Common Complaints Against DISH Network

By far the most common complaint against DISH Network is that it’s extremely hard to cancel your subscription, especially if you try to cancel shortly after starting with one of their packages. While cancellation fees are far from uncommon (both for satellite TV companies and for other digital services), DISH goes above and beyond in a bad way.

Many customers report cancellation fees upwards of $300 or $400, and one customer on the BBB reportedly got hit with a $500 cancellation fee! Furthermore, early termination fees are upheld even if a customer exits their contract at the correct time instead of early.

Many customers have to speak to dozens of customer service representatives just to get their contracts canceled. This extra effort is incredibly annoying and says volumes about how difficult DISH can be when it comes to keeping people paying, even against their will.

Another big complaint you see on DISH’s BBB page is that their accounts are frequently charged extra fees. These days, you can’t trust any company to be honest about how they charge your bill – that’s why it’s very important to look at the itemized explanation for all the charges that are levied at the end of each month.

For DISH, many customers opened their bills only to find one or more nasty surprises. Extra charges of as little as $10 all the way up to multi-hundred dollar charges are common amongst the complaints on the BBB. Many of these are for services that the customers reportedly never asked to receive or ever showed any interest in.

Nevertheless, a running theme with all these complaints is that it usually takes DISH quite a long time to respond to any of these grievances. Even if they do eventually respond, their customer service reps are more likely to try to get you to stick with the service that costs extra instead of just refunding customers for the money.

Speaking of which, plenty of customers have issues with DISH since it’s apparently like pulling teeth to get the TV company to refund customers for charges that were levied unfairly. It’s clear from all these complaints that DISH is regularly dishonest or incompetent regarding charges and fees.

Even beyond the monetary complaints, many people report that DISH has an issue when it comes to their technicians being on time. For instance, one complaint stated that:

• the technician to install their dish was supposed to come sometime in the morning
• the technician did not arrive until the afternoon
• furthermore, the technician didn’t give the customer heads up that they would be late
• the technician was then rude and abrasive

This level of customer mistreatment and general unprofessionalism is a scourge in the satellite TV and networking companies. But it’s clear that it’s a particularly bad problem with DISH.

While it might be tempting to try to install your DISH equipment yourself, DISH, like many other satellite TV companies, tack on heavy fees if you don’t use one of their technicians to properly install their equipment. In other cases, the warranty that protects that equipment in the event of accidental damage is voided if you put your hands on the stuff.

So you’re almost forced to use some of their technicians to get your agreement up and running. This is ostensibly a good thing, but the quality and timeliness of their technicians are very much in question.

One last big complaint repeated on the BBB about DISH Network is that their special offers or promotional items are either ignored or misunderstood by their customer service reps. The customer service people on the other end of the line are supposed to know everything there is to know about ongoing promotions.

Yet many customers report that those same customer service reps have no idea about the promotions they’re talking about. For instance, one customer reported that DISH promised her an additional $300 in the form of a promotional gift card for signing up during a particular period.

However, after signing up, she never received the $300 gift card. When this customer contacted DISH to ask where her gift card was, she was given the runaround by the customer service rep. Furthermore, the company never actually gave her the gift card or acted like they knew about the promotion she was talking about.

This resulted in an incredibly frustrating experience and the customer ended up trying to cancel her DISH subscription. This led her back to the first complaint at the top of this list – all in all, it was clear that it was a terrible experience all around.