I am now the proud owner of all three (Bundle) of Charter Services. Great Internet, Superb Telephone and comparable TV, so what is bugging me?

1. Your Charter Customer Service, I can not understand your outsourced service people, I had to hang up on two of them, I was getting NO WHERE and fast.

2. Your email address book is slower than a 2400 baud modem, and that is if it works at all.

Can you help me, at least with the email. I switched to your email because you no longer support outlook express, that’s fine, but how about a product that is at least compareable?

- Alan, March 11, 2007 (name changed for privacy)

Hi Alan, I’m glad to see that you are making use of InternetServiceDeals.com. Please allow me a moment to say a few things, then let me make a suggestion regarding your email troubles.

In regards to high speed internet services, InternetServiceDeals.com is a “search, check availability, and online ordering tool.” Because of the high volume of visitors to the site, we’re able to provide this tool to the public. The deals are input by the providers such as Charter, and Charter bears the responsibility for technical support issues.

What I’m getting at here is that if you are calling the technical support numbers provided on your online order receipt, that is the Charter internet technical support team. Here at InernetServiceDeals.com we can’t access your account information, which protects customers privacy and customers generally like the idea that the service provider (Charter) will be the one in charge of the account. The deals are the same services offered directly through the provider, just at a reduced price when available.

With some companies, calling at different times of the day may help. For example, if you call late at night, your call might get forwarded to an outsourced calling center. Where if you call around noon time, you might get a rep in your area. These days regardless of industry tech support is problematic: computer purchases, banking, etc. Every time I call my bank I end up in Pakistan, so I have to drive in and visit the branch instead! If you can’t understand the rep, ask to be transferred or get a case number assigned and call back later if necessary.

Email problems — if Charter email is not compatible with what you would like to do, remember that you don’t have to use it. “Email” and “internet access” are two separate things. For example, once you’re online, you can visit any website you wish. If you can’t get what you want through Charter, visit http://www.hotmail.com (now live.com) http://www.yahoo.com or http://www.gmail.com and sign up for a free email account. I can’t recall offhand if the free accounts integrate with Outlook Express. Check the “sign up” details for each to learn more. I can say that the upgrades do integrate, because I pay $19.95 per year to use a @msn.com email address which integrates nicely with Microsoft Outlook.

With Outlook I can access multiple email accounts through POP3, IMAP, HTTP, etc, so I use my @msn.com email account on a daily basis and forward all other email accounts to it. Using one of the above three can also open up the door to free webcam and voice calls using Instant Messenger. If you are not familiar with Instant Messaging, take a look at this AT&T Yahoo Yahoo DSL web page on our site for some insight.

- John

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 11th, 2007 at 7:30 am and is filed under High Speed Internet, Internet Service Providers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.