I recently helped a friend order Centurylink DSL for his home. It is to be installed tomorrow. We ordered him a DSL modem/router/WAP/four Ethernet ports device from Best Buy. It was to [and did] arrive earlier today.
This morning, my friend got an email from Centurylink saying that a package would be delivered tomorrow. We called Centurylink. They confirmed it was a DSL modem that we didn't request.
I asked them why the installer wasn't bringing it out. They said it was self-install.
There is no phone line in this house and there hasn't been for years. My friend has been using cellular for phone service all of this time. There is telephone wiring. But it will likely have to be connected appropriately in Centurylink's local cable.
I tried to work this out with Centurylink. No one would own the problem. Each representative kept transferring me to another representative, and another, and another. And of course I spent a couple or three hours listening to their Centurylink ad on hold.
Finally, I spoke to a technical representative in Salt Lake City. She was a Godsend.
She concurred that this wasn't going to be a self-install and that if I would hold she was see about arranging for a dispatch. Bless her, the installer is coming tomorrow. So that means he should have his DSL on time.
Centurylink is not the first TELCO I have written about this kind of preposterous customer service. And I wrote another one about Centurylink quite a while back when no one in their business office had even heard of ISDN telling me that they didn't provide it. Really? When I spoke to the folks at the Centurylink ISDN help desk, they didn't believe me. So they called the business office and got the same treatment. They admitted they were shocked, too!
The TELCOs need to spend some money on better training for their people. Their CSRs have a tendency to give people migraines (I got one today from dealing with them). If it is something they don't know how to handle, they blindly transfer them into some other queue where the same thing happens over and over again.
I've worked for companies that would have fired [me] for far less.
Fred