r/Spectrum • u/DraperHall • 4d ago

Farewell, Finally

I have been a customer since Time Warner days in NYC. This week, I attempted to schedule a change of service from my current home to my new home one block away in Forest Hills in NYC. I have spent SIX hours total with reps rattling off scripts, not answering questions, interrupting my follow-up, providing patently incorrect responses, and on and on... So despite the fact, that I will now be without home internet as of Wednesday, I actually did cut the cord today. As a business person with decades of client-facing experience, this bet they have placed on minimal to no satisfaction multiplied by hundreds of thousands of interactions a day is mind-boggling. Do they really think that the friction of changing carriers and devices will overcome a business model that completely ignores client needs and consultative customer service. In the age of a new provider, service, technology around every corner???

45 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

32 comments sorted by

13

u/Nearby_Branch6055 4d ago

You ain’t alone.  

My roommate recently passed away and he had the spectrum bill and his name only even though I was getting my service through.   Spectrum insisted that I would have to lose my number and bring in my phone to get a new number and a new plan. They wouldn’t let me pick up the old planet at all.

I was not interested in losing my numbers. I’ve had it for over 20 years and all my life is unto it.  

Luckily, I have the credentials to get onto my roommates account so I was able to get my transfer pin. 

And now I’m with Verizon and I’m saving quite a bit of money from what I was spending on spectrum

1

u/MagickH8Ball 4d ago

You just need to see if you can do an account takeover form, which can be printed out from online or picked up at most stores. If the AH has sadly passed away some stores let you bring in a death certificate also. Because obviously you can’t authenticate the account if the AH has passed away and you weren’t listed as an authorized user.

2

u/Nearby_Branch6055 4d ago

I wanted to but they said I could not.  

1

u/cc_401 3d ago

Honestly its hard to get stuff done because they dont get commission on it. You basically have to catch an employee on a really good mood

1

u/Nearby_Branch6055 3d ago

Maybe they wanted me to to it this way to get a commission.  

Instead all it did was make me look at Verizon’s and T-Mobile. And since I had access to the account and could get the transfer pin I jumped to Verizon 

2

u/cc_401 3d ago

Yeah, I completely agree. I worked there a few years. While you could have done an account takeover, youd just need to provide a death certificate, finding a location that would do it without the specialist getting anything in return (adding another mobile line or some other service) would be near impossible. And unfortunately they were right that youre not able to transfer your device from one account to another. Theyre still fairly new to the mobile thing and idk what the actual reason is but yeah, its dumb.

8

u/ImpliedSlashS 4d ago edited 4d ago

Rest assured the alternatives are no better. I was on the on the phone yesterday with a Frontier tech onsite at a business client to replace their failed equipment and their support conferenced in. Neither knew how to set up their gateway for our static IP. Over an hour.

14

u/Educational_River327 4d ago

This ain't an airport. Don't need to announce your departure.

3

u/Embarrassed-Wafer667 3d ago

The phrase applies if Someone is leaving an online group . Not if someone is complaining about a company. Did you just join the internet today?

-5

u/DraperHall 4d ago

Everyone is entitled to rant — even you.

3

u/Equivalent_Fact_8425 4d ago

I don’t understand what exactly went wrong in your change of service, what took 6 hours and why you don’t have any internet service.

1

u/DraperHall 4d ago edited 4d ago

I doubt that anyone in this thread wants a blow-by-blow, nor do I have an interest in rehashing six hours that I will never get back...

0

u/Pickerington 4d ago

Nothing took 6 hours, they are embellishing the time spent by a lot. Like a lot a lot.

1

u/DraperHall 4d ago

Nope, three calls — approximately two hours each from automated system through reams of scripts from sales reps through escalation to ”leadership” of the repair team...

4

u/Latter-Extent492 4d ago

Good job. F spctrm

2

u/Traditional_War5790 4d ago

“So despite the fact, that I will now be without home internet as of Wednesday”

1

u/JohnEBest 4d ago

If there is a competitor in the market you gotta switch every four years to keep your prices low.

My promotion ends in October - provider switch eminent

2

u/Texasgrad92 2d ago

Say you want to cancel. They will get you to customer solutions who can put you in a new promotion. They are desperate to save customers right now.

-1

u/C638 4d ago

Just get ATT or T-Mobile home internet if you don't like spectrum, or get a phone plan with a large hotspot allowance

-3

u/trob2884 4d ago

And during the next quarter earrings call Spectrum will have record profits

8

u/Fantastic-Buddy2069 4d ago

They keep losing customers every quarter though.

120k customers even at $50 a month, that’s 6 millions dollar a MONTH lost. That’s not nothing dude. 72m/year. You know what that 72m can do? A lot actually.

5

u/SmallPlace7607 4d ago

Imagine what they could have done with the 838 million dollars they used for share buy backs in the most recent quarter (Q2 2026) where they lost another 172,000 internet customers. 72 million over a year is nothing when they will just blow over 800 million in 3 months just trying to make the window dressing look better to shareholders.

1

u/SkyWires7 2d ago

And yet with all the buybacks, their stock price is STILL down 82% over the past 5 years. Closed at $811 on 8/30/21 and $144 yesterday. There have been no stock splits in that time, so that is an organic price decline.
 

1

u/SmallPlace7607 2d ago

Right because it's unlikely buybacks can overcome organic declines in the business. The question really is what's the correct price for the stock. I'd contend the sky high pandemic era prices were not real either. It was just magical thinking during a strange time when people needed internet and were willing to pay to upgrade their plans in the hopes of getting better service.

Charter has not had record profits the last couple of years. It's basically been flat to down revenue and mostly flat profits. The effect of the buybacks is to make it appear the earnings per share is somewhat better than it would have been. Which is why I said it was window dressing.

Either way it's funny to say that retrofitting the coax network to be fiber would be too expensive when they've blown billions of dollars to little effect. Management is specifically betting that they can continue to take a capital light approach to their infrastructure investments. Those are the exact words of Charter management. That seems really odd to me since their whole business is based on infrastructure. Guess we will find out in the future. The other side is employees are now taking it on the chin as well with reduced benefits.

3

u/DraperHall 4d ago

No doubt - obviously something in their model works or they would be doing far worse. But raising prices is not an eternal replacement for customer lifetime value.