I’ve been a DirecTV customer since January 1995, and I’m about to return to cable. I’m not all that excited about it, but in a marketing and customer service failure of epic proportions, DirecTV has made that the easy choice.
Over the past 12 years, I’ve shown that I’ll spend money with DirecTV, having a premium package that includes a bunch of movie and regional sports channels I never watch. Plus, I buy the college football and basketball packages and the NFL package. I’ve bought every conceivable sort of DirecTV satellite receiver, from the early RCA models, through the Sony and Hughes models, to my current slate of four HR10-250 HD DirecTivos- for which I paid a grand a piece.
Now, as we know, those boxes are unable to receive the new MPEG-4 signal used to transmit local stations in HD. Not only that, but my dish won’t work either. It needs to be replaced with a bigger one.
That’s a lot of work just to remain a customer. A lot of work.
So I called DirecTV this past weekend and, after bouncing around for a while in search of a live person, asked what my upgrade options are. I’ll need four of the new DirecTV branded HD PVRs and a new dish- all installed since the company that installed my current system won’t touch the new dish installations. After bouncing around a little bit more, a DirecTV representative offered the following deal: 1 of the new HD boxes for free, 3 others for $100 a piece and the new dish installed for free. Not a bad starting point, but at this point DirecTV has to understand that, because of the significant cost and hassle of replacing all of my equipment, DirecTV has no incumbency advantage over any other provider.
I reminded the DirecTV representative of how many boxes I have already bought and all the money I have spent both on equipment and programming. I said that if DirecTV would give me 2 boxes, I’d buy 2 others at the quoted price of $100 a piece. She put me on hold for a few minutes and came back and said no. Whoever is upstream from her said no (or more likely her script said to put me on hold for a while and then tell me no).
I asked, nicely, if I could speak to the person who said no. She put me on hold for a few seconds, and then someone picked up the line and as soon as I started talking, hung up on me. Since I had been asked for my telephone number and told that the nay-sayer had my account on his screen, I thought maybe they’d call me back.
It didn’t happen. I could call back, spend even more time on the phone, start over and probably get someone to again allow me to pay $300 for the equipment to replace my recently purchased and now obsolete equipment, all for the privilege of paying DirecTV $100+ per month for programming I can get via cable for the same price. And without having to wait on the phone forever just to haggle with someone over $100.
I got discouraged. It felt like there was a heavy weight on my shoulders. I felt tired. I needed a nap.
It’s not the money. It’s not even the principal. It’s just that DirecTV is making it too hard for me to remain a customer.
I’m not willing to work that hard just to pay DirecTV more money.
