I love High-Definition TV - whether it is a football game, nature show on the Discovery channel, or even just a regular televison show, regular TV does not compare. The only thing I don’t like about HD is that, up until recently, there have been few good HD DVRs. Tired of waiting for my current provider, DishNetwork, to come out with a decent HD DVR receiver, I called them up in late January to cancel so I could get one from DirectTV. While in the process of cancelling, they told me about a new HD DVR & HD service coming out on February 1. I decided to stay with them.

On February 1, I called up in the early morning to order the new receiver. I paid my $300 for it and was given a 2/25 install date for a new dish so that I could get the extra HD channels that were being added. On February 17, I was excited when the receiver came via UPS. I immediately set it up and tried to use the receiver for my current channels. Upon setting it up, I was informed I’d have to call DishNetwork and have someone activate it for me. “No problem,” I thought, “everything is working fine and I’ve paid for the receiver and everything, so it should be no problem to get it activated.” Wrong!

Talking to the tech @ DishNetwork, I discovered that they wouldn’t (as a matter of policy) activate the receiver
until the install date. I wasn’t overly excited about that, but since my install date was just a week away, no big deal. Then he informed me that the person who took my original order had screwed it up and had not put in the order for the new dish - which was the whole reason they had to come and do an install in the first place! Re-doing the work order lost my original date, the next available one being April 1! Despite the fact that this was a screw-up on their part, they still would not activate the receiver for me.

Hi,

On 2/1/2006 I called DishNetwork and ordered a ViP622 receiver. At that time, I was required to pay $299.00 for the receiver and was given an install date of 2/25/2006.

On 2/17/2006, the 622 receiver was delivered to my house. I plugged it in, and after going through the setup steps, was told I needed to call DishNetwork to activate the channels. I spoke to a representative who told me that Dish policy was to not activate the receiver until the install. He further told me that the necessary Dish 1000 was not part of my original work order. In the process of editing the order, I lost my 2/25 installdate and was offered one on the 4/1/2006 instead.

This experience has left me very upset with DishNetwork - I have paid $300 for a receiver that I can’t even use for over a month and a half. An error on the part of DishNetwork caused my install date to be pushed back more than a month. Why do I have to pay for your mistakes?

At this point, I’d like to ask what you can do to rectify this situation?

If nothing can be done for me, I’d like to return the 622 and cancel my service.

Thank you.

- Spencer Uresk

A terse, but professional email, right? Nearly a full week later, here is the reply:

Dear Mr. Uresk,

Thank you for your reply. We apologize for the delayed response and inconvenience. There are no earlier dates than April 1st for installing the Dish 1000 and your VIP 622 receiver.

Your business is greatly appreciated and we thank you for allowing us to be of assistance to you. If you have any further questions or concerns, please refer to www.dishnetwork.com or reply to this e-mail.

Wow, thank you. My business is “greatly appreciated”, yet you can’t push a button and activate my receiver? I know that when I appreciate a client’s business, I don’t go out of my way to screw them over. I can understand not having an earlier install date, but would it be too much to ask for an activation? Apologizing doesn’t cut it.

I’d cancel the whole thing and return the receiver, if I weren’t afraid Dish would screw that up too, and cause me a multi-month long hassle to just get my money back. That’s ok - Dish already lost one customer because of my experience, and I won’t hesitate to tell friends and associates to go elsewhere for satellite tv so long as they continue to treat customers like this.

Some lessons we can learn from this?

- If you are running a business, don’t make it impossible for those who face your customers to actually help them. Most of these problems have been caused by DishNetwork’s ordering system not even allowing the CSRs to help me. I had one CSR who was actually quite helpful, but could not activate the receiver for me, because the system wouldn’t let him. Nice system.

- Get information to those facing your customers before they actually need it. A lot of frustration in my case (and for many others, unfortunately) has been caused by the fact that Dish did not give their CSRs enough information about the new HD hardware, channels, and promotions. This caused confusion, incorrectly setup work orders, and pissed-off customers like myself.