Comcast Is Reading Your Blog

Paolo writes "A Washington student got a bit of a shock when he received an email from internet service provider Comcast about comments he had made on his blog. Brandon Dilbeck, a student at the University of Washington, writes a blog and used it to complain about the service he was getting from Comcast. Shortly afterwards he got an email message from Comcast apologizing for the problems and suggesting he might look at a guide it had posted on its web site. Lyza Gardner, a vice president at a Web development company in Portland used Twitter to complain about the company and was surprised to be contacted directly. Comcast is now monitoring blogs as a way of improving its image among customers. The company was ranked at the bottom of the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index."

Comments

Good for them!

[doug141]

Reading a public blog and giving free tech support about problems posted in the blog is good.

Re:Good for them!

[griffjon]

No, it's not good -- it's putting out fires. Good would be training their call center employees to solve problems (instead of reading, tediously, from the "unplug your modem, reboot all your computers..." book)

This approach is not addressing the thousands of comcast customers who don't blog or twitter or have a "voice" online, like my parents. They still get the usual craptastic comtastic customer support.

Want a way to fix your image Comcast?

[downix]

Quit the bandwidth throttling, or conversely, just be straight forward with honest numbers about the service. I live with bandwidth throttling with my pipe, but my ISP was very straight forward with me that if the traffic load spikes they will rebalance accordingly, and that will on occasion throttle my speed in some cases. If Comcast were at least honest about issues, they'd gain a lot of respect.

So many companies are so worried about their image, they actually hurt their image more with the tactics used to keep their noses clean.

I'll be moving in a year or so to an area serviced by Comcast, and am weighing them against the FIOS thing carefully. How Comcast handles their customers will be key to that decision. Comcast used to stand for being a great cable service company, and I would like to see them stand tall again.

Re:Want a way to fix your image Comcast?

[Spittoon]

We tend to treat large companies like Comcast as if everything they do is the result of the considered thought of a single entity. That's just not the case. The Customer Support piece of Comcast is likely to be a distinct entity. Certainly they work with the rest of the company, but they've got their own agenda-- answer calls.

That means they have two things on their mind:
1. Are all the calls getting answered?
2. How long is each call and how can we shorten that time-- without doing such a poor job that call volume increases?

Call volumes are one area that Customer Support *probably* can affect only in limited ways. Divisions within a company are, in some ways, fiefdoms-- everybody filters up to a VP, and there is limited participation between Support, Network Engineering, and Product Management. Each of those groups will have their own area of responsibility which the other areas don't control-- they can only participate in projects and do their best to be a good team member.

So in the case of network policy or product efficacy, the Support operation can only affect the Network Engineering, Fulfillment (the people who ship equipment to customers), and Product Management operations to the extent that they can socially engineer the other team to do the right thing. If you know any Network Engineers you have an idea of how difficult that can be. The city of San Francisco recently learned this lesson, I think.

What Customer Support can affect is the tools they use to handle customer issues. This blog-watching guy is one of those.

If people in America would answer calls for the same rates as people in the Phillipines, then the balance of cost-to-quality for call centers would probably move further toward quality. But only maybe-- the more calls you handle the more pressure there is to generate efficiencies, which means less training and more scripting and less tolerance for calls that last a long time.

Of course, end users don't perceive any of this-- to us it's just "If Comcast would just make their service better I wouldn't have to call" and we have trouble understanding why they put effort into wacky new Support ideas like this when they should be spending that guy's paycheck on improving their network capacity so they stop being tempted to throttle bandwidth to control data transfer costs.

Oh noes!

[Aminion]

Comcast is helping their customers, yes? They are crawling/indexing/filtering blogs that are completely public, yes? So what's the problem? What am I supposed to be outraged about this time?

"It feels like nobody ever really reads my blog," he told the New York Times.
"Nobody has left a comment in months."

Oh, that's the problem. Seriously, this is a lousy post.

This could be a very good thing

[davidwr]

As long as they are using public means like blog-monitoring or using search engines and not underhanded means like customer/IP-monitoring/stalking, this is probably a very good thing. If only every company would listen to what their customers say in public and use that information to improve customer service.

