Consumer Update

Hello everyone!

It's been a while since my last consumer incident; I guess I've been fortunate for the past several months. However, the folks at Direct Star TV (a DirectTV reseller) decided to help me get back on track. Or should I say derail me from the track.

To begin, I'll admit that I haven't always been a BYU fan, but lets just say being away from Utah tends to put a new spin on things. The Texans I've met are pretty committed to their alma mater; it's practically religion. In any event, I had recently been contemplating getting satellite in order to get the games and the BYU channel. Keep in mind that Leah and I have been married now for almost 10 years and the only time we had cable TV was when it was included in the price of our apartment - a grand total of one year and three months, and for the first year of our marriage we didn't even own a TV. It would be safe to say that we don't like spending money on television service. All that aside, I decided to call Dstar to find out exactly how much it was going to be for this new service.

A young man named PJ answered the phone and we began our conversation. He asked for my name and I told him, "Zeb." To which he replied, "Ed?" To which I responed, "No, Zeb. Z-E-B." Then PJ said, "Oh... Zed," and then went off about some friend of his from high school that loved Led Zeppelin, so they called him Zed and how it was so cool, and blah blah blah... I didn't want to be anal, but I figured if I was going to buy service from them I wanted my name to be right on the bill so that I wasn't getting crazy things for people named "Ceb" (I know, I know, you don't believe it could happen - see earlier posts).

After getting the name right, I told PJ that all I wanted was to find out prices and that after we determined the cost I would discuss it with my wife and make a decision. PJ said that was fine and that we could just schedule a follow up call. So we went on our merry way determining exactly what the price would be. I will admit, I was less than excited about the price. After all, I only wanted three channels and you have to buy a billion channels you don't want just to get the ones you do want. So PJ did what any eager telephone call center salesman would do, he offered me discounts, and on we went widdling down the price of the service. After about 35 minutes on the phone we determined what the final price would be. With the price settled, PJ gave me a customer service number and read me some legal disclosure jargon, which seemed odd to me since I wasn't planning on buying anything at the time. And then, not surprisingly, PJ asked for my credit card number. After declining to offer the number, PJ informed me that nothing would be charged to the card, but that after I gave him the card number he would be able to give me an account number and we would be able to set up a time for an installer to come out to the house. Hmmm... that's odd. Despite the fact that no immediate charge was going to be made, this seemed a lot like purchasing the service.

So I backed PJ down and asked him to schedule the follow up call that we'd talked about. He told me that he wasn't able to schedule the call without setting up the account, and to do that he'd need the card number. This seemed fishy so I pressed a little. PJ then informed me that the card number was needed to verify my ID. Yeah! Sure PJ. In an act that was probably more deserving than was called for, I asked one more time for the follow up call. Finally, PJ relented and he said he'd set it up.

The phone went dead for a moment and then suddenly PJ's manager was on the phone. This seemed kind of odd since managers usually get on the phone for customer complaints, but I went along with it. The manager started asking me some pretty direct questions. "What seems to be the problem," he said. Mind you the manager had a pretty thick hispanic accent, which I thought was pretty entertaining. Imagine Jack Black in Nacho Libre. "We're giving you all these great deals and you're not signing up." I started to tell Nach... I mean, the manager that I wanted to talk to my wife before I committed to anything. But he cut me off and told me that they had offered me every discount they could. I told him that was fine, but I still wanted to talk to my wife. And of course he told me that they could only offer these discounts to callers the first time they called in. As if they keep a data base of all callers and once a caller hangs up without purchasing they're treated like leapers and charged some exorbitant fee because they didn't take the offer the first time and now they were being punished. So I told the manager that if they wouldn't offer me those prices again I'd just call another reseller and get the same deal. Of course he told me that I couldn't get this deal anywhere else and I told him there were at least nine more hits on the Google search that would give me the exact same price. To which he quickly replied that I wouldn't be getting their superior service. That actually made me laugh out loud. Here I was on the phone with a "Manager" of this company and he was giving me the riot act about not signing up for their their service. So I asked him if this was the way they treated all their customers. To which he promptly replied, "You're not a customer yet!" Now that was really laughable. So then this pip squeak says to me, "Why don't you talk to the person in your home that makes the decisions, and call us back when you're ready to get the service." Tisk, tisk, tisk Nacho.

So I went to Dstar's website and did a little research. It turns out that they advertise themselves as being members of the Better Business Bureau, and that they have an A+ customer rating. I thought it would be easy enough to go ahead and file a complaint while I was online to see if we couldn't adjust the rating a bit. But, as it turns out, the BBB has no record of Dstar. Odd, an A+ rating from a company that doesn't even have a record that you exist. Well that got the old law school consumer protection outline flowing through my head. It seems to me that someone is advertising their services as having a particular sponsorship or approval that it doesn't actually have. That just so happens to be a laundry list violation of the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. It looks like I'll be making a few phone calls on Monday... (stay tuned)