Canceling PeoplePC Service is Almost as Bad as Trying to Cancel AOL
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I’ve had a PeoplePC dialup account open for the past four years. I provided this account to my mother before she got a DSL account. The $10 a month billing got old though, so I decided to cancel the service. I called in and got an agent that was no doubt not from the United States. English was definitely not her first language either.
After explaining that I wished to cancel service, she started babbling about keeping my account open. I expressed that I didn’t want to continue my service over and over. She continued to offer me two months free and removed my payment for the current month. She did a good job making it sound like my account would only be open for two months. The catch was that I would be billed again after two months. I struggled to understand this woman throughout the call. At some point I must’ve agreed to keep my account open. Toward the end of the call she ended up thanking me for staying with People PC. Ugh! I said no, I did not want to be billed by the company anymore! Finally I think she got the idea. We’ll see at the end of two months.
This seems to be the way all companies treat their customers. They stick you with people that don’t even speak the language. I tried to call my bank the other day and get a username and password for its Web site. I had to disconnect because I couldn’t understand the agent, and he couldn’t understand me either. I also am not content with the fact that somebody in a poor country has access to all of my banking information.
Here we go people. We’re sliding far downhill yet we still give our money away to these companies that just don’t give a damn about their customers. We can do better. Imagine if a computer company advertised 100% U.S. Technical Support. I’m waiting for somebody to do that, because I think most people are getting fed up. Maybe I should make a Web site that provides a list of companies that are not providing support from India or any other place I can’t understand. Oh wait! There are none.
6 Comments
Eric
February 24th, 2008
at 10:50pm
America is certainly being bled dry by its own companies and corporations. These “entities” obviously care most about their own profits, even to the point of being blind to the necessary results of their use of foreign labour for manufacturing and customer service: American currency depreciation, fewer employed Americans to buy from them and lower-paid employed Americans not as likely to buy from them. And the fact is, the idiots in charge of these companies would ONLY be concerned about the American economy for the above-mentioned reasons, provided they actually cared. They really aren’t out to make our economy stronger. And as for customer service, if they all stick us with foreigners, we sure can’t boycott them if we want whatever it is they sell.
Matt Harris
February 25th, 2008
at 6:43am
We had the same problems when we were on PeoplePC and I downloaded there internet security pack and after we got off there service my computer couldnt take it off. We had problems setting up our service and when we called for tech support we also got somone who couldnt speak our language. Finally we got off from that and we arnt using them again.
Russ L'Rogue
February 26th, 2008
at 4:05am
Hmmm … certainly not glad to hear about your experience with PeoplePC, but I feel a bit less like an idiot knowing for sure that others out there are having this kind of problem.
I had a similar experience with Netzero a couple of years ago … up to the point that I took a rather “last resort” kind of step to solve the problem. The situation was that I had canceled the service but couldn’t actually get it canceled. And like you, I was dealing with someone offshore … sounded like perhaps India the first time. For over a year I couldn’t get the problem solved … until I just canceled the debit card and bank account that the auto-payment was coming out of. This finally took care of the issue but I don’t think we should have to take such steps to solve these problems.
On the other hand, I really couldn’t come up with any other solution …
HAD
February 26th, 2008
at 6:05am
The used People PC as i was in a remote mountain town in KY. so remote i was UNABLE to get a local number for aols free trail.
i used it for the 2 months i was there, and called to cancel. the wait time was about 15 minutes. I have a speaker phone next to my computer. so i waited. Persuading the phone rep to cancel, was easy, but he put me on hold for over 21 minutes while he processed this!!!! i was on speaker phone and i was determined to stay on hold. BTW, there was no hold music! no beeps or voice message. So i guess most people would hang up thinking they had been dropped. Finally the rep got back on the phone and as if he had not put me on hold at all, gave me a confirmation #. the total call was over 45mins.
7 months later i had paid off that credit card that I had used to charge People PC and closed the account. Suddenly i receive my first statement from them in over half a year with 6 People PC charges of $10.95 made on the same day all with the same reference account#!
I called the fraud line at the credit card company and had no problem in proving the fraud. and they removed it after sending me an avidavid. These charges carried on for 4 months 6 at a time. I would call up the credit card company and they would see i had already signed a disclaimer so they just credited back the amount. Finally i asked the fraud rep do they ever contact People PC to get this straightened out?? ACTUALLY NO. They do not, they charge about $50 for each transaction they have to reverse back to People PC, and I was told eventually they would see these charges and stop charging me! I think by my last statement they were down to charging me once a month, but i have carried a $40 credit on that account for a while now.
Scotty2K
February 26th, 2008
at 10:46am
Thats where you just have to cancel your credit card you use to have them take out the monthly payment.
Chad
February 27th, 2008
at 7:52am
While I can understand why a company would want to cut costs by sending its labor overseas, whatever happened to American pride? I work for the dial up companies BasicISP and Copper.net and we do all our technical support in-house. It costs a little more, but when I worked in the call center just about every-other customer would thank me for speaking English.
When people are upset and need technical support, it only adds to the confusion if there’s a language barrier. I don’t fault the people who work in the overseas call centers because they’re just trying to make a living in a relatively high-paying job. It’s bigger companies that try to cut corners to keep down costs, but end up robbing the customer of good support that annoy me.