2 Days in and we hit a snag…
By john on Feb 7, 2008 in AT&T UVerse, featured
So last night, aside from having my car half swallowed by a pot hole (and puncturing one of my tires – requiring me to get it replaced), I also had the good fortune to have my U-Verse DVR die a horrible death. Not too cool, considering I just got it on monday. Also not cool that there were recordings on there I had yet to watch (and was waiting for Ann to be available to watch with me). So I called up AT&T, and was met with mixed results.
While they couldn’t get my dvr box to work again, they had a list of steps for me to take to see if we could recover it. None of them worked, but I tried them anyways. Eventually they wanted me to do a factory reset of the dvr, which I was somewhat reluctant to do (given that i’d lose my recordings) but was out of alternatives. It didn’t work. It also takes about 20 minutes for it to not work and display a red X on my screen. At one point during all of this the first tech I talked to asked for permission to go into my residential gateway to see if there were any funky settings there that could cause problems. In the process he also knocked my whole network offline as he, without telling me he had done so, turned off the DMZPlus mode for my non-uverse router. As a result my router stopped passing traffic from my internal network, taking it all offline. I’m not so much upset that he changed a setting, rather that he didn’t tell me he was doing so (I’d have told him not to) . Anyway, I ended up resetting the dvr 4 times at the behest of AT&T’s tech support. Since that still wouldn’t resolve it, they told me a tech would have to come out to the house to take a look at it and probably replace it. That was around 930am when I talked to them. They told me they will have a tech here between 10 and noon today. Yes, 10am – 12 pm today. Less than three hours from the incident. With Comcast, any such repair or replacement would take until next week sometime to happen, certainly not less than 3 hours.
So, while I’m dissapointed that my DVR box died so quickly and unexpectedly, I’m definitely impressed with the speed and responsiveness of their technical support compared to Comcast. I was able to get someone on the phone in about a minute, they were moderately competent, they weren’t in India somewhere so I could actually understand them and they scrambled a repair guy to fix the issue pretty fast. Now we just have to wait and see how things go with the repair, if the tech shows up, etc. I’ll update this post when they’ve got everything taken care of.
[update 1]: Half hour after getting off the phone with tech support the repair tech who is scheduled to come out and fix everything called, said he’d be here in about a half hour, making the time from getting off the phone with tech support and the arrival of the tech just about one hour. I don’t care who you are, that’s just impressive.
[update 2]: The repair tech was just here and was able to get the DVR to reset properly. He checked the coax jack in the wall (installed by comcast) and put in a new one, as soon as he did the dvr box was able to reset itself properly and came up without a problem.
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That *is* an impressive response. Sure beats the usual “We’ll have someone there between 9am and October. Thanks for calling!”
sayerbloke | Feb 7, 2008 | Reply
I know! When they first uttered the words “we’ll need to dispatch a technician…” my mind was reeling with past experiences with Comcast where that meant I might have someone out there to fix it in the next three months. When they said the times available I was stunned (in a good way) and even more so when they delivered on that.
So far the customer service is, at least in my case, light years better than with Comcast.
Hell, when I called comcast today to cancel the cable I had to call in several times because their phone system got screwed up and kept dropping the call. It also took a good minute of menu hopping before I could get anyone on the phone. Not so with U-Verse – I literally put in my phone number and said I wanted UVerse technical support and was connected in under a minute – to a person, not a machine.
john | Feb 7, 2008 | Reply
John,
Impressive customer service from at&t indeed!
While I’m not a total at&t fan myself (for other reasons), I will say their customer service HAS ALWAYS been better than Comcast, and as of the last few years, downright impressive.
While I unfortunately still can’t get UVerse where I am (though it is pretty close in nearby areas), I’ve had their DSL since 1996 or so. While they haven’t been able to scramble a tech that quickly, they’ve always been able to get a tech out to me within 4-12 hours. Still quite impressive, especially compared to Comcast. I’ve tried Comcast for brief periods during pricing specials, and while Comcast is faster, the connection has always been slightly less stable (more voip cut-outs) and the packet latency (ping times) are always significantly higher with Comcast. Not to mention Comcast’s VASTLY inferior customer service and response times (at least on average).
I love all your blog entries… I wish I had more time to read more of them.
Alan | Jun 13, 2008 | Reply