The minute they start monitoring me to see what blogs I post to, the minute they start stalking my online activities, or the minute they start using what I say to retaliate against me is the minute they've gone too far.

Where's the story? Isn't it obvious?

[davidwr]

The story is that it's COMCAST.

Several thoughts spring to mind.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. The Web is a public place. Anything and everything you say from your webserver can and should be considered to have been shouted from the nearest corner. Sure, most people ignore that evangelist who's spruiking his faith, but "most" is not "all".
2. Computers are really good at finding obscure facts. As somebody said, and has been widely quoted: Type in "Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire" and the computer will say, "Specify type of goat."
3. Listening to somebody who's venting about a company is a good way for that company to find out what they're doing wrong, at least in the eyes of that particular individual. Such knowledge may not be worth much (eg: "Apple should sell its high end Mac Pro at one dollar a pop!"), or it might be worth a hell of a lot (eg: "My brand new LCD had five bright pixels in it. I took it back and exchanged it for another of the same model, but that second one had ten bright pixels. The third one was a bit better - it only had four bright pixels - but the fourth was appalling: twenty bright pixels!")

I'd basically say that if Comcast is using this to supplement its normal customer support channels (rather than replace them entirely), it's a good thing, especially if they beef up the ability of customer support to help the customer out before it gets to the venting on the web stage.

He posted a commend on a public forum....

[sys_mast]

...and then complains because it was read and responded to? I would be bothered if it was a private intended email sent through their email relays, but not to comcast, and they responded to that. But he put it on a public, blog, WOW maybe they are using something like google searching for these negative remarks and OH MY GOSH trying to make the customer happy by suggesting things!!! WOW...OK sarcasm off. Come on, if you don't want anyone to be able to read it, don't post it on the web. Sorry to say but the title should read "dumb blogger shocked when public blog read by someone" OK I admit I'm assuming it's a public blog, but a quick scan of the article didn't indicate it was private/secured in anyway. So unless I missed something, this is a non-issue.

Really?

[Darkness404]

Comcast is now monitoring blogs as a way of improving its image among customers.

Here is an idea don't throttle P2P connections also, don't block websites, don't keep logs, and stand up for fair use and anonymity on the internet. Do that and you might be more liked. But keep throttling P2P connections and acting as a puppet of congress/MPAA/RIAA and people will hate you for it.

Do they read the newspapers too?

[ktappe]

For every blog that gets read, 100 newspapers (online or printed) get read. So one wonders if this lady will get a call too: http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080726/BUSINESS/807260323 If not, then Comcast is picking off small low-lying fruit instead of dealing with the larger, more widely seen issues. Silly.

Re:Is that you Comcast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading your blog is not big brother. The blog is public. They could have a few generic scripts that query Google for combinations of keywords, and when they show up, someone looks at the page. We have several newswatcher scripts set up at work that monitor news articles that mention our company. Nothing sinister here. You can remove the tin foil hat.

This would never have happened if...

[fgaliegue]

Comcast had... You know... Some kind of decent customer service or something...

Not JUST that it's Comcast...

[KWTm]

Not just good PR- If I ran such an unpopular company, and was serious about turning it around, I'd be looking everywhere humans go to vent, or make criticism. Then, I'd try to solve the problems I found. Where's the story?

Where's the story? Isn't it obvious?
            The story is that it's COMCAST.

Not only that, but Comcast is actually addressing its clients' concerns and negative feedback, as opposed to being oblivious to them.

Now, to really score, Comcast would need to fulfill some additional criteria:

• address it with more than just some mere "yeah, we saw your complaint, now we're responding to you with this feel-good letter that doesn't actually do anything, just so you feel that we've addressed your complaint"
• address the complaint for more than just a handful of high-visibility people with popular blogs, but rather do something about the actual corporate culture. I was going to say, "I would love to see a Slashdot posting or two from someone actually inside Comcast who would describe a positive shift in the corporate culture," but they might send a shill or two to write some false praise here.

