My Comcast TV box was broken again !
Situation was exactly same with previous one.
This time, I was not irritated and did not fell anger because I am unfortunately used to this situation. Actually last time when I replaced my old box by new one, I wrote about its situation detail and process which I followed to exchange it at. Here is a link to the previous post of mine about it. Last time I called to the call center, but it was painful time for me because it took much time for identification as well as remote test to check weather the box was really broken or not. It was also because it took a few days to expect a mechanic to come to my apartment and replace it by new one. I was sick of this process even though it was not my fault.
Therefore, I tried to follow advice which my colleague suggested to me before. He advised me to take it to a local service center because he has seen many people do that to replace their own box by new one. Today I had time to do that, and I thought that it would be cumbersome but could be experience and a thing to talk about. When I checked where a local service center is, fortunately I found it near my apartment. It is the local service center at Sunnyvale. Before I visited there, I checked its reputation at Yelp, but it was not so good and everyone complains about its service : link. It looked like to be going to be tough, but it was fine with me because I gave up high quality service here. When I visited there actually, I was very surprised to see many people holding their TV boxes. I realized soon that one of reason was lunch time and second reason was that Comcat planed to stop its analog TV service from October 1 and many people would come to replace own TV box which can deal with only analog signal by new one which can deal with digital signal. The size of the service center is, for example, as same as Seven Eleven, and there are 7 or 8 service desks but only half of them were available at that time. When I visited there, there were already 15 peoples ahead of me, and one lady was noting customer names by using tablet at the entrance. The tabled looks like connected to internal network, and customer names are send to a big monitor in order to show their name in their service order. When it comes to your order, your name will be displayed largely at the monitor, and service person in own desk will call your name loudly. I waited for around 15 minutes during which I was doing people-watching to see with what reason peoples came here, to check how service persons deal with customers, and I was thinking how to explain my situation about cable box. It was because I was thinking it would be tough negotiation and it would be obviously better to tell a person in charge clearly in order to make process go easier. A person in charge of my service was a lady, and she could understand my situation easily even though I just said "My cable box has not worked since one month ago and I can only see blue error code". She immediately said that she could replace it by new one without cumbersome identification and process which I had experienced before. Additionally, she checked my account information by looking at the number of TV box, and pointed out that I`m paying too much to the current service, and proposed me that I could upgrade TV service but expect $40 less. I was embarrassed to realize that I paid too much without knowing breakdown of price which I paid so far. I, of course, followed what she said. Finally I got new cable box soon, and it took only 10 minutes for process and 25 minutes totally including waiting time. My expectation started from bottom, so I was feeling comfortable very much even though the broken TV was not my fault. She gave me the easy instruction paper to activate new box kindly by highlighting activation code and online URL. I would like to thank her to make process easier. What I am regretting now is to forget to ask her name.
When I returned home, I connected cables to new one and tuned on it, and make it ready for activation. I went to the link on the paper which I got from her, and enter my account number and cell phone number. When I clicked a bottom for activation, new cable box was turned off remotely, and remained turned off. The activation site told me that it would take 45 minute to complete activation. Around 45 minutes later, I turned on it actually and confirmed that it works well finally, and I could confirmed that new service (Channels) are available.
If you suffer from same situation for TV boxes and if local service centers are close, I recommend you to visit them. Many peoples say that service at local centers sucks, so I might just happen to be able to get very good service and it might be just lucky.
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