Mary moved to a new house recently and had to suffer through the ordeal that is Comcast “service.” So she wrote a blog post about it. Lo and behold, a Comcast employee shows up in the comment section and writes:
I’m sorry for the poor experience we created for you. I’m glad everything worked out in the end, but I would like to see that you are compensated for your time and frustrations.
. . .
If you would like my assistance, please email our team at We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com. We’ll work to make this right for you.
Something similar happened to me. You email the people at that address and they really do fix things up quickly. But still, can you people over at Comcast get a shred of perspective, for just a second? Do you realize how utterly stupid it is that you can’t manage to allocate your resources efficiently, or train your workforce effectively, so that you get things right the first time? Do you realize how absolutely, stunningly idiotic it is that you have people, apparently, who troll the blogosphere looking for posts like Mary’s, so you can send in your decent technical and customer support crew? Why not just, you know, get it right the first time? Why mess around with all this lunacy of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, and the left hand just making problems for the right hand to fix?
Some Comcast person will probably show up and comment on this post now. Wasting time that would be much better spent on improving the internal operations of your company. Thanks for sending me a monthly bill for this crap. Thanks for being the only outfit that can get me semi-reliable fast internet service, so I have no options, you have no competition, and you have no real incentive to do a good job. You have us all by the balls, Comcast. At least with your left hand. But your right hand is busy doing magic tricks to keep us entertained.
Hello!
Thank you for the feedback. We agree with you. It would be much better, for us and for our customers, to get things right the first time. What our team does is a small part of Comcast’s overall effort to improve the quality of service across the board for our customers throughout the nation.
Regards,
Melissa Mendoza
Comcast Customer Connect
National Customer Operations
That’s all fine and dandy, noble intentions and all, but your efforts are misdirected. When I know there is what appears to be a rogue customer support group within the Comcast organization, it doesn’t really matter to me that you manage to fix problems fast, or that you can work out vaguely compensatory deals like discounts on monthly charges. Instead, I see a deeply fractured organization, something that is far more troubling than just a big, bumbling corporation that screws up. To me, that means that the moment I can get fast internet service from someone else, like AT&T or whomever, then I am still jumping ship, even though you sent people out to fix my problem and worked out a lower monthly charge.
When I go to a retail store and they make good by giving me something free to compensate for their mistake, I know that they’re just doing what’s right and fixing a problem that they caused. But if I knew that they hired sub-par employees and trained them poorly, so that there were problems with lots and lots of customers, only to find some other group of employees standing outside the doors to fix all those problems, that would tell me they have problems so deep that I should be shopping elsewhere. How much deeper do those problems go?
The problem with your team and Comcast’s alleged “overall effort” is that you are not going to the source of the problem. Why aren’t you dispatching your people to crack the whip on all the morons who answer the phones at your customer support number? (And I have no compunction for calling them morons. It’s not technical support when the only thing they can do is tell me to restart my equipment. That’s just an insult to the intelligence of the customers.) Why aren’t you exerting your efforts to ensure that your on-site technicians are trained to do something other than swap out cables and boxes, or get on the phone with their supervisors? That’s all I’ve ever seen the ordinary techs do. It’s painful to watch them. They’re just about worthless. But Comcast pays them, and they are slow and inefficient, and that means my cost, as the consumer, is driven up.
You people shouldn’t be out there fostering this sense of dissent within Comcast. You should be taking over the inner-workings of the company. Start a better training program. Here’s an idea. Have your people build a fake neighborhood. Wire it up with Comcast equipment. Then get your trainers to insert defects of all kinds, physical, digital, whatever. Send in your newly hired technicians to diagnose the problems. If they can’t figure out the problem and fix it within a reasonable time don’t send them out to my house!
But this thing of trolling the blogosphere and looking for discontented customers and handing out that email address, it’s silly. It doesn’t tell me that Comcast cares. It tells me that the vast majority of Comcast doesn’t give a rat’s ass, and that anything good that comes out of Comcast only comes through some internal resistance movement. That’s insane.
So I don’t really care that you agree with me because your actions amount to, from what I can tell, enabling Comcast to fail perpetually. You’re like the people who don’t want their friends to be harmed by their alcoholism, so you give them rides everywhere, thus enabling them to stay drunk and removing any incentive to sober up and take some responsibility for their actions.
Stop treating the symptoms and fix the source.
At least Comcast probably sends your bills to the correct address… They keep sending my bills to the wrong address, despite me trying several times to correct it. (I’d never changed my address — Comcast decided on its own that they should send my bills elsewhere.) So I don’t get the bills, and then I owe them lots of money.
Everytime I call, they say they’ve fixed my address. I called again over the weekend, so let’s hope it’s truly fixed this time.
I agree that Comcast has some serious problems with customer service. I shouldn’t have to call the customer service line multiple times just to correct a mistake that was caused by Comcast. I think it’s great that if you complain loud enough, they can be helpful and fix almost anything. I just don’t understand why you have to complain so much to get any help.
Who’s to say that “Melissa Mendoza” is even a real person? Aren’t there programs out there that can surf the internet and give a response? Ms. Mendoza could be an extremely intelligence bot program made by Comcast. And that is even more disturbing than a rogue customer support group.
I’m not happy with Comcast either. They are being investigated by the FCC for moving analog channels to digital but the people receiving the analog channels did not see a smaller bill even though they no longer had access to those channels. In August they were told by the FCC to stop unfair billing practices for bottlenecking certain peer-to-peer traffic online. FCC did not fine them but they should have. Comcast has spent $3.2 million lobbying Congress (see Forbes article Nov. 12, 2008) just in the 3Q so if they buy enough politians, they will get what they want.
I wrote to my local congressman, George Miller, in September to let him know that I do not appreciate Comcast trying to plow legislation through Congree that serve their self-interests and not the public’s.
I’m pretty sure Melissa Mendoza is a real person, considering her comments both here and elsewhere, which evince much more humanity than any net bot I’ve ever encounter.
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