-line home phones are on the same path as news on paper: slow death.
final post:
Haw Tel’s Yelp ratings?
two out of five stars.
http://www.yelp.com/biz/hawaiian-telcom-honolulu
enough already, Hawaii.
We haven’t gotten all the channels we should be getting for 9 months. They blame it on the communication to the boxes or should I say lack of. They won’t give you any refund unless you are extremely persistent and it takes months to get it.
As long as customers put up with this, it isn’t going to change. We definitely need a class action lawsuit. Anyone know a good lawyer???
I, too, recommend switching to DirecTV. I did several years back and have had no complaints. On two or three occasions I’ve had reason to contact their customer service people and each time they handled the issue quickly and courteously.
I wonder if Oceanic employees are under a lot of time-productivity pressure? From the installers to counter clerks to phone/email customer service… all seem to be racing to keep up or keep their jobs or maybe they get paid by the “piece” or customer served.
We purchased a new tv set last fall and signed up for Oceanic Time-Warner’s digital service.
We are now on our fourth DVR box – they are refurbished somewhere on the continent and shipped over here. Being able to use a brand new box is not an option here in Hawai`i.
I record all my shows – including sporting events – because I am rarely back at home before 11 pm. I also do NOT like having to sit through a ton of advertisements. That’s why a functioning DVR is so important.
This outfit also is unwilling or unable to respond to written comments or inquiries. Service is irregular and outages go unexplained or flat lied about, be it on Super Tuesday voting or Super Bowl.
If you are lucky enough to get a live response, it is on Oahu here they have little sense of N-Isle geography. They once confused my Palani Street home in Hilo with Palani Road in Kailua-Kona — about 100 miles distant.
I would switch to D TV in flicker of an eye if I could find number for it that someone would answer.
Obviously, state consumer protector has its phone off the hook, too. We were far better served when little Comtec provided BI service under Richard Henderson’s ownership. Bigger sure ain’t better.
I worked at Oceanic in the repair department for 5 years. Worst job I ever had,far and away.Everybody there is miserable with micro-management everywhere.
I love Directv, and also bundle phone and internet with Hawtel. Much cheaper and much more reliable. And they answer their phones. Novel concept,that.
Try the chat function on Oceanic Time Warner’s website: http://www.oceanic.com/help
I get an immediate response whenever I use the chat function.
I, too, am NOT a fan of Oceanic. Their whole methodology is to get as much cash out of their customers with the least amount of effort on their part.
Here on the Big Island they have been making channels disappear from their analogue service then telling you it can only be found on one of their higher-priced lineups that require a “free” converter box which costs you in due time. The latest example of this is the CNBC channel — one that is pretty important to anyone with a 401-k.
It’s all part of an effort to get customers to upgrade to more expensive packages. And what is infuriating is that they just switch channels around with no warning or explanation. Yes, I’d go to Direct TV if I didn’t have a bunch of very nice trees between my house and the line of sight to the satellite. I ain’t cutting down perfectly good trees because of these idiots! But I do take my internet and phone services from HTC — a lot more reliable on both counts.
Hugh: The customer service reps might not actually be on Oahu. I recently called Oceanic late at night and while speaking to the rep I found out that he was in the Philippines. I wondered how Oceanic was able to take live calls 24/7.
They used to be live and local 24-7. Wonder when they changed that?
I have also spoken to Oceanic tech support (for internet) that was clearly in the Phillipines.
The moral character required to handle a monopoly without disadvantaging customers is sadly lacking at Oceanic (and Young Brothers). My main complaint with Oceanic regards bundling. Why do I have to accept an enormous package just to get the few stations that I want? And for internet service, Hawaiian Tel offers no choice. There’s a reason why they offer $30.00 a month for life; they won’t live long.
