Charter Communications

Charter Communications is a cable telecommunications company, which offers its services to consumers and businesses under the branding of Charter Spectrum. Providing services to over 25 million customers in 41 states, it is the second-largest cable operator in the United States by subscribers, just behind Comcast. It is the tenth largest telephone provider based upon residential subscriber line count. In late 2012, with the naming of longtime Cablevision executive Thomas Rutledge as their CEO, the company relocated its corporate headquarters from St. Louis, Missouri to Stamford, Connecticut, although many operations still remain based out of St. Louis. On May 18, 2016, Charter acquired Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks for a combined $65.5 billion, making it the third-largest pay television company in the United States.

• Cable Television
• Broadband Internet
• VoIP Telephone

Review

Charter has poor customer service. The Charter Spectrum business technical support division is just as poorly managed as the residential customer support. Criticisms include lack of knowledgeable support staff, no means to communicate directly to a higher level engineer, rude customer service representatives, and no means to report abuse by support staff to management.

In a three part regional study between competing providers Charter was unable to demonstrate the same level of uptime as COX Communications and Time Warner Cable. Since the study Charter has acquired Time Warner Cable. Support staff in the various Midwestern markets is shared by the national call-centers and field technician staff have been reduced so that customers in rural areas are forced to wait sometimes days before a service technician can be dispatched to their home.

The Charter business model completely isolates customers from any escalated level of management or technical engineer. A complete disconnect between the lower tier of the company and the upper echelon prevents customer concerns or quality feedback from reaching the desk of anyone capable of causing positive change. Automated customer feedback surveys fail to provide the means for the customer to articulate the overall problems with a Charter customer support experience.

2016: Charter Time Warner Merger, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. In late March 2015, Charter announced plans to purchase Bright House Networks. On May 26, 2015, Charter and Time Warner Cable announced that they had entered into a definitive agreement for Charter to merge with Time Warner Cable.

As of January 2017 it should be noted that Charter has failed to meet any improvement benchmarks in support related criteria.

In 2007, PC World ranked Charter's cable Internet service as the worst among 14 major Internet service providers. In addition, Charter High-Speed was rated 19th out of 22 cable ISPs on dslreports.com.

Violation of Internet Standards: Charter Communications redirected error pages and Windows Live Search results to a Charter search page without notifying customers.

Oops: It was reported that on January 21, 2008, during a routine sweep of inactive accounts, Charter accidentally and irretrievably deleted the email accounts of approximately 14,000 customers.

Robo-call Marketing: On August 28, 2017, Charter agreed to a $225,000 settlement in the state of Missouri over violations of telemarketing and No-call list laws.

Configuration

email

Most versions of Outlook offer an automatic setup, but if it doesn’t work, you’ll need to set up your account manually. No matter what the type of setup, you’ll need your Spectrum email address and password.

Automatic Configuration Microsoft Outlook:

1. Open Outlook.
2. Select the File tab.
3. In the Info category, select Account Settings > Account Settings from the drop-down list.
4. Select the Email tab.
5. Select New.
6. In the Email Account section under Auto Account Setup:

       In the Your Name box, enter your full name.
       Enter your Spectrum Email Address.
       Enter your Spectrum email Password.
       Enter the password again in the Retype Password box.
       If you want Outlook to automatically enter your email password, select Save this password in your password list.

To set up your Spectrum email use these settings:

   Username: Your full Spectrum email address
   Password: Your Spectrum email password
   SSL: On
   Protocol: IMAP
   Port: 993
   Port: 587
   Requires Authentication: Yes, or checked