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Comcast Confessions
An anonymous reader writes: We heard a couple weeks ago about an incredibly pushy Comcast customer service representative who turned a quick cancellation into an ordeal you wouldn't wish on your enemies. To try and find out what could cause such behavior, The Verge reached out to Comcast employees, hoping a few of them would explain training practices and management directives. They got more than they bargained for — over 100 employees responded, and they painted a picture of a corporation overrun by the neverending quest for greater profit. From the article: 'These employees told us the same stories over and over again: customer service has been replaced by an obsession with sales, technicians are understaffed and tech support is poorly trained, and the massive company is hobbled by internal fragmentation. ... Brian Van Horn, a billing specialist who worked at Comcast for 10 years, says the sales pitch gradually got more aggressive. "They were starting off with, 'just ask," he says. "Then instead of 'just ask,' it was 'just ask again,' then 'engage the customer in a conversation,' then 'overcome their objections.'" He was even pressured to pitch new services to a customer who was 55 days late on her bill, he says.'
Snatch up one Comcast and one Time Warner exec. Saw their heads off on YouTube.
I wonder when customer service will start being more proactive by calling customers.
"Hello, this is Comcast. How may we upsell you?"
The Cable Company
Public Service Announcement
I cancelled my Comcast cable service last week. Walked into the office, handed them my equipment and told them I wanted to cancel my account. The person behind the counter checked in the equipment, had me sign a form indicating I had returned all the equipment and pay the prorated amount I owed.
The only thing he asked me is if I was going with someone else to which I said no, I could no longer justify the cost.
I was in and out in just over a minute. I waited in line significantly longer than that.
Sidenote, I received a notice in the mail from Comcast that for a small additional monthly fee I could upgrade my service to one of the following. Obviously my cancellation hasn't worked its way through the system yet.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Would you be more or less inclined to put your money into a company whose seemingly sole focus is profit? I mean focused well over and above happy employees, happy customers, delivering a product/service they can be proud of, and other such trivialities.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Lots of companies have engaged in this practice over the years. I've worked for a Credit card company in the past, and they did the same exact thing. It's basically preying on the weak. Those who tended to overspend and could never pay off a debt were the most vulnerable to the sales pitch to keep the card open and active. This used to be called the "sub-prime" market, but that term fell out of good graces back in 2004 - 2006 when the word "sub-prime" referred to poor people; which was true. The original intent of sub-prime was to help people with bad / no credit establish a foundation for building good credit. Just like everything else, it got corrupted by corporate greed.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
I've been a Comcast customer for eons. Since the days of them gobbling up MediaOne, Road Runner, etc.... and while I've had to deal with customer service a few times annually due to unexpected outages, I can't really complain about the speed or consistency.
I suppose the worst Comcast horror story I've got is last year when speeds were acting erratic we called for a tech to come out and look at the lines, suspecting it was squirrels chewing on them. We ended up getting a contracted 3rd party tech who while very friendly, wasn't the most professional. His solution to fixing our problem was cutting out our neighbor's line behind us to fix ours.
When I asked what would happen when they come home and realize their internet is out he jokingly said "they'll have to make a service call just like you did". Also while we made smalltalk I let the guy know I was working from home and with my limited technical knowledge he still insisted I should go work for his boss.
He was extremely pushing that to the point I said I'd give them a call just to shut him up. Turns out he earns a $300 commission for referrals when I did eventually call just out of curiosity, and needless to say I did not want to work for a company who employed jokers like the tech we got.
Comcast is definitely slipping, and the next time I call for a tech I'm going to insist on a first party.
So I moved out of a Comcast area. It was 3 rounds of what can we do to keep you, to cancel. Apparently I no longer live in a Comcast area is to hard to process. I've since gotten a call trying to get me back.
I ready did not have much of a problem with internet from them, though my new Optimum service is faster and cheaper (75/25)
No sir I dont like it.
