I want to get other opinions on this. I used to think that Cincinnati Bell was a great company. I have been with them since I got to Our Fair City and no complaints. Then around March/April 2010 it seems like they have done an about face.

 

The guys in the store used to be very friendly and put a lot of effort into helping you with your problems. Now they are more paranoid and interested in enforcing the rules. Case in point, I was leaving town and wanted to know about tethering my phone. I was going to be using a tether plan just at the time of my billing date. The CinBell guy said that would make my tethering bill double! I was spanning my billing date and even though I was only wanting to use tethering for 3 days, I would have to pay twice. I asked if I could change my billing date. No, absolutely not. If I wanted to tether over that date, I paid double, no exceptions.

 

OK, if I couldn't tether I would use the 1-800 number to get on line for $.10/minute. But it didn't work. I called the help line and it took them 1 1/2 days to get back with me and tell me that the 1-800 number was now canceled/discontinued. It is still showing on the website. How would you know it was discontinued?

 

In the Phone Store, there have been a couple of scary instances where customers got upset and started yelling and/or declaring what they wanted very loudly and were ejected. That is not a good thing, and it's wasn't necessarily Cincinnati Bell's fault but going into their Hyde Park store, you have a tendency to keep your eyes open in case someone gets out of hand.

 

Has there been some fundamental shift here, or have I just run into a patch of odd/bad service?

I used to work for Cincinnati Bell for many years and I have to say their service and quality of products has gone waaaay down hill.  Soon XUMelanie and I will be cutting off our two CBW mobile phones and more than likely cut the land line too (which hasn't really been working lately anyway).

 

I would highly recommend calling their support line just to see for yourself how long it takes to get through to get your questions answered.  It will also be a good test to see if you can understand the very thick accents of the support people.  Recently when we had issues it took three calls.  The first two were over an hour with no luck getting a live person and on the third attempt I was unable to understand what the person was saying.

Uh, I already did that, my friend. When I had to problem with the 1-800 no on the road I called their support line at about 4:30 on June 18th. They promised to call me back in about 2 hrs with an answer to my question. They never did. The next day I called them again at 8:30 a.m. and finally got my answer at 3:30 p.m. The answer was "no". This was from Philippines. So, I know first hand what you are talking about an am not going to be repeating the experience any time soon.

 

You can't call them, and they are the phone company. How ironic!

 

    3 times in the last 4 years my land line quit working. All three times they came to the street and fixed it. One of the technicians said that the lines in the street are disintegrating. This is bad news for Cincinnati Bell, in that their infrastructure is deteriorating.

 

    The good news is that they fixed the problem promptly, gave me a discount for lost service time, and even offered to forward land line calls to a cell phone for free until the service was restored.

 

    More and more people are getting cell phones without land lines at all. I wonder how this is going to play out in the long run.

   

Yea, I live in Mt. Lookout and the land line equipment was put in by Watson, Edison's assistant. They have been good about coming out and fixing things, I hope that continues.

Update, I just got a phone call from a CinBell exec whose job it is to fix consumer problems like mine. They didn't get what I was driving at in my e-mail. I complained that the 1-800 number didn't work when you were out of town and trying to use their .10/min feature with the dial up. I was told it was discontinued (after 1.5 days of phone calls to the Philippines). The website still showed it was a feature of Cincinnati Bell, even after a week it shows you can still use it. The exec told me that was a problem and said she would look into it and get back with me. I think it's an anomaly but it looks real bad in this day and age of "let 'em eat cake" corporate management.

My old roommate works in quality assurance with the call centers at Bell. I will shoot him an email with your problem (incl. the website phone number thing), and let you know what he says.

XUMelanie and I got our land line back up!  The technician found the pair from our utility room to the central office had a weak anomaly and switched it to a new pair that was a bit better.  It's good to know the technicians are at least good at what they do.  I feel kind of bad wasting their time since we'll more than likely cancel our land line service in a month or so, but at least we have an active line until then.

 

The technician was sympathetic when I mentioned that I had trouble communicating with the foreign call center.  I guess this happens so often that they just simply apologize and explain that it is unfortunately a corporate decision not under their control.

I have a nightmare customer service story from about a year ago.  Too long to tell here.  The short end is, that all C-bell had to do was replace a defective phone for a customer of nearly 20 years, and I would have been happy.  Instead, like all companies, they have become so metrics-driven, that the customer comes second.  Checking off the little boxes that some moron has deemed important seemed waaaay more important than making sure I got what I needed. 

 

They did replace the phone...finally, but it was a different model, and didn't refund  or replace my accessories.  The whole thing left a BAD taste in my mouth, and they would have spent A LOT less money just replacing the freaking phone in the first place.  They spent a ton of money having a million different people "look into" the issue and pissing me off in the process, instead of stepping up to the plate to do the right thing.  I must have told a kazillion people about my bad experience.  Unbelievably, I stayed on, and have been happy with my equipment and service.  Let's hope it continues.