Another Stupid Thing About Comcast

I called Comcast to cancel my service today. Their phone number has a menu, with an option to speak with someone specifically for the purpose of discontinuing your service. I would think, “Oh, a menu. That means when I get to a person, they will know why I am calling.” But apparently not so at Comcast. The goon who answered the phone asked, “What can I do for you today?”

That leaves two possibilities, from what I can tell. Either their menu is completely functionless, or they are playing a psychological game with people who want to cancel their service—like maybe after spending 12 minutes on hold listening to their absolutely terrible music that sounded like it was being streamed over a 28.8k modem, I had changed my mind and wanted to stick with these losers and their lousy service? Or maybe they think I am so weak-minded that if I have to say to a real, live person that I want to cancel my service, I will chicken out? So are they evil, insulting, or just stupid?

Maybe some wanker from that “Comcast Cares” group will find this blog post and comment. Last time I wrote about them, here is what Melissa Mendoza of Comcast Customer Connect wrote:

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.

Below I will reproduce my response to her, which I doubt she bothered to come back and read. So to whichever Comcast employee stumbles into this post, read this before commenting:

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 othergroup 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 meansmy 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.

Have a nice day, Comcast.