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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."
I'm really upset with my comcast internet. I wish it was much cheaper and even faster.
People say my sig is the best thing about me.
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.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
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.
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.
Go to news.google.com and look up "Comcast Vermont." You'll see articles in every Vermont daily paper about how Comcast has dropped 8 channels from its basic analog service (including MSNBC and Comcast's own cable news station). It's telling people who miss those stations from their $18-a-month plan they can get them back by going to a $58-a-month digital plan. The state may be able to act against this, since Comcast is only allowed one "rate change" a year, and this would be the second, if dropping channels and charging the same price counts as a rate change. Comcast claims it doesn't. In Comcast's eyes, it can drop any plan to a single channel, offer more expensive plans to those who want their channels back, and it hasn't changed rates at all.
Disclaimer: My brother-in-law is a Comcast executive. He's a decent guy.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
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:
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.)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]