We’d like to do a little customer service satisfaction survey. Do you find dealing with Time Warner Cable, which is probably your broadband provider if Comcast is not, the most awful thing you can imagine or only in the top ten? Haha it doesn’t matter because your complaints will always go unheeded, sucka, as Time Warner can do things like just keep no records of your ceaseless phone calls and verbal complaints when you are just trying to get your fucking cable to work to show you the House Hunters International marathon. No records equals no complaints to report! Everybody wins. Except you.

First, let’s get a glimpse into the dystopian nightmare that is how cable companies squeeze the most out of municipalities while giving as little money or information back as possible. So you’re a city that wants to add a second local channel, probably to show double the hot hot city council subcommittee meeting action, but to do so, you have to sit down with Time Warner, cap in hand, and beg for it. And Time Warner will come down from the mountain and grant you an audience, but then will explain how this is going to go down, and it isn’t the way you want it to, puny city.

Last month in Keene, New Hampshire, the Keene City Council was voting on whether to add a second local channel (which would give the city more revenue) through Time Warner Cable. In exchange, Time Warner Cable wanted to extend the franchise agreement with the city for an additional five years, or the year 2023. While the rest of the council agreed to give Time Warner Cable the extension, one Councilor had a bit of an issue with the way that Time Warner Cable was running their business.

What kind of City Council-dwelling peon would dare to question the great Time Warner? What does this speck of dirt want?

Even though the Council voted 4-1 in favor of the second channel, Councilor Terry M. Clark expressed his disappointment with Time Warner Cable on their refusal to adhere to the original franchise agreement signed with the city years back that forces Time Warner Cable to tell the City Council about any complaints that they receive from customers.

Here’s Time Warner’s answer.

No really, we’re not kidding. That is the essence of Time Warner’s answer.

“They reported back that they had no complaints,” Clark said at last week’s meeting. “I asked, ‘Why?’ They said because they weren’t required to write them down.”

Yes, that last part is true. TWC’s franchise agreement contains some language that allows it to whitewash its horrible track record. […]

Except as limited by federal law or FCC regulations concerning privacy, Franchisee shall maintain a record of all such complaints and such records shall be available at Franchisee’s local offices for at least two years for inspection by the Franchising Authority as it may from time to time request, during regular business hours and upon reasonable notice. Nothing herein shall be deemed to require Franchisee to maintain records of oral complaints, which can be handled to the customer’s satisfaction in the course of the initial conversation in which the complaint is made or does not require technical field response.

So, if you call Time Warner, and you spend 90 minutes trying to get them to make the cable box reboot or reconfigure or regenerate in time for 19 Kids and Counting, and the end result is that they explain to you that they are sorry your cable hasn’t worked for days and won’t work for days more but you will get a $2 credit, no documentation of complaint necessary because you never wrote in and it was resolved in one phone call. Success!

External metrics (look how Vox Dot Com we sounded there!) show that no one at all likes Time Warner, because they are awful.

Consumer Reports stated that TWC ranked “very poorly with consumers when it comes to value for the money and have earned low ratings for customer support” and “Time Warner Cable ranked 16th overall for television service with particularly low ratings for value, reliability, and phone / online customer support.”

According to YouGov, Time Warner Cable has the poorest brand perception of the major pay TV service providers, with a score of -10.

None of this matters, because soon Time Warner will merge with Comcast and then you will have one and only one choice for your internets and it will cost $1000 month and extra if you want porn and the glorious new sci-fi era of corporations being governments and running entire parts of the country and making you all live in corporate compounds will come to pass and you will like it because the teevee says so.

[techdirt]