Consumer Newslets

Believe me, I'm just as disappointed as anyone who loves a good "bad customer service" story would be, but I just had a great experience with TWC in Brooklyn. Here's why:

1. Phone support last Thursday was fast and polite. Level 3 support didn't talk down to me, and they confirmed my complaints about slow Internet access, told me to trade in my 5+ year old modem.
2. Trade-in was without a hitch.
3. Phone support on Sunday (when new modem didn't fix problem) was equally fast. Earliest scheduled date for a technician to come check it out in person was Wednesday, which is my only complaint--I needed Internet access IMMEDIATELY, not in 3 days.
4. They bumped it up to Tuesday morning between 8-10am.
5. On Tuesday  morning, technician showed up at about 8:55am.
6. She carefully examined the modem, the cable, the master box in the apartment stairwell, and then the connection above my door, and discovered the problem and fixed it. Total time: about 45 minutes.
7. While doing all this, she answered any questions I had and explained things to me (I was curious).

This doesn't absolve TWC from all of the terrible customer service things it does to other customers, but I have to say, I was pretty impressed. It's how customer service should work, and so I felt compelled to mention it in semi-public, since usually I only write about TWC's screw-ups.

(And my name is nowhere on the account, so I don't think there was any way they could trace it back to me and give me special treatment as a PR scheme.)

(Photo: Dan4th)

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Wired's Threat Level blog reports that Express Scripts of St. Louis, Missouri has contacted the FBI regarding an extortion threat made against it in early October:

Express Scripts said it has received an anonymous letter containing the names of some 75 clients that includes dates of birth, Social Security numbers and their prescriptions. The letter threatens to expose millions of patient records if Express Scripts does not pay an undisclosed amount of money."

The company managed prescription benefits for 50 million patients. They say they've alerted the 75 people listed in the threat letter, and have set up a website to provide more help for members: http://esisupports.com

Extortion Plot Threatens to Divulge Millions of Patients' Prescriptions [Wired]

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Very Short List pointed me to a really cool website today, usernamecheck.com, where you can enter a user name and see where it's already registered among 68 different websites, from the big ones like Flickr, Gmail, and eBay to weird ones I've never even heard of (Wakoopa? Plurk? Seriously?).

usernamecheck.com

If you don't already subscribe to VSL's daily emails, you should. At least once a week I discover something cool, and it's free, which is always a plus.

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"After a full trial on the merits, we proved that Sprint Nextel's termination fees violated California law," said Scott Bursor, lead trial lawyer for the plaintiffs. "We proved that the fees bear no relation to any cost incurred by the company. And we proved that the fees were established as an arbitrary penalty to prevent dissatisfied customers from leaving. Now we will prove that the fees violate federal law as well."

http://www.intomobile.com/2008/11/04/sprint-targetted-in-1-billion-class-action-lawsuit-over-early-termination-fees.html

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Now that Gawker has booted me off the Consumerist float in its Parade of Snark, I am going to post consumerist-y things here. It's like a blog, but less! It's like Twitter, yet more!  And it won't take up too much of my time, which I really like.

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