Helio is an exciting new cellphone company! We heard about them some months ago when they just got started and were launching 2-page spreads in major magazines and taking out ads on prominent websites, except then they decided to only pay for the magazine ads and told the websites to go screw themselves. This general air of assclowns spinning asshats on sticks at the asscircus trickles down all the way to their call centers, which, based on reader Dave’s complaint, has their head totally up their ass. Which must hurt because it’s also got a spinning asshat on it (on a stick, no less) but we digress.

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…

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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

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