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Dish Network to SoCal couple: fire or no fire, we want $300 for our receiver NOW!!

By | October 26, 2007, 7:25am PDT

Summary: Yup you read that right. And you’ve heard about the Southern California wildfires, have you not? Well, those extending the hand of mercy don’t seem to include the good folks at Echostar, d/b/a the Dish Network. Karl at DSL Reports.com notes that Matt and Danelle Azola returned from a cruise to find their Ramona, California, home burned to [...]

lg_dish322.jpg

Yup you read that right.

And you’ve heard about the Southern California wildfires, have you not?

Well, those extending the hand of mercy don’t seem to include the good folks at Echostar, d/b/a the Dish Network.

Karl at DSL Reports.com notes that Matt and Danelle Azola returned from a cruise to find their Ramona, California, home burned to the ground.

Now with their residence in ruins, they methodically called the services that came to their home, and cancelled them. Or at least tried to.

Natural because their home is no more, and presumably everything in and around the home was damaged or totalled. Like their Dish Network receiver.

Yet when they called Dish, they were told they owed $300 for the receiver. No matter the Azika’s are homeless, and the dish and tv were probably burned beyond recognition.

Customer service wouldn’t bend. Not even a little.  They won’t even defer the bill up until  the Azolas get their insurance check.

Main takeaways:

1. This is what happens when you either outsource your customer “support” to third-party call centers,  or/and;

2. This is what happens when service providers don’t empower phone service agents to effect changes, or/and;

3. This is what happens when upper management is so far removed from the call center supervisory apparatus that necessary policy changes aren’t pushed down to the people in the trenches.

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Disclosure

Russell Shaw

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?page_id=1879

Biography

Russell Shaw

Russell Shaw passed away in March 2008. He was an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. A specialist in open source architectures and strategies, Microsoft applications, wireless networking, and multimedia content creation, Russell covered these fields regularly for several IT, business and consumer publications, including Investor's Business Daily and the syndicated IT news site NewsFactor.com.

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RE: Dish Network to SoCal couple: fire or no fire, we want $300 for our receiver NOW!!
specialist63 27th Oct 2009
check this site out for great deals
http://www.vmcsatellite.com/?aid=299170
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Sounds Like
gettinoriginal2@... 26th Oct 2007
hmmmmmmmm, sounds like Echostar, d/b/a the Dish Network and Sprint have the same call center !! It seems to me that big business has forgotten how they became big business, the consumer. And thank you for the tip, I cancelled my Sprint account over their disgusting business theology, and even though I do not use Echostar, I will be sure to pass on their attitude to others who do.
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Tried to cancel.....
satovey@... 26th Oct 2007
The author makes a point about the difficulty of canceling the service of some companies.

I had this problem with T-Mobile.

After the year contract was up I called them to inform them that I would not be continuing the service because of the fact that I no longer could afford it being unemployed an all.

The rep told me that I had to pay them for another month because they I did not give them a months notice.

I informed the individual that the one year contract I signed had expired and that there is no way that I was going to pay them another month for service.

Companies not only make it difficult to cancel their service, but they have some insane notion that they can force you to abide by a contract that has already expired.

What dweebs!!

Scott
I'm sorry their house burned down, but is there something I'm missing? They bought the thing and said they would pay for it. They had possession of it. Why should they get a free ride now? And they missed watching their house burn down because they were on a cruise? And now they claim they don't have $300? Puh-lease.
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There is something you are missing....
ccrashh2@... 26th Oct 2007
You really need to read this again. They didn't "buy" the thing, they rented it (as most people do). They are required to pay for it if it is damaged, however. They never claimed they didn't have the $300. They claimed that the company demanded immediate payment, without waiting for the insurance claim(s) to be settled. Big difference.
I didn't see that they denied or refused to pay - simply that there was a demand for payment even though the fires destroyed most if not all of the couples assets. Seems to me the comment missed the point: There appear to be more important things to worry about than paying a dish or any other crap from Dish Net right now. If Dish can't figure that out, they'll probably grow ever smaller, regardless of whether they get paid this time or not.
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How about a sense of humanity. I wonder if you'd be so quick to side with the Dish company if it were YOUR house that burned to the ground.
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Just send it back!
ariepert 26th Oct 2007
I would just scoop up a box full of ash and send it back to them...
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Excellent idea! LOL.
MGP2 26th Oct 2007
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Dish Network Customer Service
savagesteve13 26th Oct 2007
Dish Network's customer service is astonishingly bad. My worst experience with DN (and my only one!) was when I tried to order the service. They ran my credit check and couldn't find a credit rating, so they insisted I buy all the equipment ahead of time. I said fine...I will buy it. The rep got snippy with me for some reason and then said that they couldn't give me free installation without credit, even though I offered to buy $300 worth of equipment right on the spot. So they referred me to a phone number of a local installer who turned out to be a home residence and the guy on the other end was not an installer.

I hate DirecTV because its expensive and run by that idiot that owns Fox News, but at least they don't openly hate their customers.

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