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I have two angry rants to get off my chest this first blog of the New Year.

One is with Alienware, the Dell Computer subsiduary. The other is Rogers, again.

 I bought an Area 51 in the Fall of 2008 because spec for spec it was the most robust box I could find. It wasn’t cheap. Last summer one of the USB ports broke and then, later, it wouldn’t start.

The issue, they decided, was the motherboard. They would send me another and a tech would come to my house to fix it within three days. The motherboard arrived in two days. The tech took three weeks and countless phone calls.

In the meantime, I figured out that it was a peripheral issue (keyboard, mouse or other plug in hardware) and I fixed it.  The tech came, checked it out and agreed it wasn’t the motherboard. I sent the motherboard back Nov. 5 by Fed Ex. Alienware signed for it Nov. 6.

However, they dinged my credit card approximately $200 as a deposit in case I didn’t return the original. I figured it would take a week or so to get it credited back. As of today I still don’t have a refund. Why? It turns out that to replace the USB port which had broken Alienware sent an entire case to my house. Yep, the big box a desktop comes in with a power supply but nothing else. The tech looked at it and said: “I’m not stripping the guts out of one box to install on the other.”

And why would he? With two drives, liquid cooling, sound dampening and a few other boards installed, it’s a bit of a palaver for a simple fix. He did the right thing and swapped the USB module.

Since then, the new box minus, the USB module, has sat in the spare bedroom. Today Alienware, on my call asking why I haven’t got a credit for my motherboard return, informed me it’s because I haven’t sent the box back. I haven’t sent the box back because they didn’t ask me to, until now, and have yet to send my a shipping label so I don’t pay for the costs.

Duh.

Now this box weighs near 20 poounds. It must have cost a lot to ship. And now it’s being shipped back. Eventually, when they send me a label. Who knows how long that’s going to take?

I think I’ve made somewhere near 15 phone calls on this and spend some7 hours trying to resolve this since the start. Someone should have escalated the call at the outset. It was a simple question. Where’s my money?

Now they have a pissed off ex-customer. Yep. Ex. Because I’m never going to buy or recommend their products again.

It’s the same with Rogers. I added a second digital box which I bought over the holidays when it was on sale at Future Shop. there’s no cost to add the box since I pay for digital already.

However, when I got confirmation of my bill, my montly went up by $4.

Sure, it’s a piddling amount. But that’s $48 a year plus tax for all eternity.

Why? It turns out I don’t have enough outlets to add a second box.

Huh? When I built this house in 1983 I wired every room with cable and phone. Since then I’ve added a wired Ethernet (and later Wifi too). I was with Shaw Cable back then. When Rogers swapped assets sometime in the late 80s or early 90s I ended up as a Rogers customer. I’ve never once asked them to install an outlet or to fix one. All the issues I’ve had with signal strength have eminated from their side of the gate, that is the service up to the entry point of my home.

Like Bell, which I believe is now blocked from charging for extra phone jacks (unless they install them) on a monthly basis due to either a CRTC ruling or court ruling, shouldn’t the service be as far as your wall just as it is for municipal services like water.

Suppose the city wanted to charge you extra for water services if you added a new bathroom? Doesn’t Rogers realize that the more set top boxes it activates in a home the more opportunity they will have to upsell services and movies on demand?

Last month’s bill, for example, including $40 in on demand charges that my kids ran up (okay I watched a couple of the movies too), flush with the novelty of digital.

But no. I don’t have enough outlets so they cancel my basic cable extended at $56 a month and up me to $63 a month for the VIP package. With the bewildering and I suspect, temporary, discounts, it works out to $4 a month more plus tax. Do I get any more services? Channels? Options? Nope.

Cha-ching.

Thanks Rogers. You’ve done it again. Between upping my Internet costs because I want high speeds and yet still throttling speeds and packages to ensure no one comes along and usurps your plans for Movies on Demands Downloads, dicking around with my Cable and maintaining the highest Return per Subscriber revenues in the world for cell phone service - meaning our rates are higher than other countries - it reminds me once again how grateful I am for the CRTC which keeps enshrining this monopoly.

Bah! Humbug I say. When will companies learn that front line customer service is what makes or breaks their brand, not those touchy feely TV ads. To hell with brands and brand image. Social media is killing it off. It’s word of mouth and what people say about you that determines your brand image.

Wake Up.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Bark with Byte. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.