We've had our suspicions and this latest story all but confirms them: Helio and its amazingly incompetent customer service staff are a plot to undermine the will of the American people in preparation for the forthcoming Scientologist uprising and takeover.

5 reasons why Helio's "Total Happiness Guarantee" is baloney [LifeClever]

...they neglected to cancel my account after I returned the equipment and canceled my service —- and didn't send me any bills/communication, only to report me to a collection agency a few months later. It was a big and annoying ordeal, I already didn't like the company and lack of customer service which is why I originally canceled, but after this situation, to say I have lost respect for them is just not enough.

Helio [Yelp]

I wanted to sign up for the Ocean on May 13th, but I noticed that on the web site, the only option for contracts was a 24 month agreement. Given that Helio is a new company, I wasn't sure I wanted to commit to two years. I called Helio to find out if I could get a one-year agreement. The customer service rep that I spoke to was very accommodating and said I could have a one year deal. I mentioned a web promo code that would get me some other discounts, including the $30 activation fee waved, and $25 off the first four months of service, and she said that I could have all that, as well as a nice discount on the phone itself. I signed up then and there.

I got the phone a few days later and was pretty pleased for a while. I then went to my online Helio account for the first time and saw that my contract expiration date was 5/13/09....I called up customer support and explained my story to the rep, who told me that one year contacts aren't even possible to set up in their systems. I told him that the other rep promised me that as well as the other discounts, to which he replied that none of that was showing up on my account summary. He said the best he could do was offer me a $20 credit....

(Photo: goblynalchemist)

I tried another rep a week later, hoping to hear a different story. Unfortunately, I didn't. I got passed off to someone else who might have been a manager who took the name and number of the rep and promised to deal with her internally. Unfortunately, there was nothing they could do for me. Even when I threatened to cancel the account, they didn't budge. A few days later, I did just that. I called to cancel the account. They wanted to know why, and I told them the whole story. Again, they didn't seem to care that they were losing a customer. Thus ended my short stay with Helio service.

Typically, I thought start-up companies liked to KEEP their customers, not lose them. Coupled with some of the other things I've read, not to mention the coverage isn't great, I really think Helio is destined to go the way of Amp'd Mobile.

- Chris

PREVIOUSLY:
Helio Call Centers Still Staffed By Nincompoops
Helio Call Centers Staffed By Retards

Brian writes, ""The short of it is that I tried out a Helio Drift, canceled my account and sent the phone back within 30 days (as per their policy), and have been waiting for a refund for the last six months, calling Helio roughly every 2-3 weeks and getting a slightly different story every time," — and no refund. It's now been 170 days.

Hey Sky Dayton, if you don't want your company to go the way of Amp'd, maybe think about purging the body thetans from your call centers. *

Fuck Helio [Local Insanity]
PREVIOUSLY:
Helio Call Centers Staffed By Retards

* Sky Dayton is a Scientologist. One of their beliefs is that, "75 million years ago, [Xenu] brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling Douglas DC-8 airliners, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living. Scientologists believe the alien souls continue to do this today, causing a variety of physical ill-effects in modern-day humans. [Scientologist founder L. Ron] Hubbard called these clustered spirits "Body Thetans"..."

Essentially Helio, totally screwed up porting over Dave's cellphone from Verizon and their call centers were unable and/or unwilling to fix the problem in any coherent fashion.

Sky Dayton, pictured above, founded Helio. Why don't you spend less time surfing and targeting trendsetters Mr. Visionary and more time fixing your feculent call centers. You barely have any subscribers, so you shouldn't go around shafting the few that you have. Maybe that's just the problem, the reps are out of practice...

Read the tragic tale, and Mr. Dayton's phone number, inside...

Dave writes:

- I have 3 phone lines under Helio, lets call them "A," "B," and "C." I have 1 line under Verizon, let's call it "V."

- Call Helio Tuesday morning and tell them to port over line V to line A. Instead they port it over to line B. After realizing this mistake within an hour of the call, I call back and ask them to reverse the action. Their response is that it'll be done within an hour. After 2 hours I call back...another hour they say. I decide to give them the rest of the day.

