We have DirecTV. One of the things that I like is it appears if we have a problem the CS personnel have some autonomy to fix and mitigate service issues.

And if they make a mistake own up to it and fix it.

Fingers crossed this kind of excellent customer service continues. Its one of the reasons we came back to it after having left over non customer service in the early years.

I emailed the CEO when Consumerist listed his email address because of an on going problem. They called me back the next day and this was the number on my caller ID. I never thought of it as a special number for future reference.

I have Directv. The other day, our main box started sparking and emitting smoke. My wife was luckily home and awake and was able to unplug the box before it burned the house down.

I called Directv and spoke with a tech. After hearing what happened, he instructed me to PLUG THE BOX BACK IN to see what it would do. I was shocked and refused. I play $6 per month for an equipment warranty. I told him I would not plug the box in, as that was too dangerous. I told him to just send me a new box. He then told me I would have to pay some amount of money (I did not hear him) as refusing to troubleshoot voids the warranty. I asked to speak to his supervisor. He put me on hold for 10 seconds, came back on the phone and agreed to send me a box for free.

I tipped the editors a couple weeks ago to a problem i was having with DirecTV. I never saw anything about it, but this information was definitely helpful when trying to get my issue solved.

I wonder if the people at this number could get the local channels in my area added to the satellite covering my location.

@Skaperen:
you can get the am21 add on and get them ota on your hd box or hd dvr.

While I like the fact that Direct TV has created some sort of advocacy team -- one has to wonder why not just apply this level of customer service training to their "lower tier" reps and eliminate the need for such an advocacy team to begin with?

I feel the same about big companies like comcast or verizon using twitter for customer service issues. If their standards were better and their internal training improved then there wouldn't be any need for such things as the "regular" customer service folks would be able to handle the problems.

I don't want to have to tweet to get my problems fixed. I don't want to have to call and advocacy team or escalate my problem to the damn supreme court. I want one number with a dude on the other end who can FIX IT!

Is that too much to ask for all you big companies out there?