I don't know any Comcast customer who has had a positive experience with their customer service. I also know some who've had Comcast blatantly disregard the details of their contract with respect to price and features a few months into a 12-24 month contract. Frankly, what Comcast needs besides competition from more companies and municipal broadband (via utilities) is a few strategic arrests of employees and executives for fraud. Put a few of their guys in prison for fraudulent business practices, and I'll wager their billing and sales people will wake the f#$% up and do right.
OK, this is nothing new, as an EX employee of an American telephone/telegraph company. The first person you talk to is a "customer service and SALES" every time you call in, and their system is "Running Slow" they are looking at your account to "Bundle" a solution to your problem. Bundle = bamboozle. The reps make over half their income from commission, this is "Customer service" not outbound sales. It is the way business is done anymore.
when they become even bigger corporate assholes following the (will be approved without any significant concessions) buyout of time warner cable.
They are calling people on cable-modem only and offering a cable box for 5 dollars more a month.
...painted a picture of a corporation overrun by the neverending quest for greater profit
Or for short, just "a corporation".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I can understand wanting to save money by putting tech script as the first line of tech support, but it gets a little tiring when want to skip to the advanced folks and still they want to stick to their script and ask me to reboot the modem as if I hadn't done that 3 times already. If it isn't low hanging fruit for the script readers it's not going to be a very successful or efficient support call.
Seems some DNS issue that isn't solved by reboot kept all of the devices in my network from getting reliable connections for about 10-15 minutes after starting to browse. I did some of the obvious stuff; reboot modem, try other DNS servers, etc. Doesn't matter now. Switched to FiOS and now pages load before I can blink.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
Verizon is the same way with FIOS. I called to set up automatic payments to my credit card and found the (seemingly) 70 year old woman trying to sell me the next tier internet speed. No matter how I tried to explain that the most bandwidth I use is with Netflix, which already works fine and therefore don't need any additional speed, she kept persisting.... but I didn't feel right yelling at someone who could be my grandmother.
"...painted a picture of a corporation overrun by the neverending quest for greater profit"
Is there some other type of corporation?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Posting anonymously since I need to remain employed...
Comcast has two mantras. Increase sales and cut costs. As has already been pointed out, the customer service staff are heavily pressured through careful sifting of metrics to see how adept they are at saving a customer that's identified that they want to flee. They're also incentivised to push new product to anyone they interact with on the phone. All the better if they can sell you something "at a discount" that you won't even use...like voice services as people are switching to cell-only phone service in droves. Pump the earnings, while adding almost nothing in operational cost. And while a "positive customer experience" is often discussed, it has little to do with your compensation. It's all about increasing sales, reducing costs, and truck rolls (minimizing truck rolls is likely tatooed on the private parts of all the supervisors and management types so they don't forget). This constant drum beat of cutting costs has resulted in:
Hiring "lowest bidder" outsourced staff to manage the phones
Reduction of overall customer service staff over time vs number of subscribers (no wonder the hold times are so looooong)
Slow infrastructure for internal staff (sometimes they really ARE waiting for their screen to update while you tap your foot for 2 minutes)
Slow and outdated services (DNS/Email in particular) for customers. Fast pipes seem glacial when it takes 20 seconds to resolve a hostname.
etc...
On the video side of the company, they're bleeding video subs steadily (and so is Time Warner). This is causing a panic. Video infrastructure and licensing is expensive fer chrissakes! Who's going to pay for all that? Well...you are. They haven't clued into the reality that a lot of people want to consume specific bits of content AT THEIR LEISURE. Paying for the hundreds of channels of obscure content that you just don't want is ludicrous when there are so many alternatives out there on the interwebs. That's why you're seeing Comcast kick and scream about content owners paying to ride their last mile to your doorstep (unless, of course, it's NBC Universal content...then it's ok and given a fat pipe). I know...a shocker.
Does this make them any different than any other megacorp with quarterly earnings to meet? Probably not. However, when you consider that they'll be the 800lb gorilla of ISP and cableTV service in the US after they ingest Time Warner, it does give one pause about the future of the quality and cost of those services. Someone is going to pay to keep those quarterly profits up, regardless of the actual cost to deliver the services. Buckle up. It's going to be a rough ride.
