A few weeks ago my beloved TiVo broke. It did not break all the way but it was not recording all shows properly. I called their support line. The person diagnosed the problem quickly – it was a “known issue”. The fix was to reset my entire system, which would unfortunately delete all my season pass and preferences. They would all need to be redone. I was annoyed. I have 55 season passes. You heard right, 55 of them. Can’t I back this up somewhere? No. Can I export the list somehow? No. Can you save off my info at TiVo central and send it back to me in some format? No. I would just have to suck it up. Man, that’s annoying. I was angry.
Suck it up I did. I took a pad of paper and carefully wrote down all the season passes. I reset the system (this takes about three hours). I started entering all the season passes back. I hadn’t thought to record my thumbs up and thumbs down, so it has taken a few weeks more for TiVo to learn my likes and dislikes.
Thinking about it later I realized how the support person could have done a better job. At not point did she show any sympathy that this was a giant pain. If she had simply said, “I’m sorry but we don’t have any easy way to back up and re-enter your season pass information. You’re going to have to that manually yourself. I know it’s a lot of trouble for you.” I would have been much more calm about it. A simple admission that she was asking me to do labor to fix their problem in their product would have helped a lot.
Just to build on Men’s comments — wife, 3 kids, poker, job … and literally reads library books by the shelf full. And posts a blog on a daily basis. Are you in some alternate universe where you have like 50 hours a day or something? Do you read, watch TV, and rock a kid to sleep in each arm at the same time or something? I’m not sure if I’m more impressed, dumbfounded, or jealous. OK, jealous…
Yes, I have 55 season passes. It’s not 55 shows though. Some of them are to catch Patriots and Celtics games, some are to catch movies I want to see when they’re broadcast (Iron Giant, Defending Your Life), some are for the kids. But it is a lot, I admit it.
The TiVo Netflix partnership seems very good. I think we will renew our Netflix membership soon.
Oh…and Muttrox….55?! How the heck do you have time to track 55 shows when you have 3 kids, a wife, a weekly poker game, and presumably a job? Oh, and write a regular blog?
Most customer service reps are required to use a script or variations of a script with little room to deviate. Also, they are getting complaints and dealing w/problems all day long – would probably be exhausting apologizing 100 times/day.
I agree with you though, more often than not, all they need to do is offer some empathy and that would placate 90% of someone’s frustration. I’ve actually asked them to apologize before when I’ve been upset, and there have been instances where they wouldn’t apologize even after I said an apology would solve my frustration. Crazy stuff.
I love Tivo, but from a business perspective they are struggling, big time. They will probably be bought out at some point – which is best case scenario for them.