WildBlue Sucks

The following post was written by a former tech support agent for WildBlue Satellite Internet service. This website takes no responsibility for the accuracy or content of the message and has not confirmed the validity of the post (not that WildBlue would confirm it) so please use at your own risk.

FORMER WILDBLUE TECHNICAL SUPPORT AGENT

I was just terminated today July 26, 2010 from Wildblue.

The reason for my termination was that I took a telephone call from an angry customer that was told that Wildblue was 10 times faster than Cable and DSL.

I told the customer that that statement was not true and we were slower than cable and dsl.

I also asked the customer if she had cable or dsl available in here area.

For telling the customer that wildblue was slower than DSL/cable and asking her if she had DSL/Cable in here area, I was terminated.

If a customer called with slow speeds, we were just instructed to have them fill out 2 forms called Information Gathering (http://help.wildblue.net/care/article/4113&n=1) and Slow Connectivity (http://help.wildblue.net/care/article/4117&n=4). We also had to open a ticket which we would close at the end of the call and give a ticket number to the customer. We would have the customer log on to toast.net to perform 3 speed tests. Once speed came back lower than the customer was paying for, we told the customer the following: Speeds are not guaranteed. Your rate plan has UP TO 1.5mbps (for pro), 1.0mbps (select), 512kbps (value). The actual Wildblue average for Value was 200kbps, Select 500kbps, Pro 900kbps. We would tell the customer everything was working fine as long as they were close to average. If they were not close to average, we would make up some story about how testing at toast.net is never 100% accurate, or it was the web hosts problem like hostrocket, yahoo, godaddy and not our problem. We would then get the customer off the telephone and move on to our next call.

Our Fair Access Policy was horrible as well. It was a rolling 30 day period which means it could go to 2 different billing cycles and never start over at the time your new bill is paid. It pretty much went back 30 days from each day. Example, if today is July 26, 2010, it took usage from June 27th, 2010 to today.
Hughes net gives you unlimited downloading between the hours of 1am to 6am. We never had any unlimited downloading.

Our system was horrible when it was cloudy, snowing, raining, pretty much horrible all together.

I assisted customers with technicians not showing up, modem being offline, customers calling after 3 months of install and into a contract and having to pay $95 to have a technician come out and fix a faulty install (I should say wind storm instead of faulty install since we never would blame our technicians for a bad install we always had to ask if they had storms lately, etc)

We would give you a free Discount Repair Program, Month of Service and Service call if you said the Magic Words, “I am going to cancel”. Pretty much “I am going to cancel” is the statement you need to use to get things free from Wildblue.

We had 3 different systems we would use. Infinys (name of our Billing Program), Support Portal (name of our system that can see if your service is up and running) and CIMS (the system to initially look up the customer). Link to Infinys is https://portal.servicecenter.wildblue.net:8772/go?to=UA_Signin&from=dummy&task=dummy&redirectFlag=true Support Portal https://portal.servicecenter.wildblue.net/ and CIMS https://cims.wildblue.cust-serv.com/WildBlueCims/login.aspx

Infinys was a program designed by Convergys. I am not sure who designed Support Portal and CIMS.

The customer knowledge base was help.wildblue.net/kb/ The employees knowledge base was help.wildblue.net/care/

The Wildblue default installer ID was 34853836. We would always have to use then when customers were suspended for the system not letting them sign the customer agreement. This happened all the time.

When a customer called to pay a bill we would process it in the Infinys program and we never had a confirmation number since I do not believe the charge was instant. So pretty much you could call with an invalid credit card or one with insufficient funds and we would turn you back on and not know about it for a day or so.

The simple fact of the matter is that Wildblue was not a very good service. People constantly called with problems and forget about getting online if it is Cloudy or raining. Also forget about getting decent speeds in some areas because they have way too many people on a circuit than they should have.

We were trained to always Apologize to the customer and try and talk nice to them under any circumstance. We always had to say at the end of the call “For your convenience, you can chat live with us at wildblue.net” This always seemed to make the customers get mad and they would say, “I would if I had internet service, etc”

So I guess if I were stuck living out in the Country I would probably choose HughesNet. #1 because they are a KU BAND service which works in the rain/clouds, #2 they have been around longer #3 Commerical businesses use them, #4 From talking to our customers they always talked about having hughesnet in the past and it sounded like a much better system from what they described. (I did use HughesNet back in the 90’s when it was one way receive only. It worked pretty good
actually)

Hope this helps clear up everything with WildBlue.

Okay - I thought this one would be kind of funny and yet ironic all at the same time. On another post about WildBlue and related companies having poor service and bad attitudes, we had a WildBlue installer (tbagg) jump in on the conversation and telling us how we would not have a chance at going after a class action and how his dodge neon wouldn’t do 150 etc.

He raised some legitimate arguments which I appreciated and gladly posted as I think it is imperative that we allow others to post their opinions, regardless of what they are.

The funniest thing though is that he helped me to prove a point about how “helpful” WildBlue and their affiliates are. I have been unable to get anyone that could give me a straight answer about removing my satellite dish from my house. I want to make sure that there are no “dangers” (electrocution, etc) in removing it and if so, I want to know how. My local installers will not answer it for me, even though I have given them no indication of who I am - just asked a simple question and they give me the run around before finally hanging up. Well, since tbagg was so vocal on the blog, I thought I would shoot him an email, again, not leading on to who I was - below is a copy:

I got your email off a WildBlue-related website and hope you do not have a
problem answering a question for me.

I want to remove the satellite off my house but was curious as to power
source prior to moving. The installation company is a joke and I can’t
even get them to answer my calls so I will be removing this myself.

I can easily figure out how to removed it (unbolting, but need to know if
there is anything specifically that needs to be disconnected inside the
home prior to disconnecting outside.

Thanks.

I thought this was a relatively easy question for him since he stated that he installed many systems. Of course, rather than answering what would have been a very easy question, he shoots an email over to a friend to get him to look up my email domain and see who i am, then responds with my contact information and a note from his friend telling him to ignore me.

I have to assume that the general mentality of anyone employed or subcontracted by WildBlue must have  to be pre-qualified in the art of working harder to avoid service. This just went to prove a point that many of these guys would rather work harder to NOT give an answer than to just give the easy one.

While I realize it is not hard to do a domain lookup, this guy had to email it to a friend and wait for the response, ultimately responding two days later to let me know that he knew who I was and he was going to ignore me. Then, he had the audacity to come post about it on the other thread. I thought that was the FUNNIEST part, and kind of the icing on the cake.

When I purchased my WildBlue Satellite Internet Service, I did so through The Wireless Center in Gautier, MS (near Ocean Springs, MS).

Of course, during the initial sales and setup - they were great to deal with but after talking with them about how poor the WildBlue service is - the owner got VERY offensive, raised his voice, and basically told me to go screw myself because he was not interested in helping me.

The funniest part about the whole ordeal, was my intent on calling The Wireless Center in Gautier, MS was to have them come get the satellite and modem. I WAS GOING TO GIVE IT TO THEM - FOR FREE! All they had to do was come pick it up, but as soon as I said the service was crap, he went off on me and would not let me get a word in edgewise.

I have filed a Better Business Bureau complaint against The Wireless Center in Gautier, MS, although I doubt it will do any good since they are not even a member.

Anyone living in the Mississippi Gulf Coast region and thinking about doing business with The Wireless Center - think twice. They are very friendly as long as you are handing over your money but as soon as an issue arises, they will not even listen to you before automatically going over the edge!

Caveat Emptor! (Buyer Beware)