They fired most of the technicians and now 90% are subcontractors to get around most of the labor laws. Around here the guys that do Comcast have a magnetic sign on their rust bucket and will swap out for Dish when they go to that next job. They barely train these guys and they pay them a flat rate per job so they want to be in and out as fast as possible many times half assing it because they average out to being paid less than $7.00 an hour on most jobs.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm amazed to read about the kind of crap Verizon and Comcast can get away with, both in terms of customer service but also in terms of services delivered (Netflix issue among others). My sympathies goes out to all of you.
* Posted this from my 100/100mb fiber connection
You know what these people are going to do, right? For cancellation, you gotta have a brick wall they can't navigate around.
Them: "WHY DO YOU WANT TO CANCEL?"
Me: "Because work is paying for a teleworker account from another ISP."
Them: "Which ISP?"
Me: "Heck, I don't know."
Them: "We can beat the other (speed, service, etc.)."
Me: "Not if you're not hooked up to my house."
Them: "We will give you 3 months free service just to keep you as a customer."
Me: "I've always back-billed my company for this service. They will not accept the charge in the future."
Them: "Are you dissatisfied with our service?"
Me: "WHAT? Heck, no ... I love you guys." .... ....
--
Go in prepared for it. Your parents died and you got no money. You're heading of to federal prison. Your house burned down.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
When did people become shills for corporations by posing as a "regular joe." Had you read the article you would have known that call reps whose job did not involve sales in any way are now responsible for making sales.
Nice job ass-hole.
My credit has been crap for years mostly due to a steady flow of medical and therapy bills for my "special needs" child that far exceeds my ability to pay. But one benefit of not giving a fork about my FICO score is that I don't even bother to deal with the BS from cable, cell phone, internet, gym memberships, "free" trials, or anything else. When I want to change or drop a service I find it much more convenient to just close my bank account and open a new one than to deal with "Customer Retention Counselors". Sure, I get letters for debt collectors every day, but no one has bothered to sue me. Of course, if I had any savings or disposable income that could be a different matter.
I work at a major finnish telco (posting AC to protect my identity/employment) and for the last year or so we've been seeing exactly this kind of pressure. Even tech support now has sales quotas that have to be met to maintain your employment. Staff is trying it's best to rebel against this, but you can't really do anything: If you quit or even if 100 people quit, it won't matter, with the economy and employment being where they are, the company would just replace everyone who left in a week.
What is terrible is this is just setting up a publicity stunt for "oh! We're kinder and gentler now!" and the people behind the draconian policies will not get fired.
I wasn't aware that seeking profit and trying to retain customers is a bad thing. If a business doesn't retain customers or seek profit there won't be a business to bother with.
Here's a novel concept, don't like the business don't support it...
When I worked for AT&T in the early Naughties, we were instructed in pretty much the same way. Sell, sell, sell, and ignore (as much as possible) the customer and what they really want.
This guy is clearly a graduate of the AOL School of Custormer Retention.
I had a nearly identical call with America Online years ago. I didn't record it, but someone else recorded their similar experience. Definitely the same guy!
cw
chris watts íë¦ìS ì(TM)ì
I worked tech support for Gateway for about 6 years, and the last couple years, sales were a requirement of our job. It started like, oh if you want to do this, please do it, but it is ok if you don't, to you will try to sell them stuff, it is no longer an option. It got so bad just before the E-Machines merger that there was techs who would go through tickets and find open orders that were missing something like a po, or a wrong address and then take over that sale and finish it to steal credit for the sale. When I started there, it was all about providing the best tech support. By the end (before the whole tech department was outsourced) it was mainly about could you sell them something. As bad as they were, the sales people were worse. At least the techs would sell them stuff that worked. Sales would sell them whatever, and tell them we would support it. It was kind of sad, it was really a lot of fun working there until they went all crazy (things started going downhilll when they got into a price war with Dell).