Let me tell you something, Comcast. You ruined your own reputation. Now it's going to be real hard for you to erase that. See what happened to Microsoft? (Hey, Sony, stop snickering.)

Re:Not JUST that it's Comcast...

[KGIII]

According to the article they're trying to improve their image. I say that's friggen retarded. Why not improve oh, their service? Their pricing? Their policies? When they do THOSE things then they can work on improving their image.

Re:Not JUST that it's Comcast...

[mpeskett]

I assume that they do the shit they do for a reason other than pissing everyone off on purpose, so that would imply that it helps their bottom line. Or at least it does until people catch on, and go elsewhere.

At this point they could improve the service, which has the downside (from their point of view) of removing the advantage to the bottom line, and may not actually help their image - the people that are really interested won't be won over quickly and will stay suspicious, the people that aren't that interested won't notice the change and will continue with the impression that the service sucks.

They *could* improve the service whilst simultaneously launching a PR campaign to make it well known that they've improved the service, which might be more successful in winning people over, but still carries the cost of yknow... actually improving the service.

If they assume that the people who know things are mostly a lost cause, and focus on the people who are actually likely to be persuaded, then they could have just as much success with just the PR campaign, possibly more success if you factor in the savings from keeping the service as it is.

You can't trust them to do what's good for the customer, but you can trust them to do what's good for their profits... if they could do better by making the service better then some analyst or advisor would have pointed this out already.

Re:Not JUST that it's Comcast...

[vux984]

I could be wrong here, but wouldn't the easiest and most cost effective way of improving your image to be doing what you had described? Service improvements. Better pricing structures. Better policies.

No. It takes both. You can't run an effective image improving campaign if nothing has changed. But if you just change and hope everyone notices on their own that's horribly inefficient. You get much better results by telling people.

As much as you may hate it, advertising works.

Re:Not JUST that it's Comcast...

[atraintocry]

Go elsewhere? For cable service? You're crazy.

And before you say satellite, think about how awesome it is to have your TV and internet go down because of some big bad trees, or the occasional rain cloud. Or those blazing fast analog modem uploads. In the areas the Comcast operates, they have a monopoly on cable service. And for TV, most people get cable now rather than OTA. So the time when those protections were necessary to create infrastructure are long over. Not to mention, the regulations that made it somewhat fairer were dropped years ago.

There's no free market here. You can't go somewhere else and get similar service. You might just have to go without. Nothing wrong with that, but not everybody can or wants to...so it will take a lot more than P2P throttling or shitty customer service, or even no expectation of privacy or even uptime to make someone want to do that. There's no incentive for them, or any other US cable company to be competitive or to improve their service. I think the PR is just bet-hedging, and often reactive, like those ridiculous ads they're all running against FiOS, saying "our fiber is way bigger and cooler".

Re:Comcast is reading your Slashdot too

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why this is good PR. I saw this story on one of the networks this week, and Lyza Gardner apparently called Comcast customer service first and got no useful help at all. So instead of getting help when you ask for it, you should go complain on the internet, and maybe someone at Comcast will happen to read it and resolve your problem?

Re:Comcast is reading your Slashdot too

[v1]

I suppose it depends on how you take it. Some people would view them as stalkers hunting you down, possibly intent on silenving you. ("knock off the negative blogs or we further modify your bandwidth limits") Others would view it as an honest attempt to seek out discontent and make things right. ("do you happen to remember the name of the rep that refused to address your concern?") Or it may simply be a selfish move on comcast's part to grease the squeaky wheels in an attempt to improve their public karma level. One pissed off and motivated blogger can do a lot of hard to the image of even a large company, making for a nice David-and-Golliath type conflict that Golliath either better make peace on or take the hit.

I suppose in the end a company is a company and they really don't care about how happy or unhappy their customers are. Happy customers can make for better business, but not always. Sometimes the best business model involves pissing off quite a percentage of your customer base. (particularly when lacking competition) So regardless of what the peons at comcast look like they're doing or think they're doing, the actual intent from comcast is not to make happy customers. It's to protect the bottom line.

So lets hope that they think making their customers happier is currently the best thing for their bottom line.