You want to know what really drives me bonkers? They don’t keep records! So, one repair guy comes – does something – but there’s absolutely no customer maintenance records-so the next guy has no idea what the previous guy did! They depend on the customer to explain why the previous guy took out a cable or a change where he did. Do I look like I know anything about this?? They are the experts. That’s why I pay them the ridiculous amount I do every month. When I once asked why they don’t have a records process – they cable guy said ‘that would be too hard because the customer changes’. Someone explain how they get away with not maintaining customer records??
No TV but we had Oceanic internet for years. Fired them after they snuck in a “rental” fee for the modem we’d already had for over 3 years & bundled internet with our HawaiianTel landline. So far so good. It’s possible that the quality of Hawaiian Tel’s internet may be affected by one’s distance from the substation – the farther away, the worse the service.
I was infuriated by that modem lease fee that showed up on my bill in November I think it was. They had tried to raise my cable bill on 3 separate occasions over the previous several months. Each time I called and told them I would be downgrading my service or changing providers and they removed the extra charge, but they wouldn’t budge on the modem lease. In fact the supervisor I spoke to was very rude about it, and implied I was trying to get something for nothing when I mentioned that I could watch just about any show they carried online for free.
That something for nothing I was getting was a 7 year old cable modem that was so outdated they couldn’t have even put it back out in service if I had returned it. It still worked so I had been keeping it, but the bottom line is that I had already paid for that modem many times over in my monthly charges. They should have gifted the thing to me rather than trying to charge me to lease it 7 years later.
I ended up buying my own modem and returning the leased one to get the charge removed from the bill, which is allowed. I would love to make a change, but there is no way in hell I would switch to Hawaiian Telcom for internet because their customer service is worse by far than Oceanics. I really wish we had more choices.
Say more, please.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like to know where you bought the modem and whether there were any problems making the switch to your own equipment.
I think they have an url on the bill for a website that has a list of ‘acceptable’ modems you are allowed to connect to their system.
The prices range from about $50 to $150. Since the modem charge is ~$4/month, it seems like a better deal to buy the modem. But I read the reviews on a few of the lower priced modems, and they all had quite a few comments about the modems not lasting very long. Interestingly, the modem Oceanic provided me, and which has lasted me many years already, is not on the list, nor do they provide the option to buy that modem, unlike what ATT did when they stopped requiring us to rent their phones.
http://www.timewarnercable.com/en/residential-home/support/topics/internet/buy-your-modem.html
Ian, here’s the link. I just bought one tonight. I’d say for those that can deal with reading a manual and setting these things up on their own it makes a lot of sense. Probably the main drawback IMO is if you run into trouble can easily say heh that’s not ours! Which they will. But these things are very stable (we are going on year 5 or 6 with never an issue on the old model) so seems pretty low risk to me.
Rob’s link has the info on which modems are allowed. I bought mine used on eBay for $20 and it is as good as new. Then you just call Oceanic and they will activate it for you. There was no hassle at all with part of it.
No idea on the TV thing – I don’t watch it. But I do have HTel landline & DSL. Love ’em both. I’m online when RR etc. is off due to power loss, etc. Just power my DSL modem w/a battery UPS & continue on my laptop.
However – posting the same post over & over again is ‘spamming’ more or less. I’m sure whoever was moderating ‘got it’ after the first two posts. Got what she deserved in that respect, sorry.
Is television doomed?
http://www.businessinsider.com/for-whom-the-bell-tolls-it-tolls-for-tv-2012-10
It would be interesting to correlate local television viewing habits with local daily newspaper subscriptions. The latter seem to be 1) senior citizens, 2) working-class sports fans and 3) wealthy people locked into old habits of subscribing without actually reading the paper. This seems at first glance the same demographics of television viewing.
I think so. I’m sure one of the reasons Oceanic added the monthly modem lease fee was because they were losing many cable TV customers to online streaming, and they’re trying to make up for the loss of income on the backs of internet users.
If that were the case, then they wouldn’t have hit their TV customers with the charge.
They just wanted to increase their income.