I spent hours with them, trying to figure out why they couldn't give me access to my online account to pay my fing bill. Finally I just told them I was canceling the account to resolve the matter. Then they aked me why... Then they transfered me to another rep to close the account, who then asked me why .... Finally after going through two people, I just told them I wasn't explaining why anymore, just close the account. Getting angry on the phone is the only thing they understand.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
There's a saying in organizations like Comcast that "salesmanship begins with the customer says no."
Interestingly, "when the other person says no" is also a common definition of when rape begins.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
At first glance this may seem completely irrelevant to debates about Net Neutrality and data caps, but now I think it tells us a lot about just how unscrupulous Comcast and other big ISPs are. When their greed trumps even the most basic tact and professionalism, how can anyone in their right mind expect us to believe that the best thing for everyone is to let them run amok unchallenged and unregulated with a virtual monopoly? It boggles the mind.
The reason for your ease is your choice of environment, telemarketers are trained specifically to be pushy salespeople and have financial/employment incentives driving their behavior. Your average front desk employee isn't trained in sales, has none of those incentives and probably better things to do then arguing with you about keeping your service.
Is to lie. Tell them you are moving to a city which doesn't have comcast. So they can't do anything but disconnect you. Of course once Comcast is the only Cable company left you are screwed.
So a client of mine uses Comcast Business as their ISP. I drove on-site to configure a SonicWALL. Their modem was in bridge mode with the only option of turning into "pseudo bridge mode" (something like a DMZ). Also, the modem wasn't yet provisioned for their assigned static IP pool. Only Tier 1 answers the phone. If you require Tier 2, a call-back within 24 period IS THE ONLY OPTION! And most of the Tier 1 guys don't know how to do anything other than provision modem, basic reboot troubleshooting, and scheduling a truck roll for physical coax connectivity problems. Or put it another way, I can't schedule in advance (proactively) to setup a business gateway firewall. You have to wait and be reactive, then drive X amount of mile on-site all while the customer is left offline with a business that can't function (IE losing money!!!). But it gets better; Tier 2 will configure the modem and reboot the unit without calling first. Epic fail!
Problem 1: I can't get a modem that will drop down to true bridge mode
Problem 2: Business class support is inharently reactive and not proactive with regards to scheduling downtime.
Problem 3: Tier support of all levels wildly range in competency.
Problem 4: -fill in the blank because I'm sure I missed something here-
Life is not for the lazy.
They already do this. After getting calls at least once a week pushing offers to upgrade our service to a bundle with a land line, and after asking them *each time* to stop calling us... we cancelled our service.
It's not limited to Comcast. I rarely revisit a financial transaction unless I can save money. Whether it's my bank, brokerage house, mortgage company, internet provider or Church. Every sales call has the potential for a loss of business. Usually I let things go the way they are until they rub my nose in it. It's your money folks, nobody is holding a gun to your head. Once you realize that you will stop playing the victim.
On a side note, I refuse any phone support with Indians. Not because I am a racist - that is besides the point. I'm just wise enough not to do business with a race of people who have a proven track record of stealing credit cards. Unfortunately, that is the way it goes. You'll notice most companies do the initial selling with white guys from Iowa, after that all your calls are international. It's your choice. So the next time you get a call from Comcast, downgrade your service, or cancel, even do without. You'd be surprised what true freedom is once you grow a spine.
Logically, how can this policy be the result of a decision made by professionals? If a customer really wants to end service hiding the exit door is just an inconvenience. If a girl wants to break up with her boyfriend and the boyfriend won't "let her" it's a serious psychological problem, nevermind illegal.
Yesterday I cancelled my newspaper delivery subscription (yeah I actually had the paper delivered on Sundays). I went to the web site to unsubscribe but guess what - it's impossible. There's not even a mention of cancellation. It's like they figure, if we close our eyes and yell "lalalala" our problems go away.
So how's that strategy working out for you, Seattle Times? Not only have you lost my business, you've irritated me so much I will never come back.
