RCN: Great service IF there is no option AND only when it works
Written: Jun 24 '04
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Pros: Bundle very good. Very fast cable access. easy hook up
Cons: abysmal menu system both at telephone CS level as well as television programming. dreadful reps.
The Bottom Line: You may have to use RCN if they' re the only one offering such a wide bundle for their price. Bottom line will depend on reading review. It MAY work?
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| Bookwriter's Full Review: RCN Cable |
I am writing this while on hold with RCN. These guys REALLY put you through the wringer when anything goes wrong with their service with endless totally useless and extremely slow menus all asking for information and then slowly demanding confirmation of all that information prior to not actually entering any of it into the telephone call records automatically in any way: Whenever anyone from any department gets on the phone they slowly ask all questions all over again (and repeat those questions for maximum annoyance value) however many times you get connected to however many different departments. AND I have now been on hold for over ten minutes trying to get my broadband service restored which they cut off without notice (see end of message for more on this). The person to whom I spoke asked me EIGHT times (sometimes with two or three such questions grouped together to totally demoralise you into changing service) whether I wanted to be put through to payments when I said obviously YES on the first three occasions and that was the entire purpose of my (then) half hour long call.
They do cut off service peremptorily without sending out bills: This has happened to me twice now, so none of what I say is any type of temporary glitch which only applies to me, and their equipment isn’t all that reliable (one of my boxes gives constant problems, -and has been changed once, - though not the other). And their service people occasionally make you wait all morning after having made you wait three days for a service call and then don't show up.
Their television channel line-up is quite good although I object to being made to pay for BBC America which isn’t regarded as a second tier service by many other cable providers. When I got this ‘premium’ service I found that although it DOES have tremendous programming, most of it is filled up with endless pseudo-reality shows about Englishmen telling Americans about interior decorating tiny suburban semi-detacheds in some housing development in England somewhere which cannot have any relevance to anything any american would ever want to know about how to redecorate their houses, - along with similar programs about how to re-do tiny English housing development gardens; These same shows are endlessly re-run (OK, after a few of these shows, they ALL look like re-runs of the same show). They also do Ken Burns-type excruciatingly slow programs (granted, these shows do not suffer from the talking heads and Burn’s ludicrous uneducated hyperbole) about digging up archaeological sites all over England which would be interesting if they weren’t soooooo slow. Kinda like those first-time-Directors shows of deep sea, - also archaeological, - dives for wrecks with most of the hour spent watching people putting on diving costumes and laughing over their not being able to dive because of the (endless scenes of the) weather today. Let’s say the promise definitely isn’t fulfilled and the programmers are constantly complaining about this to their bosses who apparently won’t let them have many of the better BBC programs. Then quite often they do marathons which can be of no conceivable interest to anything but a minuscule number of viewers in which they repeat for a whole day reruns of compendiums of these exact programs. OK, there is probably some political reason for this but in any event my point is that this DEFINITELY isn’t a premiums service for which RCN should be charging.
On the good side, RCN has mouth-watering offers not all of which are carried through on (for example before I signed up, they promised me that this very BBC America service WAS in their standard digital line up) and were the first to offer completely bundled telephone, cable television and broadband service, - and at a charge which was slightly more than I had been paying THEM for the telephone service alone. But even though they are offering you a special discount service, you do eventually find that they are only offering all separate services at their standard rate (so one of their engineers told me)
And they are a bit commercial: I can live with their selling advertising space on the ribbon bar every time I change channel IF it subsidises my service (which apparently it doesn't, and I am suspicious that the channel changes a bit slowly so that you have to look at the ad to see what is going on) but I do object to all those HSNs and QVC look-alikes (which I haven’t found a way of deleting) at the beginning of the line-up (their boxes all turn on at Channel 8, - their advertising channel, called IT (a bit like their version of New York 1 but only slightly less amateurish and with less actual programming). And it is fiendishly difficult to program their remote control (to exclude all the dud channels) for favourites, involving laboriously going through up to twenty pages of wrong channels before you can add or erase a single channel; BTW they send you messages every few weeks telling you that they have changed their line up so you may have to go through all this again.
(I hope someone gets a feel from this message for how long they keep you on hold and how their endless slow messages can't be by passed without your call being cut off: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES CALL THEM IF YOU HAVEN'T GOT A SPEAKERPHONE WITH A VOLUME CONTROL. It is now 9.39 and I am going off to take a shower to see if I am still being kept on hold by RCN when I come out and have to go off to an appointment and am forced to start this whole process again
9.39 a.m. 25 minutes later. Still endless pretences that I am being held in a queue, - which obviously isn’t true as this is supposed to be a payments centre and one has some difficulty in believing that they don't answer payments calls reasonably quickly
10.17 a.m. After this call has lasted 1 hour and two minutes I am going out to my appointment but will be leaving the phone off hook to get someone in the office to ascertain when they do answer and make a note of the time: By extraordinary coincidence my appointment is next door to the RCN payments centre so I will call from there to see if my phone still switches to voice mail because the line is occupied on this call
By the way, I forgot to mention that the last agent to whom I spoke offered to take my payment for a charge of $4.50. When I declined to pay their excess charge for nothing, you may form the impression that this wait is some type of punishment for not wanting to pay RCN this additional money on my service?)
12.43 Just came back from appointment and find (I don't know if anyone is going to be surprised by this) that the phone still hasn’t been answered. I will leave readers and potential users of RCN to decide for themselves whether you sign up for this service or if in fact they have a number they put users through to when they don't want to answer a question or give information or do anything whatsoever for the customer.
(By The Way: I was wrong about the RCN offices being in the building next door to my appointment: It was the same building and I arrived 10 minutes early for my appointment and went into the RCN payments centre and paid the bill, - the one for which they hadn’t billed me which was causing all the trouble, - in full. That was at 10.50 a.m. By 12.55 when returned to the phone and concluded this report, they still hadn’t bothered to throw the switch re-connecting me: One cannot help but suspect that they are going to try to put me through the wringer again if I want to be reconnected) UPDATE: My telephone didnt disconnect the phone from their phoney queue until 3.45 when I next tried to use that line
Conclusion: The special package was offered to me about two years ago and I don’t know if such packages are available at competitive prices from other companies at the moment or indeed if such packages are available in your area from any other companies but you may regard this as a salutary lesson about whether or not you want to deal with RCN.
I should add that on the rare occasions I have ever been able to get through to any senior executives at the company for whatever reason during the last few years, they have always been eminently reasonable and have always been as helpful as they could possibly be. It is, of course impossible to get through to any one senior without going through this extraordinary charade, during which you might well be put through to this non-existent call centre which the evidence shows exists only to get rid of customers they don't want to assist.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): $154
Version Number or Year: 2004 telephone, cable tv & cable broadband
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Epinions.com ID:
Bookwriter
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Location: New York & London
Reviews written: 12
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
Journalist, Author, attorney. NO AFFILIATION WITH SPONSORS OF EPINIONS. (reviews therefore impartial)
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