The source of the "I demand a discount"

[Bonnie Bitch]

If they didn't invent it, they perfected it. My time as an outsourced Dish rep still gives me nightmares.

But then again, it was Dish. It was the only company I've ever worked for (even if it was outsourced) that I would never go back to under any conditions. It doesn't have a single saving grace.

I share your pain.
So, which was worse for you -- the snotty Winback reps or the arrogant ERT prigs?
My favorite Winback moment:

ME: Hi, this is Bonnie, operator ID FOAD. I have a customer on the line who wants to cancel.
Snotty Winback Rep: Did you ask why they wanted to cancel?
ME: She didn't say, and she sounded angry.
SWBR: You need to go back to the customer and ask why they want to cancel.
ME <after long day of bitchy, asshat SC's> No, I refuse to do your job for you. Here's the customer... <transfer and release>

That crap happened every day, at least twice, where Winback either refused a call (not allowed, per their own rules) or tried to avoid calls. As for ERT -- they can <loud car horn> my <censored>. Useless bunch of <bleep>ing <censored>s.

At an all-department meeting one time, our project lead for Dish threw out a question: "If you could change one thing about Dish, what would it be?"
My blurted out answer: Make the New Customer reps and the retailers stop lying to the new customers about their bills. That's for starters.

[TNT]

I share your pain.
So, which was worse for you -- the snotty Winback reps or the arrogant ERT prigs?

At an all-department meeting one time, our project lead for Dish threw out a question: "If you could change one thing about Dish, what would it be?"
My blurted out answer: Make the New Customer reps and the retailers stop lying to the new customers about their bills. That's for starters.

I was on a Dish project in 1996... just a few months after the company started. If someone had asked me back then what I'd change, I'd have said, "Make the New Customer reps and the retailers stop lying to the new customers about their bills. That's for starters."

I see not much has changed. I didn't expect that it would. Not with Charlie in charge.

If satellite prices are lower than cable, it's mostly because satellite employees are treated a lot worse than cable employees.

[CurlyLocks]

It's interesting to hear what Dish employees have to say about the company. I don't think I've ever had as much problem with a company as I have w/Dish Network, starting w/my installation. It wasn't right from the start, they sent people two more times, it still wasn't right and the fourth time they just did a total reinstallation. I have the DVR service (which I love) but that didn't always work right either, until finally it totally crapped out. They exchanged the receiver for me, but when I asked if they could take what was on that hard drive and transfer it to the new one so I wouldn't lose the stuff I had recorded, some of which I hadn't viewed yet, they said there was no possible way to do that. Whether that's true or not I don't know, but in any case extremely frustrating.

Since then I have continued to have problems of every nature with them. If we get a heavy rain we sometimes lose the signal. Not even a thunderstorm, just a heavy rain! Every time I have to call them for anything I just wind up with high blood pressure. Why do I stay with them, you ask? For the simple reason that it's the only way I can watch my New York Mets all season. Yes, even though I only live a couple of hours from NYC, Dish is the only system available to me that gives the channels that carry the games. If something else were available I'd take it in a hearbeat but I'm stuck.

[April]

Curlylocks my mom had the WORST experience with Dish network that she will NEVER go back to them again. It started with installation, then one room not working. People were sent out 3 times and they told her that she would have to deal with it. She called to cancel within her 2 months they gave her and they said they would send boxes for her with the labels. No boxes, she called and they said they don't send boxes only lablels. They told her they would send one label for each piece of equipment, but didn't. When she called back they said they would be there in a couple of days. Between that call and the day the labels were supposed to arrive they charged my mom's credit card FIVE hundred dollars. She had a hard time getting them to remove it.

THEN after all the equipment was returned, the 500 was sorted out she got a bill for 5 months of service that she didn't get. When she called she was told they shut her off for non-payment on a service she didn't even have!

[TruthHurts]

We get that all the time in the hotel biz, some examples:

Online Discounts Yes we take 15-20 dollars off you're room if you reserve online. No we will not give you the discount anyway. I'm sorry if you can't figure out the set-up being ignorant does not warrant you a discount

Triple A/AARP These are the only discounts we give period. It's commendable that your boyfriend is a firefighter but there's no discount for that. No we cannot just give you the discount you have to present a card to get it. If you get an AARP discount don't ask for a senior citizens discount.

Other Checking in an hour before the office closes and wanting a discount if wrong. Insisting that we "probably won't rent out that room" is presumptive and insulting. Just because the fleabag hotel down the road is offering a cheaper rate is not gonna spur us into granting a discount. And just because the old owner offered a discount does not automatically give you another.

[Midnight12]

oh man....i wish I could just literally knock some sense into these entitlement-issue people...or at least have it done to them so they know how it feels!