This is what happens when a business thinks only of its own best interest and not the interest of its customers. When the Comcast regime is toppled, not only will people not care, we'll rejoice. Another bad company dead - good riddance. I can't wait.
that brick and mortar service locations have there employees behind bullet proof glass like a bank. I went to return some equipment to the service center after cancelling service and was dumbfounded at first. But then I thought about it and realized that it all made sense. I'm sure these pricks on the phone piss off the wrong people who then storm off to a physical location to give take out there frustrations on an actual person. Better protection than a bank i tell you.
For Canada, replace Comcast with Rogers.
rewriting history since 2109
[Cue Voice of Achmed]: "SILENCE! I bill you!"
but I really don't care.
It's high time we realize the Internet is not about money. In order to get to the point where everyone can have free (paid for by taxes) Internet, the Internet needs to be seen in the same light as universal healthcare -- it's now a basic human right. ISPs should be non-profit entities that exist to deliver bandwidth to end users -- no ifs ands or buts. Yes, watch for abuse, but we could, without profit rearing its ugly head, deliver 100mbit Internet to most Americans and Europeans with current infrastructure and work on the remainder. It's time profit was removed from the equation. The Internet should be free for all based on a small tax increase. Remove the high salaries and let's just provide for people. I'm sick to death with everyone trying to get ahead. People should be content with what they have (excluding poverty) and be happy. Pipe dream unfortunately.
The problem isn't so much that they want to profit or retain customers, its the way they're doing it. There are limits (or at least there should be) to what a company can do in order to accomplish those goals. A company could retain 100% of their dissatisfied customers, by refusing to allow them to cancel their service and/or threatening them but (hopefully) that is illegal. They could increase profits by chaining their workers to their desks, paying them in gruel and whipping the ones not producing enough, but that is illegal. High pressure salespeople, giving canceling customers the runaround and other abuses of customers should be illegal as well. Letting people vote with their dollars is a decent concept, when the business in question doesn't keep sending you bills for a product/service you've told them (or at least tried) you don't want anymore.
I used to work for a telco in Canada that had a similar approach to their upsell strategy, the view was that every contact with a client was a chance to upsell :-/
Now that screwed up the tech support guys, those who were mainly technical guys started getting bad call reviews and those who could sell more (but could barely differentiate a password problem from a network problem) were not the "good employees" in the tech support department mind you... overcoming objections multiple times, abusing senile clients, etc. was not only tolerated, it was expected, to meet the arbitrary numbers some nut job in management had in their wet dreams.
Example: lady has a problem with their internet connection, don't try to fix it, tell her she has a virus and sell the monthly anti-virus package we offer.. make sure she is scared of the viruses, and dismiss her copy of whatever anti-virus she may have as less efficient than ours.
Now I left, because I refused to be part of it, like many did, and I never did business with Bell ever since, not in any shape or form.
I fear this is a normal part of management to try to push for that sort of revenue generating opportunities :-/ maybe they learn this in business school or something.
I'll just leave this finely crafted link here.
http://www.cmcsk.com/directors.cfm
I worked for Alltel(Now Windstream) for a number of years as an internet support representative. Their business strategy became Profit over Customer experience. We became sales oriented at the help desk, and we were to entangle the customer in as many contracts as possible to make it difficult for them to leave. One representative was overheard selling multiple internet connections and phone lines to the same house as a solution for networking - Keep in mind we sold a wireless router to go with our service. She was promoted to an upper level position in the sales department instead of fired.
I worked for Charter as a tier 3 tech support specialist about 10 years ago now, and towards the end of my time there we were trained in a program called "Purchase Power". It started off as something that everyone on the phones, regardless of position or nature of the call, was "encouraged" to do and basically involved reviewing all the services on the account with the customer and point out changes that could be made to save them money, like bundle services they already had going, point out promotional rates, etc. After a month or so of this, it was turned into a non-optional thing that consisted of roughly 50% of the call score when it came to review time. If a rep in any department didn't at least make an attempt to review services with a customer calling in for any reason, it had the potential to result in a write-up if it happened in a call that was randomly pulled during a performance review since it was impossible to receive a "passing" call score under this system unless these guidelines were adhered to. "Service reviews" quickly became sales as the requirements were again modified to include trying to sell new services. "Overcome the customer's objections" was, verbatim, a category that calls were graded on during reviews. This posed an extremely.. interesting.. challenge for my team as the higher-tier support staff were dealing primarily with repeat issues that the lower-tier teams had failed to diagnose properly or fix properly. And yet we were expected to try to sell higher speed internet connections, HBO, phone service, or anything else to these customers that were calling in repeatedly because the service they already had were not working for sometimes months at a time. Not long after I left for a new position that didn't make me feel like a sleazy car salesman on a daily basis, I learned that my entire team ended up getting dissolved and the people that hadn't already voluntarily left were given the choice of moving into other departments (customer retention or sales, primarily), or to go be successful elsewhere. So now, in our region at least, there is no tier 2 or tier 3 tech support out there to this day.
