Direct TV Service Review

Overall Rating

I had some minor complaints about DirecTV when I was a customer. My major complaint is with the company ' s continuing refusal to send the $47.03 refund that it acknowledges I am due after discontinuing my service. I was a customer in Herndon, VA, and was moving to Cedar Rapids, IA, and called to close my DirecTV account. The condo I was moving into has Dish, so I declined when the rep tried to talk me into suspending my account rather than closing it. That was June. DirecTV sent us a statement saying we were owed a refund (apparently we were paying in advance for a month and were supposed to get a refund for the portion of that month that we didn ' t use). By August, when we didn ' t have the refund, my wife called and they said it had not been sent because the account was suspended, not closed. She told them no, it should have been closed, so they should close it and send us the refund. They said they could close it but we would have to call back and request the refund after the closing had been processed. (Does this sound like a company that ' s trying to hang onto your money?) So she called back in September and requested the refund again. They said they would credit it to the debit card we had been using to pay the bill online. She said no, that account had been closed, so they needed to mail us a check. Again, they ignored what we told them and transferred the money to a Wachovia account we had closed. My wife found this out in October when she called again to track down the refund. This took several hours on the phone, including a three-way phone call with Wachovia and DirecTV reps in which Wachovia confirmed that the account was closed and the money had been sent back to DirecTV. Even that didn ' t get the money back. I then emailed Chase Carey, DirecTV CEO, telling him the whole stupid story. I got an email from the ' DirecTV Customer Advocate Team, ' telling me about the company ' s commitment to ' outstanding customer service. ' That email said, ' We recommend you speak with the Credit Card department at Wachovia to track the status of the refund on your bank ' s side. If we receive a record for the failed refund, we will send out a check for the $47.03 as soon as possible. ' This was after Wachovia had confirmed directly to them. So they ignored my initial order to close the account rather than suspending it and ignored my wife ' s order not to send it to a closed account, and still they are telling me I need to track down information they already have. Another phone call and email to Chase Carey and the Customer Advocate Team still failed to shake loose the check. The company, my wife and I have spent far more time on the telephone hassling over this refund than the refund is worth. So I am turning my attention from wasting my time with DirecTV to telling as many people as possible about my experience with the company.