[CurlyLocks]

my mom had the WORST experience with Dish network that she will NEVER go back to them again.

April, her experience sounds horrible but sadly it doesn't surprise me. The odd thing is that my brother got Dish a couple years before I did and they have never had one single problem with it - not one! I really think that they're just very fortunate to be the exception.

[Bonnie Bitch]

If satellite prices are lower than cable, it's mostly because satellite employees are treated a lot worse than cable employees.

Thanks to my incarceration lovely experience with Dishnetwork, I will never take calls for TV-anything ever again.
Maybe some of our cohorts here are or were cable TV employees and can shed some light on that.

[Bonnie Bitch]

storture rack

First off -- what the hell does that mean?

Secondly -- I'm not psychic, but I know that you got your equipment and install straight from Dish. How do I know? Because Dish doesn't give new customers new equipment. Dish gives new customers used/recycled equipment. That's why your signal went out and your service sucked. That's also how Dish can afford all the free installs and rebates for new customers -- they send out cheap-ass equipment, installed by clueless technicians, who then charge for any and all trips back to fix what they <loud car horn>ed up in the first place.
BUT -- if a new customer goes to a retailer (or the customer care department at FU-Telephone, where I now work), the customer gets decent equipment and a qualified tech to do the install (never had a complaint about an install done by a retailer, FYI), but the customers get lied to about the pricing.
You're screwed either way.
OTOH, Dish's programming is better than Time-Warner and DirecTV.

[Bonnie Bitch]

Curlylocks my mom had the WORST experience with Dish network that she will NEVER go back to them again. It started with installation, then one room not working. People were sent out 3 times and they told her that she would have to deal with it. She called to cancel within her 2 months they gave her and they said they would send boxes for her with the labels. No boxes, she called and they said they don't send boxes only lablels. They told her they would send one label for each piece of equipment, but didn't. When she called back they said they would be there in a couple of days. Between that call and the day the labels were supposed to arrive they charged my mom's credit card FIVE hundred dollars. She had a hard time getting them to remove it.

THEN after all the equipment was returned, the 500 was sorted out she got a bill for 5 months of service that she didn't get. When she called she was told they shut her off for non-payment on a service she didn't even have!

Oh shit!!!

NOT THE BOXES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

<Bonnie has grand mal seizure>

Darn you! I'd almost forgotten about THE BOXES <shudder>!

And your story is all too typical of Dish.
And it all boils down to no one from Dish going over the contract or explaining the billing until it's too late.

I can guarantee that your mom signed up directly with Dish and not a retailer. Hence, the crappy equipment and service issues.
I'm honestly shocked that she had 60 days to cancel, because when I was with Dish, it was 30 days.
The deal with the credit card -- we call it autobatching. In the contract, there is a paragraph on what happens when equipment is not returned -- the credit card used to secure the account is charged (autobatched) for the cost of the equipment, services up to the date of the autobatching, and the lovely pro-rated cancellation fee for the remainder of time on the contract.
That works out great for some deadbeat who never paid and whose account has been charged off (sent to collections). HOWEVER -- this was your mother who played by the rules and canceled within the grace period.
The most likely scenario with your mom's situation is that she called Dish to cancel and was sent to Winback (see my previous post about them).
Winback agents get a bonus based on the percentage of accounts they save out of their total number of cancellation calls. The rumor was that WB agents who weren't meeting goal would skip the actual account cancellation on some accounts to meet their goal for the month. That would be the most likely explanation about why your mom's service wasn't canceled when she called in to cancel.
And since the account wasn't canceled, the service was still being billed, and the computer registered that account as a non-pay, and then the autobatching....... oh, yeah! Not fun!
Oh, and did I forget to mention that when Winback agents skip canceling accounts, they don't notate the account, so that there's no record of the customer even calling in, let alone speaking to someone?
Now, back to the credit card issue -- when a customer starts up a Dish account, they have to provide a major credit card (can also be a Visa debit card) to secure the account.
Fine and dandy. But that card stays on the account for the life of the account -- UNLESS the customer calls in, talks to a sup, and then gets transferred to ERT (Executive Response Team, the actual employees of Dish who take the major-escalation calls -- provided they feel like it!)
ERT can unlink a credit card from an account, which is supposed to be done when a customer cancels. But -- ERT wouldn't always actually unlink the card.
What could have happened with your mom's cancellation (although highly unlikely) is that ERT simply (or also, you pick) did not unlink the credit card when your mom canceled -- provided the Winback agent complied with your mom's wishes and canceled the account.
Now, with all that horsepuckey from one simple issue, you can imagine how pleasant the billing calls weren't for Dish.

[Bonnie Bitch]

She called to cancel within her 2 months they gave her and they said they would send boxes for her with the labels.

