Some "Sirius-ly" Good News

Who do you think has the bigger mouth, Howard Stern or me?

If you are an XM customer and have been following along with the online streaming issues I have been reporting here in “The Satellite Dish” then the answer to that question is me.

Today I am proud to announce that we have achieved victory against SiriusXM satellite radio!

If you haven’t been following along the issue here was that SiriusXM sent out email to XM customers in late January urging them to “lock in” to keep the services they had and this includes free XM Radio Online (XMRO) for the life of their term. Now up until March 10th XM customer could listen online with 32k or 64k streams, however on March 11th XM dropped the 64k stream leaving those who locked in with the poor sounding 32k stream.

Nowhere in SiriusXM’s email did it tell customers that by locking in their rates that their online service was going to be downgraded. To make matters worse those who locked in were told that they would need to pay $2.99 more a month for the new higher quality 128k service. To make matters worse CSR’s for SiriusXM were giving customers different answers, many where telling customers that the new service was included because they locked in, while other were told it would be $2.99 a month.

Many XM fans (myself included) felt that this was bait and switch and started to complain online at a popular XM discussion site XMFan.COM.
After getting the run around for weeks by SiriusXM customer service reps I emailed SiriusXM CEO Mel Karmazin who put me in touch with Joe Zarella who is the Chief Service Office for SiriusXM. In his emails to me he admitted the issue and the fact SiriusXM overlooked the 64k streaming.

After a number of emails from Mr. Zarella I decided to write about it here in my blog. In it I included copies of my emails back and forth. For some reason that very blog entry was picked up by Google News and became major news at a number of sites. I believe that blog entry was the most popular I have ever written here at MultiChannel. The number of comments left was also a record!

I believe it was that blog entry that really got things in motion. In addition I was helping to rally the troops together at XMFan.COM and got a number of people to complain and publicly voice their issues there.

After that I received another email from Mr. Zarella telling me they were working on a solution and to give him 24 hours. I agreed to give him the time and asked the folks at XMFan to stand down as well.

24 hours came and went and I heard nothing back from Mr. Zarella. So I emailed him again. Late last night I got an email back from him it just said “response being worked”

I didn’t know if that was a good or bad thing, but working in a large office with lots of lawyers I knew that it meant was that whatever the reply was, was going through the legal department at SiriusXM.

After waking up this morning I was again mad, so started working on rallying the troops at XMFan again. I was working on a list of folks in the media to email about the issue and started work organizing a rally to go and picket in front of SiriusXM’s headquarters in New York.

That’s when the email from Mr. Zarella arrived. It read as follows:

“Scott,

For business reasons, XM began charging for the right to listen to our service on the Internet. As part of the launch of this service, and to make it a more robust offering, the speed was upgraded to 128K. Also as part of this change, we offered existing customers the opportunity to continue to listen to their Internet streaming, at no additional charge, for the term of their current subscription or renewed subscription.

We had assumed all existing customers were receiving their internet streaming at 32K. After our offer to existing subscribers was released, we learned that certain existing customers were receiving an internet stream at 64K.

To remedy this oversight, for subscribers who were streaming at 64K and locked in to a new term in order to continue to receive free streaming, we will absolutely provide the 128K stream for the term they purchased for no additional charge.

Unfortunately, the company is no longer supporting 64K web stream of the XM service. As a result, we cannot accommodate your specific request for a 64K stream.

Accordingly, we are prepared to offer you either:

your choice of a 32K or 128K web stream for the term you signed up for at no additional charge

or

you may choose to cancel and we will provide you a full refund of the amount you paid to renew.

Please let us know which option you would like to elect. Thank you for your patience while this was investigated.”

I knew there and then that I had won, I was very happy. I sent back an email to Mr. Zarella asking what about everyone else who has this issue, who do they contact to take advantage of this offer. When I sent this email I did like I have been doing all along and that was cc’ing it to SiriusXM CEO Mel Karmazin.

A few moments after sending that email I got a reply back from Mr. Karmazin himself that he didn’t mean to send to me. In it he told Mr. Zarella not to respond to me about everyone else.

I quickly replied back to Mr. Karmazin’s email and explained to him that if he wants his customers to be happy there needs to be an easy way or a special number for his customers to call to opt in to the same offer that was made to me.

After sending this email to Mr. Karmazin I then received another email back from Mr. Zarella that read as follows:

“Scott,

thanks for your patience and understanding.

there are a couple of ways being assessed to implement this solution for
those who locked in during the lock-in period. Ideally we would like to
automate it, but won’t have that nailed till early next week.

those eligible should contact XM Listener Care mid next week.

Thanks”

So there you have it, sometime mid week next week those XM customers who locked in are eligible to call in and request the 128k online streaming for no charge for the length of the term they locked in at.

I consider this a victory for everyone who took the time to voice their opinion on their matter. I consider this good news for everyone that locked in!

For some of these XM customers I am sure there will be dancing in the streets, and as least now they will have music to dance to playing as well.

So yeah it looks like I have a bigger mouth then Howard Stern, but honestly I couldn’t have done it without all you readers and more importantly all the XM customers over at XMFAN.COM.

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!