Disagree: Comcast IS one big entity

[KWTm]

We tend to treat large companies like Comcast as if everything they do is the result of the considered thought of a single entity. That's just not the case. The Customer Support piece of Comcast is likely to be a distinct entity. Certainly they work with the rest of the company, but they've got their own agenda

While your premise is technically correct, I'll provide a counterpoint to your point.

Large companies like Comcast (or Microsoft or most others), with some good aspects and some bad aspects, do indeed tend to be treated as one big monolithic blob --because that's how they're asking to be treated. Comcast is using its name as a brand. That's what it means to be Comcast. So, while it's not surprising that there can be factions within, we will still rate whether Comcast is nice or nasty on an overall scale. The responsibility for this falls on upper management which oversees both the Customer Service Department and the Lie About Unlimited Bandwidth^W^W^W^WMarketing Department. If Customer Support wants to improve its image separate from the rest of Comcast, they can spin off into "Support-A-Tronics -- A Division of Comcast(TM)" and change their logo. Of course, I've heard quite a few not-so-good things on Slashdot about Customer Support itself.

In the same way, I disagree with people who keep saying that "companies aren't evil --just the people within them". As a whole, companies can indeed be evil, greedy, upstanding, etc, just as people can be evil, greedy, etc. even if you can break their actions down into component actions which, by themselves, are not inherently evil etc.

Re:Disagree: Comcast IS one big entity

[moxley]

"In the same way, I disagree with people who keep saying that "companies aren't evil --just the people within them". As a whole, companies can indeed be evil, greedy, upstanding, etc, just as people can be evil, greedy, etc. even if you can break their actions down into component actions which, by themselves, are not inherently evil etc."

I agree with you - Corporations can be "evil" - but to to clarify it further, there are three things I can think of right off of the top of my head which enable a corporation to be infinitely more "evil" than a person:

1. The group dynamic - this can be positive or negative, I am sure everyone can think of some of the positive sides of working within a group, but I am talking about the negatives - like how people behave when they are part of a group - there are numerous studies which show that people will go along with things that they would never do alone (even incredibly cruel and evil things) when they are part of a group and/or feel that they have backing of authorities. There are numerous experiment results that attest to this.

2. Add to that the faceless nature of beaurocracy - the fact that even at high levels people know that their actions as groups or individuals will reflect upon a faceless corporation, thus they feel masked.

3. Add to those the benefits corporations have, primary from the government - especially here in the US (and I am not even mentioning the illegal, behind the scenes backroom stuff that we all know goes on sometimes) - but things like corporate personhood where a company can enjoy legal benefits normally only granted to persons - yet, due to some of the things I mentioned above and other things they aren't held to the same standards of responsibility as a person...Just think about recent rulings on things like eminent domain and how the Enron pensioners got screwed, war profiteering...I am sure if you think about it you can come up with many things corporations have done which are anti-humanist to say the least.

SO I think looking at the above things it is apparent that large corporations not only provide a good base of cover for illegal and unethical activity - they can damn near be a magnet and playground for sociopaths and other people who put their self and selfish needs above just about anything.

Don;t get me wrong, I am not saying every single thing about all coporations is bad - but certainly much of the status quo relating to corps. in the US disturbs me.

Re:Is that you Comcast?

[Gerzel]

Exactly. It could be summed up as Commcast is listening to what is being said about it in public and trying to improve upon its services based on that.

This is more or less exactly how a good corporation should behave.

Re:Is that you Comcast?

[cobaltblue1975]

Well they desperately need to do something to improve customer service because as it is I would rather have sharp pens shoved under my finger nails than go back to that nightmarish cavalcade of misery and grief that is Comcast.

Re:Waste of public money.

[Fourier404]

It is outrageous for them to waste money combing through blogs to shut up complaints.

You make it sound like they're killing these people. They aren't wasting their money on ads, they're improving their image by providing better service, which is definitely something they're allowed to do.

Re:Is that you Comcast?

[budgenator]

So the way to get Comcast to preform customer service is to make your complaints public, but talking to them directly is a YMMV proposition. This seems almost narcissistic.