Customer Service for Dummies

I ordered a Tivo 7 business days ago. I specifically say business days because my order was supposed to arrive in 4-6 business days. Today was day 6 so I called. See for yourself how the conversation went with customer service.

Today is the 6th business day since I ordered my Tivo. The order said 4-6 business days for delivery. I call them today and the guy comes back:

“Yes I ordered a Tivo 6 business days ago and I have yet to receive it.”

“OK let me check. [1 minute passes] Good news sir. Your box is on back order.”

“OK so what does that mean to me?”

“You haven’t been charged yet. You can cancel or wait.”

“How is that good news?”

“Well you haven’t been charged.”

“That’s not really good news. How come I didn’t get notified that it was on back order? How long am I supposed to wait?”

“Ummm I’d give it another week.”

Do all providers of video service to the home (save for youTube) get together on weekly customer service meetings to ensure one of them doesn’t outdo the other by treating the customer properly?

Perhaps I’m overreacting, but the last interaction with the cable company to cancel our cable internet went down pretty badly as well. Sadly we signed up for Comcast residential cable a few months ago. Odd thing is we are paying half what we used to for our “business” internet, yet our connection is twice as fast. Strange how the physics of the video giants works sometimes.

Until youTube can provide all my video needs I’m stuck with these video giants. What I really want is IPTV to take off. Let me buy what I watch, not these other filler channels I have to flip through because I’m too lazy to delete them or “just in case” something cool eventually comes on one of those channels. Let me buy the 7 or 8 channels I watch. No more, no less. I will be fine without 10 Spanish channels, 8 shopping channels, and the 1 channel that shows the Windows screensaver 24×7.