I almost forgot, before I went off on my "<loud car horn> Dish" jag in the last post --

THE BOXES!!! <shudder>

We hated boxes and labels. Why?
Thank you for asking. I shall tell you why we hated boxes and labels.
Dish does all its shipping through UPS. To send out boxes and labels, the rep has to get to the UPS website. Not a problem -- except that at my call center, menial reps (like me) aren't allowed outside internet access -- except for dishnetwork.com and UPS.
Getting to the UPS site was a major pain in the rectal area. The site was slow to load up, and the pop up warning about Internet security would come up with every last kilobyte of crap that had to be downloaded. I once had to click on that damned icon 32 times on one call.
Now, when we get to the UPS site, we can only send boxes to the billing address. To change the send-to address, we have to re-load the UPS site and go through a longer process.
Ok, fine, I type 80 wpm and know my way around a computer.
The catch was -- DISH would only pay UPS for X number of boxes to be sent out per day. Once Dish reached the limit, no more boxes would be sent out that day. So, if Dish reps had entered a total of 100 (arbitrary number) boxes to be sent, only the first 80 (arbitrary number) would actually be sent, because Dish was only paying for 80 (arbitrary number) to be sent out per day. If a customer was in the final 20, then tough poop! No boxes for them.
And here's the real kick in the rubber parts -- if the aforementioned customer who didn't make the cut-off did call back and ask about the boxes, they couldn't get any. Why? Because they'd already asked for some, and an order had already been placed for the boxes.
Then the real fun started -- LABELS. And I'm just gonna say it -- the f*cking pre-paid g*dd*mned shipping labels p*ssed me off to no end.
Sending out labels was a 15 minute process that was so convoluted that even the help desk sups had to use the cheat sheet.
Labels could be sent thru snail mail (yeah, good luck with that!) OR thru e-mail, and at least I could keep the customer on the line sometimes to make sure that they got the labels in their e-mail. (Cust would then print the labels out).
Oh, and the customer had 14 days (that's calendar days, not business days) to return their equipment. The time quote we had to give them for boxes was 3 to 5 BUSINESS days to ship, and 5 to 7 BUSINESS days to return. You do the math!

So, why did I stay with Dish as long as I did?
I didn't know any of the crap until I had changed departments, and the project lead for Dish and I ran into each other at a coffee shop on a drizzly Sunday afternoon and had a two-hour chat. Since Dish was already gone at that time, she spilled her guts to me (I'm easy to talk to, I guess).
If I had known any of this crap at the time, I would have quit -- not just the department, but the call center, even though it's a decent place to work.

Anything else you want to know about Dish, such as how Dish gets a cut from the 12.98 processing fee Western Union charges to send in a payment via Western Union? Just ask. I'm feeling very chatty on the topic this evening.

<kiss noise>

Bonnie Bitch

[Andara Bledin]

Urgh. Nobody charges my credit card without my permission.

If some company tried that with me (which they have), I would have challenged it and gotten my card provider to remove the charge (which they did) and given explicit instructions that the company doing the charge was never allowed to charge my card until and unless I changed that instruction. And this is on my debit card.

The most ebarrassing, however, was when my ex and I couldn't recognize a charge and challenged it. The company called us to ask what happened, and we apologized and called the bank to re-instate the charge. Boy were we red-faced over that one.

^-.-^

[Bonnie Bitch]

I didn't know any of the crap until I had changed departments, and the project lead for Dish and I ran into each other at a (I should be drinking tea instead) shop

Bonnie Bitch

The part in bold -- I didn't write that, just like I didn't write "storture rack" in my last post. But it showed up anyway.

What's the up with that?

[Bonnie Bitch]

Urgh. Nobody charges my credit card without my permission.

If some company tried that with me (which they have), I would have challenged it and gotten my card provider to remove the charge (which they did) and given explicit instructions that the company doing the charge was never allowed to charge my card until and unless I changed that instruction. And this is on my debit card.
^-.-^

I've had to do that too. But the thing with Dish was that the customer's signature on the contract was all the permission that Dish needed, since the customer also had to sign a second time next to the disclosure about "I've read and understood what I signed above."
Legally (and just barely, might I add) Dish does have the customer's permission to autobatch when Dish can claim that the customer defaulted on the contract.
Caveat emptor, as they used to say back in the day......

[Bonnie Bitch]

April, her experience sounds horrible but sadly it doesn't surprise me. The odd thing is that my brother got Dish a couple years before I did and they have never had one single problem with it - not one! I really think that they're just very fortunate to be the exception.

My brother Etthis (pronounced EAT-this) has also had nothing but fabulousness as a Dish customer. But he bought his equipment outright and has his credit card automatically debited each month, so he's never behind or late in paying.
Because of Dish's FUBAR delightful billing system, it is very easy to get behind on payments.