When we got home yes­ter­day, we were sur­prised to find a weird “acti­vate your device” mes­sage when we tried to go online. I turned on the TV, and there were no cable chan­nels. Some­thing was afoot.

So I called the num­ber on the “acti­vate” screen and had an auto­mated mes­sage tell me that my account was delin­quent, I owed hun­dreds of dol­lars, and my ser­vice had been dis­counted. Imag­ine my shock to learn this when I’d had NO PREVIOUS NOTICE. Even worse, I couldn’t get through to a cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive with­out pay­ing my bill first (sleazy — what if it had been your mistake?).

Long story short, when my card num­ber was stolen back in Octo­ber, the bank can­celed it and issued a new one. I for­got that the old one was reg­is­tered for your auto­matic pay­ment pro­gram, so your were unable to process pay­ment in Novem­ber and Decem­ber. Fair enough, but maybe you could have men­tioned that to me at some point before tak­ing the extreme step of dis­con­nect­ing my service.

Clearly you had my email address. While I received weekly “Xfin­ity What to Watch” spa­mails that I was too lazy to unsub­scribe from, I never once received a “hey, there’s a prob­lem with your pay­ment” notice. And when I called to try to talk to a human being about the prob­lem, the auto­mated voice ver­i­fied the last four dig­its of my phone num­ber, so obvi­ously you know how to reach me by phone. In fact, after a sec­ond call when I could finally reach a real per­son, I received an auto­mated tele­phone sur­vey, so call­ing me is proven to work. Not once, though, did I receive a “hey, we’re going to dis­con­nect your ser­vice” call dur­ing the last two months.

And while we’re at it, we’re on the verge of 2011 and you’re my cable and inter­net provider. Don’t you have the tech­nol­ogy to pop up a mes­sage on a screen say­ing, “hope you’re enjoy­ing this, we’d like you to keep enjoy­ing this, but can we talk about the prob­lem with your card num­ber? please call.” On the TV or on my com­puter screen — your choice. Or go old school because you know what else still works? Postal mail, a chan­nel you and I will be return­ing to using.

Hon­estly — in 2010, you couldn’t find *some* way to con­tact me to let me know there was a prob­lem? On top of that, I now have to go anti-green and re-activate paper bills if I want to be sure I see prob­lem notices, because the only billing-related emails I received from you dur­ing the last two months looked exactly like the one below. Which looks exactly like every other “your state­ment is ready for view­ing” mes­sage I get each month.

That mes­sage is the only billing-related one I received from you for the entire month of Decem­ber. If you saw that mes­sage every month from your elec­tric com­pany, would you think there was a prob­lem? Would you expect a lit­tle some­thing more from them that they’re turn­ing off your ser­vice? I expected more from you.

Yes, I could have logged in dur­ing those two months and seen a notice on the screen, but I also think you could have added a notice to that email or sent a sep­a­rate notice to make sure I knew there was a prob­lem. Good cus­tomer ser­vice this ain’t.

And now you want to charge recon­nec­tion fees because you dis­con­nected my ser­vice with­out any heads up that there was a prob­lem. Seriously?

Now that I’ve calmed down, I’m sub­mit­ting the fol­low­ing requests so that oth­ers don’t have to spend a frus­trat­ing evening the way I did.

• Change your pro­ce­dures so that cus­tomers using your e-bill ser­vice receive sep­a­rate noti­fi­ca­tions that there’s a prob­lem with pay­ment. Or add a notice to the stan­dard tem­plate, but pro­vide some type of heads-up that there’s an issue with­out the per­son hav­ing to log in to find out about it.
• Change your pro­ce­dures so that cus­tomers using your e-bill ser­vice receive sep­a­rate noti­fi­ca­tions that you’re going to dis­con­nect their ser­vice. While it likely won’t be any­time soon, I’d like to be able to trust your e-bill notices in the future and stop receiv­ing paper bills again someday.
• Make it pos­si­ble for some­one who’s as con­fused about an unknown prob­lem as I was to talk to a human being first with­out hav­ing to cough up a credit card num­ber first.

And I want my recon­nec­tion fees waived, because I would have paid my bill (as I have for years) had I known there was some­thing wrong. It’s a shame your cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive couldn’t do that for me. I had no con­fi­dence that any com­plaints I sub­mit­ted to an unem­pow­ered front­line per­son would get me any­where, which is what made me blog this open let­ter to you. I know you think you’re pro­tect­ing your CS folks by tak­ing away their abil­ity to judge a sit­u­a­tion and make a cus­tomer happy, but all you’re doing is upset­ting cus­tomers like me who want to dis­cuss how to resolve a valid complaint.

Please fix these prob­lems. You can do bet­ter, and you owe your cus­tomers bet­ter communication.

Sin­cerely,
Jenny