Today I tasted my first experience of researching and bargaining for services through social media. My promotional package with Charter Cable is coming to a close and I’d like to keep my bill at about the same rate for the same bundle of services (expanded basic cable and high-speed Internet). I’m not interested in premium packages, such as movie channels or sports packages. I would just like to have access to basic services for under $100/month. Of course, during the weeks leading up to the end of the promotion period, I received a variety of confusing calls from different Charter customer service representatives with a variety of offers to continue my service. Unfortunately, none of the offers caught my attention, although since one of them was a 2-year contract for high-speed Internet at $29.99/month, I didn’t think that expanded basic should cost me more than another $30/month. ?????? ????? ????
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I decided to use poll my PLN and social network to consider options than Charter for TV and high-speed Internet. I posted a request for feedback to alternatives to Charter Cable on both Twitter and Facebook. I was happy to receive opinions from colleagues and friends about their experiences with DirecTV, Dish Network, and others (for some reason I value the opinions of people I know more than epinions, etc.) However, the feedback that surprised me was that I was contacted through Twitter by Umatter2ChtrR. It intrigued me to find out that Charter was assigning people to monitor social networking to try and resolve issues. It was interesting to see the variety of customer issues that this particular Charter twit was attempting to solve.
This contact by Charter brought me some hope that a back channel might provide me with a deal that would fit my criteria. Unfortunately, the Twitter rep was only able to restate an offer that I had previously been provided over the phone. So, I continued my online research for alternatives. Judging from my social network feedback, I associate with a large DirecTV audience. A final technology note from my research, I was also interested with what happened during my visit to the DirecTV website. Apparently, there must be some sort of timer on web visitors, because after I had been browsing for a while, a customer representative chat field appeared to ask me if I had any questions and provide me with additional information. I thought that was a nice touch. ?????? ????? ???? ?????a???? ????? ????? ??a??????? ???a2
On the flight home from