I want to share this but don’t have the patience or time to get into real details, so here’s the short version.

We came home on Sunday to find the DVR telling us we had nothing recorded. Odd, since we had a shitload recorded. We tend to record, save and watch in chunks and there was stuff as old as 4 or 5 months on there waiting to be viewed. Even weirder was that it was telling me that 100% of the space was available, but indicated that there was about 17 hours of HD space. That’s weird because the DVR held about 100 hours of HD and 17 hours is about what was left with what we had sitting on the box.

Called AT&T. Essentially, the hard drive went. They sent out a replacement. It came yesterday. It’s a much newer model, has more capacity and seems to handle the ‘whole house DVR’ thing much better than the old box – which would lag and get out of sync. So that’s a nice upside to losing all the shit we had recorded.

My wife took the opportunity to try to weasel some compensation for our loss – it was a longshot, but you’d be amazed at what she has to give at the hotel sometimes, so it was worth a try.

This is where AT&T customer support failed in a major way. After the tech couldn’t help she was given to a supervisor who seemed to be just as unempowered. When my wife asked to go over her head to an actual manager, she was told no managers were in (it was Sunday evening) and to call back tomorrow and she could speak to the manager. The next day, the runaround got even greater with each person on the phone just passing the call along to someone else who wasn’t empowered to try to satisfy our complaint. It finally ended at the supervisor level again where this one offered the most compensation (still not even closer to what felt like an honest effort to appease an angry customer), informed us that the supervisor the night before was full of shit and pretty much lied to get my wife off the phone and pass the problem to the people on the next day and that no one above her on the totem pole would ever talk to a customer because it’s not in their job description.

Pretty much, if a level 1 tech can’t solve your issue to your satisfaction then it gets passed to a ‘supervisor’ and after that…well, sorry.

She suggested we try the AT&T site to contact someone higher up, but you can’t seem to. It just pushes you to the same phone numbers and the same unempowered employees.

Flat out. AT&T doesn’t want to hear it.

That was a little disappointing. Seems to be getting that way more and more. The one that always irks me is the customer survey that only asked certain questions or asks them in a certain way so that you really can’t express displeasure. I can’t think of an example offhand, but too many times when I have an issue with something and try to fill out the customer survey I can’t help but think they’re worded in a way to elicit the ‘correct’ response and keep satisfaction scores high.

But the new DVR is pretty kick ass.