Charter Communications can eat my ass!

Charter, oh Charter! How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

It’s always high drama with Charter and has been for years. I can say with conviction and gusto that Charter Communications is the worst company I’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Bar none.

The most recent fiasco involves Charter Quick Pay or ePay or whatever they’re calling it this week. I used Quick Pay and it said my payment was accepted. Then I waited. And waited some more. Day after day the payment never showed up on either Charter’s web site or my bank statement. Finally I gave in and made the call I was dreading to find out what went wrong.

Cue the employee with an accent…

Long story short, Charter’s customer service representative was unable to offer any explanation why the payment failed short of “it didn’t go through.” Well, was it declined? They couldn’t say. I had plenty of money in my bank. As far as I could tell, I didn’t do anything wrong.

Then they told me I was being charged a $25 fee because the charge didn’t go through. What the hell?!?!? I tried to get any kind of useful information from the phone call but the person on the other end was a total idiot. Finally out of frustration I asked, “where are you, anyway?” Answer: Panama City, Panama. The phone call was going nowhere and finally ended with absolutely nothing accomplished.

I still don’t know what’s going to happen with my $25 dispute with Charter. One option I’m seriously considering is switching my internet to another provider and living without TV. Opting out is often the only form of viable protest left for an angry costumer. I’ll dispute the charge and Charter will respond by using the only leverage they’ve got – turning off my service. Then they’ll ding my credit report about a million times and eventually turn it over to a collection agency for a while. I will dispute the charge every step of the way. I’ll never give in and I’ll never pay the charge, damn them!

This is just another example of what I call “gold nugget economics” (which I will explain in a blog posting coming soon). Companies like Charter and banks are frothing at the mouth for the chance to slap fees on your ass. It amazes me the way they want to treat their customers just so they can make a quick buck. They think they’ve got you by the balls, which is the only reason they’d even attempt shit like that. Finding another company is not very fun, but it is an option, and so is opting out.

Anyway, I decided to do a little research into Charter’s “call centers.” According to Wikipedia, Charter announced in 2006 it would be closing seven call centers in the United States. Meanwhile it was outsourcing new call centers in places like the Philippines, Mexico, London, Canada, Brazil and, yes, even Panama City, Panama. Charter still has some call centers in the United States, but after searching the internet it is unclear what portion of that workforce is represented by Americans. Damn anti-American company!

“We don’t want to give Americans jobs, but we do want Americans to be our customers and pay top dollar for our shit.” Services like “on demand” which are buggy as hell. What a friggin’ joke.

Here’s the thing about this sort of outsourcing that I don’t get. Companies like Charter clearly want U.S. customers paying their exorbitant service rates using dollars. But they aren’t willing to employ U.S. workers and they send their jobs outside of U.S. borders. Laughably, even by trimming their compensation costs by outsourcing they weren’t clever enough to avoid bankruptcy, though. The savings probably all got blown on overpaying their brilliant “executives” who screwed the company into bankruptcy in the first place.

Question for ya Charter. If U.S. companies won’t give U.S. employees jobs, how are they going to come up with the dollars you’re frothing for to fill up your coffers? Quite the conundrum, eh?

Yes, outsourcing can provide short-term savings to a company, but it may have a long-term effect on the sustainability of a company when customer service gets flushed down the toilet. A 2009 J.D. Power survey found that Charter Communications was “below average” in the U.S. for customer service. As far as I can tell, it came in last place in every market where it has a presence. I then went to the J.D. Power web site and surfed the 2008 survey results and it appears that Charter Communications received the lowest ratings in every possible category. Even I have to admit that is quite the accomplishment.

Well done, asshats!

Is $25 worth losing a customer for life? You tell me, Charter idiots!