The most sickening part of all of this though, from the perspective of someone who worked with it first-hand, was the internal fervor behind refusing to call Purchase Power a sales program. It was always about "satisfying" the customer, calling it a sales program was extremely taboo even in internal conversation among employees, and telling customers about the program, calling it by name, or telling them we were "required" to do it was an offense that could lead to termination.
From my experiences dealing with other telcos as a customer over the years, I've heard the telltale signs of this breed of training from reps in almost all of them. What starts as an innocent "lets take a look at the services you have with us" is the opening line these programs train their reps to use, which will soon be followed by inquiring about what you like or use the most with the services, highlighting some other service or bundle you don't have, "overcoming the customer's objections", and then trying to sell you something. I've heard it from Charter, AT&T, and Time Warner first-hand and I know from my own personal experience that this has been a trend in the industry at-large for at least a decade now.
You don't know my enemies! Loan me a few Comcast customer service reps and a catapult, and I'll be a happy man.
...even though I cannot stand comcraptic my only other real choice(if you can call it that) is crapverse.... ....but...
I've found that calling when they hike a bill, try to add some charge or something threatening to dump them and/or reduce services tends to get them coughing up all sorts of deals -> while they may "sell" me an "upgrade" it tends to be quite a bit less than what I HAD been paying before... game their system boys and girls...*
I always have to wonder what sort of value they added for me when they try to raise their rates as, AFAICT it just got worse mostly, although I did get a "free" bandwidth bump a few months ago...
* NOTE: this was for residential. Talking to a local business owner who has comcraptic detailing my most recent scenario(above) it sounded later like their commercial offering that they just play hardball, and he's in the same boat for available service: comcraptic or crapverse period. ...also protip: do NOT rent their equipment. Buy your own. Depending on what you buy it'll pay for itself in 3m - 2y. e.g. you can buy a cable "modem" that on paper VASTLY exceeds comcraptic's maximum bandwidth offering for c. $30(residential), which is what 3.25m of "rental" "fees"?
a corporation overrun by the neverending quest for greater profit
This is (and should be) the goal of all corporations. There are many strategies for achieving this goal. A corporation can bribe legislators for laws giving them special benefits and extra restrictions on their competitors, it can try to achieve a monopoly and exploit it, it can lower the cost of operation at the expense of quality, hope no one notices. It is our job as consumers to choose the companies we want to survive. It is in our interest as consumers to vote with our wallets for companies whose strategy for profit is to focus all their attention on creating better products than their competitors. It is our job as members of society to vote in elections for representatives who will not be bribed by lobbyists, and to ensure that corrupt politicians lose their jobs (i.e. regardless of their party).
I had been pushing my wife to give me the goahead to switch to Verizon because I had become so annoyed with Comcast customer service. We were moving apartments last month, so it was a perfect time to switch. I decided to give Comcast a chance to give us a reason to stay. Dialing in from my cell phone, which must have been associated with an old account of mine, the Robot told me there as an outstanding charge. When I got the representative on the phone, I told them I wanted to discuss services, but could she please explain the charge to me first, and whether this was a true outstanding balance etc. This turned into an argument with her interrupting me over the semantics of "fee" and "charge" with me having to switch to statements like "the amount of money that is the subject of this conversation.." That call validated and finalized my decision to quit and just go with Verizon. I'm much happier now. I deal with a local account manager who manages services for my whole building, no main line, 800 numbers.
