Charter MisCommunications

This is taken from Tom's blog of last Thursday (September 10). It will give you all the background.

Smiling Incompetence

I've been spending a lot more time with Charter Communications than I want to spend, lately.

Charter has a problem business account in Baraboo, and the cell phone number for that account is one digit off Michael's cell phone number. Somebody at Charter fat-fingered Michael's cell phone number into the company's computer at some point, so when the account became a problem account, Michael's cell phone was the contact number for Charter Communications.

Charter Communications called Michael's cell phone earlier this week. Michael was in a meeting. The call went to Michael's voicemail.

Michael's cell phone voicemail, as does mine, instructs callers not to leave a voicemail on the cell phone number, but to call our home phone instead, and leave a voicemail there if needed.

As a result, when Charter called Michael's cell phone some days ago, Charter Communications picked up our home phone and added it to the computer record for the business account they are chasing.

Since then, we've been getting a couple of calls from Charter a day, telling us to urgently call Charter Communications Business Services, Charter Communications Customer Support or Charter Communications Billing.

I've responded, in each and every case.

The first time around, Charter Business Services "corrected" the computer record to show the correct telephone number, and remove our numbers.

More calls came in.

I called again, and then again.

Both times I called, Charter assured me that our number did not appear on the business's record, and that there is no record of either Michael's cell phone or our home phone anywhere in Charter's database.

Sure.

Yesterday afternoon, when yet another call showed up, I decided to ignore the "800" number game altogether.

I back tracked the origin of the call to Charter's local business office.

I called that number directly and talked to a woman named Michelle.

Michelle had the business's paper file at hand, and she discovered that that the written contract with the business had a cell phone contact number which was the one-off-from-Michael's cell phone number. She fiddled around on the computer for a minute, and then she assured me that the record was now, finally and once and for all, corrected.

That's how things stood yesterday afternoon.

But nonetheless, I got yet another call from Charter Communications this morning.

So I called yet again this morning. This time I asked Charter to open a trouble ticket within their own systems, and escalate the matter until it was resolved.

I reasonably sure that I know what the problem is, because I've worked with distributed databases. Charter's system is not a single-object system, but instead a multiple-object system. In multiple-object systems, corrected information is supposed to distribute throughout the system. In Charter's case, somewhere along the system, the corrected record is not distributing across the database, and somewhere in the system, our telephone numbers remain in the record.

With escalation, Charter Communications should now be tracing the record throughout their databases, and sooner or later, assuming that Charter's database system is a step more than half-assed designed, every distributed record should be automatically or manually corrected.

So I've done what I can and we'll see where this goes.

I have no idea what to do with a company like Charter Communications.

Everyone I've talked to is polite. Everyone I've talked to acknowledges the problem. Everyone I've talked to tells me that the problem is corrected.

But the calls keep coming.

It is, clearly enough, a case of smiling incompetence.

I suppose that smiling incompetence is preferable to snarling incompetence, but incompetence is incompetence.

So here it is, Monday morning, almost a week after all this started. The calls from Charter have not stopped. Tom is still on the phone with this morning's second attempt to get this straightened out. Charter doesn't seem to be able to solve it, no matter how many folks in how many departments he has contacted.

Somehow the fact that a communications company cannot communicate internally about something this simple does not fill one with confidence about their other abilities. I had heard a rumor this summer that Charter was going belly up. Needless to say, I won't be surprised.

At any rate, we are not recommending Charter to anyone these days.

Tom, as you recall, is a retired attorney. I am already planning how to spend the money we get from the lawsuit.

PS -- This is not just an annoyance. If these people can't get their act together -- and if Mike doesnt pay his bill or whatever (I happen to know they guy, a friend of the Screnocks) -- Charter will turn it over to a collection ageny and send out a nasty note to the credit agencies and ruin OUR credit ratings. We are not Charter customers, by the way.

Be lovely to have my credit rating destroyed because someone else defaulted on a bill from a company I don't even use. Or to have a couple of loan shark heavies at the front door. I suppose Cassidy and Sundance might protect us.

While Tom is on the phone, I am doing laundry and trying to get ready for my trip to Texas. I hope to get over to the library later to drop off some books, pick up some stuff and get at least a little bit of writing done.