-Next day, nothing's fixed. The phone for line B does not receive or make calls. The phone for line V still makes calls showing the old V number, but can't receive calls. I call Helio and talk to another agent, having to explain the whole situation, just like every other time I've called. Finally I persuade them to let me talk to a superior, Matthew. Matthew says he's up to speed on my problem because the agent I've just talked to has documented it very well in my notes, as opposed to the total lack of documentation previously. Matthew is very nice and tells me how sorry he is and how he'll see to it personally that it gets fixed. Give it 48 hours...at MOST 72 hours. Call back if there's a problem he says. This is Wednesday.

-Thursday morning, I call to check on things. I have to explain my situation again because apparantly there's little documentation on my account. I'm told the case has been elevated, the port forwarding department has been emailed and will get to it within 2 days.

-Saturday rolls around and no changes. I call helio and after explaining the whole screw up again, the agent apologizes profusely but laments that she can't do anything because the port forward dept is closed for the weekend.

-Monday morning. I call again and ask for Matthew and provide the agent ID number which Matthew himself gave me. At this point, I'm sick of having to explain my problem to every person I talk to and want to get someone that knows what's going on and can do something about it. Matthew is busy. Can I hold till he's free? No, I should call back later. I call back in an hour, he's still busy. I tell the agent to give Matthew my contact number so he can call me when he's not busy. 3 hours go by and nothing. I call back and now I'm told Matthew no longer works here. Greeeeat.

-Monday afternoon. Now I tell the agent again what my problem is because she can't tell what's going on from the account notations. Unfortunately my signal dies and I have to call back. I ask the next agent to look at my account notes to see what's there, he mentions that there's a note that I hung up, but I still need to explain my situation. I ask to talk to a supervisor and I get Laurie(based out of Vegas) who says she knows what's going on because the agent I talked to before losing the connection has told her. Laurie assures me that she herself has emailed the porting department as well as emailed Verizon to request Line B back from them; until Verizon lets her know line B is still available, I just need to wait. I ask her how long it will take to get B back after Verizon emails and she says it'll be very quick. So I tell her I will call Verizon myself and talk to their porting department to expedite the process in any way I can. I call Verizon, fill them in on what's what. They've got no clue about line B, but I go ahead and tell them to request line V back from Helio.

-Monday late afternoon. Calling Helio again, now I want to talk to Laurie. "I'm sorry, I can't forward you to someone else. It's against company policy," the agent tells me. She doesn't find any sort of notation in my account specifying I should talk to Laurie, thus I can't talk to her. Fine, I say I'm dissatisfied and I would like to get transferred to her superior. Now I get to talk to Dakota. He seems to think I simply want to change my phone number. I educate him on my problem and who I've talked to. When I mention how Matthew no longer works here, he corrects me by saying he wasn't available to talk. When I complain that I cannot talk to Laurie, who I JUST spoke to an hour ago, he acquiesces and asks for Laurie's agent ID. I give it and he snipes that he can't transfer me because it's the wrong ID. Maybe I wrote it down wrong, maybe she gave me the wrong number, I dunno. I ask Dakota to transfer me to the Vegas customer center. He can't do that. I need to call in again until I reach a Vegas agent on my own. Regardless, Dakota tells me that I can no longer get line B back. It's been released into the ether and it can no longer be retreived. The best he can do is assign me a random phone number based of area code. I'm angry. If this is the case, why hasn't anyone told me? So after Helio creates a problem, screws up the fixing and tracking of the problem, the end result is that they could never even fix it in the first place? After I ask for his ID, location, and title. He can't give me his location because it's confidential.

At no time during any of my conversations do I use profanity, yell, or act like an ass. I understand that each individual agent I talked to is not really responsible for the initial cause of the problem, yet I'm so utterly amazed at how frequently none of these agents can make simple explanatory notations on my account to help me fix my problem. At this time, I still have 2 non-functioning phones and probably many fewer brain cells. I urge every person thinking of using hell-io to stay clear. I've never had to deal with such overwhelming incompetence from a phone provider.

Let's see, Sky D. Dayton is the CEO of Helio and his phone number is 1-310-445-7000 x8900. Also, there's his assistant, Rachel Greenberg, at 310-312-6617. We suggest Dave call one or both of them and offer up a piece of his mind. \ — BEN POPKEN