I'm seeing things like "shamecast" and forums dedicated to exposing how bad they are. This one is hilarious as well - https://www.facebook.com/comcast.complaintdepartment
the right way. THEY JUST ASKED ME TO PRINT THE EMAIL THEY SENT ME WITH THE AGREEMENT AND FAX IT TO THEM. Agreed to go $15 more for 50 more channels and 2x bandwidth. They upped the monthly by $30 and somehow doubled the first month. Bandwidth has not budged. They don't seem to understand that a written agreement needs to be honored.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
from the article:
Rep: I’m just trying to figure out here what it is about Comcast service that you’re not liking.
Block: This phone call is actually a really amazing representative example of why I don’t want to stay with Comcast. Can you please cancel our service?
Rep: Okay, but I’m trying to help you.
Block: The way you can help me is by disconnecting my service.
Rep: But how is that helping you? How is that helping you? Explain to me how that is helping you.
Block: Because that’s what I want.
Rep: Okay, so why is that what you want?
This is not human, it is robot.
They only way to combat Comcast would be the top ten institutional investors (public employee retirement accounts, etc.) threaten to drop Comcast from their portfolios due to their dickish behavior. This and only this (given that the FCC is already captured) would get the attention of the greed pigs at the top.
A typical anti-Capitalism drivel. The listed practices reduce profit and cause the company to either collapse or be taken over — unless it has powerful friends in government.
Yep, that's what leads to losing money. Few can survive it without being a monopoly.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I can tell you the same thing happens at TWC. It was a service culture then some VP came in and decided sales was the focus. Then they started to move back to service (only for a few months). Now they are back onto customer service to sell more. "I'm sorry your cable hasn't worked for 2 days and we can't get anyone out for another 2. Would you like to add phone to your account?"
I recently dumped Comcast. They had raised my rates by 15% right after replacing my HD DVR with a model that held four times less than the one they took away. I have to pay extra for the HD DVR service BTW. I called in to complain about the rate hike and their suggestion was that they could cut my bill by $10 a month if I could live with half the Internet speed. They didn't seem to interested then in keeping me around. So I signed up with CenturyLink, I am actually getting a faster connection than I had. The bundled satellite TV provided an HD DVR (at no extra cost) with the ability to record and watch twice as many shows simultaneously and five times the storage capacity and the option to attach my own USB external hard drive to double it again. There's the occasional satellite signal dropout but not really too bad at all. The local Telco DSL is serving me well. The bottom line is more service and features for HALF THE COST! Before the big brouhaha about the AOL guy trying to cancel service, I read where Comcast was bragging to the shareholders in their annual report about how much they had cut back on home service calls and how much they had increased the average bill. Comcast is all about less service for ever increasing fees. My advice to all of you: Just dump Comcast.
Is the line shorter in other towns?
No. Last time I visited Comcast to get some gear there were about 30 people in line and I waited about an hour, not counting driving time to get to the one service center which is about 25 miles from my house. They announced loudly that if we were just dropping off gear that we could put it in their drop off big (a cardboard box) which nobody believed. Then there was no way to prove that you had dropped it off.
Fortunately my dealings with Comcast have been minimal and the service has been largely reliable for my needs. TV is WAY overpriced for what you get but the internet service isn't too bad as long as you don't need to deal with support too much.
Every cable company office I've ever been in - every single one - all the employees are behind bullet proof glass that would make a bank teller envious.
My experience also. Would mod up if I had mod points. Everywhere I've lived, returning a cable box was like visiting a prison. Desolate white-washed cinderblock waiting rooms with strange-smelling air in a run-down part of town. The security glass makes you think you're looking out from a decompression chamber. The steel drawer you put your equipment in can take your arm clean off.
What could have happened in these places to inspire this much security? I wanna know!
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
I needed to find out when a wireless contract ends. Of course they don't seem to show this anywhere on the customer service web portal or on the bill. So, I tried their live chat system. The chat basically went something like this:
Me: I'd like to know when this contract ends.
