The IT Nerd

One of the things that came with our 2016 Hyundai Tucson was a three month trial of Sirius XM satellite radio. A few days after getting the vehicle, my wife and I got a welcome e-mail and today we decided to try it out. Now right off the bat we were able to get radio stations as well as sport scores and stock info. But we didn’t get any traffic. We thought that was weird. Thus we phoned Sirius XM and got through to a customer service agent. She said that we should get the traffic functionality and that she would resend an activation signal and that we should leave our radio on for about 20 minutes. She then explained that it would take 10 minutes to refresh the audio and another 10 minutes to get the traffic info. My radio would tell me that the signal had received.

Now having done troubleshooting for my customers who have had Sirius XM issues, I knew all of this and it made sense for them to do this as a lot of their issues can be solved by resending the activation signal. Here’s the problem. After an hour, we never got the signal as nothing popped up on our radio to say that it had been received. I knew that there had to be a problem or the signal was never sent. I’ve had both when troubleshooting other people’s Sirius XM problems. So my wife and I called back. We stayed on hold 45 minutes without getting to an actual human being. We then gave up and hung up. We figured that it was just the time of day, so we tried again later in the day and got stuck on hold again. I also tried to send the code using the radio’s unique ID. That also didn’t work.

Here’s the thing. If this is what kind of experience we get when we’re on a trial, then that’s not giving us the warm fuzzies about actually signing up. I would have thought that all the services would have been live right out of the box. If they weren’t, it should have been easy to fix it. Our experience has been very frustrating thus far. But we’ll keep trying to get this to work, at least for now. If we can’t get it to work, chances are we won’t be paying up when the three month trial comes to an end. That would really suck for Sirius XM.

I’ll update this post if we actually to get all aspects of Sirius XM to work.

UPDATE: Here’s an update, and not a good one. One of the things that the customer service rep that we spoke to mentioned that we could use the Sirius XM app to listen to their service on our iPhones. All we needed to log in was our phone number to set it up. But once we downloaded the app, it asked for an e-mail address and password. Nothing we have tried thus far has worked. Thus Sirius XM is 0 for 2 with us.

UPDATE #2: It was suggested by a reader that we try their text based support system as not being able to get through by phone “happens all the time.” So we did that and got an agent right away. We explained the situation to them and the fact that the refresh signal has never reached our radio despite promises to the contrary and as a result, we still don’t have Sirius Traffic. The agent sent another signal that he said would get through in 5 or 10 minutes. But after an hour of waiting for it inside the car, we gave up as it never arrived. Thus we’re done trying to deal with this and we’ll be cancelling the trial as clearly Sirius XM Canada doesn’t want us to be able to try all aspects of the system.

UPDATE #3: Ironically, just after I updated this post a “Customer Satisfaction Survey” from Sirius XM just hit the inbox. Needless to say, we expressed our lack of “customer satisfaction” via that survey.

UPDATE #4: Another attempt at the text based support system got this result: They will escalate our issue and get back to us in 4 days. Really Sirius XM Canada? That’s truly the best that you can do? If it takes this much effort to get Sirius Traffic to work, then it’s simply not worth trying or paying for. We’ll be phoning in to cancel the trial as we want no part of Sirius XM given this rather craptastic customer service.

UPDATE #5: My wife and I called into Sirius XM Canada to cancel the trial. When you press the cancel option, you get an agent immediately. Read into that what you will. We explained the situation and the fact that we wanted to cancel to the agent that we got. First the agent wanted to send the radio another refresh code, which we declined but she did so anyway. More on that in a moment. Then she suggested that we take the car to the dealer to get a software update as clearly Hyundai has an issue. Thats’s when I pointed out this thread from the Hyundai Forums where other Canadians are having this same issue with Sirius XM Traffic not working. She then suggested that we could refresh the code ourselves as it uses a different system than the one she’s using. That was a good idea, but when I tried it, it said that a code had already been sent and to wait an hour and try again. Her response was “That’s weird. It sounds like a problem on our end. But you should still take the car to the dealer as it clearly needs a software update.” Really? One wonders if she thought that through before she said that sentence. Long story short, on Christmas Day we will no longer have access to Sirius XM and we will not miss it. Given the level of incompetence of Sirius XM Canada, that’s going to be a great Christmas present. But, just in the interest of science, I spent an hour with the car outside my condo waiting for the refresh code that the agent sent to arrive. None came. Not that I am shocked by that.

Game over Sirius XM Canada.

This entry was posted on October 5, 2015 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Sirrus XM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.