Rogers: Why would you like to know that?
Me: I'm not interested in going through a dog and pony retentions script rigamarole to qualify why I want to know the answer to the question. When you answer my question, I'll answer yours.
Rogers: I'm sorry, I can't tell you without you giving me a reason why you want to know.
Me (annoyed, so I typed the first thing that entered my head): I'm moving to Albania.
Rogers: I can't give you your contract expiration date. You need to call xxx or go into a store.
Why do these companies hate their customers so much? I had to qualify why I wanted to know in order to even get an answer that she wasn't allowed to answer me? WTF?
www.clarke.ca
This applies to Verizon as well. The FIOS employees have similar experiences.
One time, I called Comcast to report that we had a service outage, and the service representative logged the report and then tried to sell me additional services.
Dial: 1-800-Go2-Hell and you'll a direct line to Comcast's tech support - 'cause that's what they are living in - the poor bastards.
*** Don't be dull.***
This was the same at Dish Network when I worked there. I was in tech support and was told I must attempt to upsell every call, even those without working service. Somehow "So that's $75 we'll be charging you to get a tech out to you in 2 weeks to get back up and running. By the way, are you interested in doubling your monthly bill with HBO?" Never went well. But not trying would get you fired.
This sounds to me like the trend in much of business and at root cause is the digital revolution itself. It enabled investors to micromanage the fortunes of companies who routinely cut customer service to please the markets. They also pressure the companies to show very short-term return on investment and completely forget the service they claim to provide.
There needs to be something like a purge of business and investment in the world which restores confidence in the products and services a company provides to its paying customers, not just its financial condition. I think this state of affairs is the fault of the world banking and finance system and the poor ethical examples set in markets and management and taught in business schools around the world. I would like to see the MBA and economics degrees depreciated against degrees in history and politics supported by training in ethics. A collapse of the current economic order and the resulting conflagration could have that effect at the cost of millions of lives, we have been down that road before, and to go down that road seems to be ingrained in the human condition that relies on short-term thinking and elitism. Classical education was supposed to address the human failings, but it was only for elites. Now, pragmatism has tainted the quality of people's training so that basic human decency is not taught. The behavior of Comcast agents is a moral failure in a place where leaders do not set an example and where people mistake ethics for moral authoritarians. That is why members of the clergy are often more prone to moral lapses than even business people, who already have loose principles.
All my favs are "hardcoded" in my hosts file (where I spend 95++% of my time online in 24 sites) & locally resolved @ the speed of RAM, cached into the local diskcaching kernelmode subsystem (since I use a LARGE hosts file with mostly blocked known malicious sites/servers or adbanners, to the current tune of 2,980,188++ total entries) - & since that's also the 1st default host-domain resolver queried per:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Tcpip\ServiceProvider]
"HostsPriority"=dword:00000005
"DnsPriority"=dword:00000006
"LocalPriority"=dword:00000007
"NetbtPriority"=dword:00000008
"Name"="TCP/IP"
With my custom HOSTS file loaded from a "True SSD" (4gb Gigabyte IRAM DDR-2 RAM on SATA II bus circuit) for FASTER seek/access + load time speeds.
Done via the "DataBase" parameter in the IP Stack settings here-> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Tcpip\Parameters
( & I am ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE who do that in fact (acts almost like a *NIX 'shadow password' decoy & I load mine from a location on an SSD - less latency on file seek/access, open/read-write/close I-O sequence is why)).
APK
P.S.=> I've also found, via my time here on /. mostly & actually, that the 95%++ of the time I spend on my fav. technical news sites is actually higher (based on my router logs & analysis I've done on them as well), since this site is a "news aggregator", & tends to "distill" stories so well, I rarely even visit the source articles (they tend to be biased, & the posters here cut THOSE to shreds quite often, even logically which is a bonus, too)... apk
After thousands of people "contact" their government representatives, contact is in quotes because you will not actually gain any direct contact (not even direct email), and these companies contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to their election campaigns we will wait and see who they side with.
I will bet on the money winning every time.