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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 From the article: 'These employees told us the same stories over and over again: customer service has been replaced by an obsession with sales, technicians are understaffed and tech support is poorly trained, and the massive company is hobbled by internal fragmentation.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.'
I wonder when customer service will start being more proactive by calling customers.
"Hello, this is Comcast. How may we upsell you?"
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
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.
They are calling people on cable-modem only and offering a cable box for 5 dollars more a month.
They'll fall over themselves for it. Current tax laws reward reckless short-term profiteering, that's why you see shit like Hostess and RMoney where executives flat out vampire a company into bankruptcy and then take a golden parachute to the next one. Just a few decades ago tax rates were such that it was much better to develop a stable long-term profit at a lower level and consistently reinvest the rest back into your employees and customers.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
...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
The US has always been fatally weak on control fraud and white-collar crime. Dumb people are impressed by rich people, and never ask how those people got rich, nor how many dead bodies they needed to step over to do it.
I understand that above suggestion to "saw their heads off" was likely made in jest, but there is grain of truth to it.
We live in an era where people in charge have very little accountability to the masses. "The Mob" no longer puts fear into politicians or business community. As such "maybe I shouldn't do this nefarious yet legal deed because it could end up with guillotine" check is no longer there.
See how effective that was?
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @08:49AM (#47564927)
by ajegwu (1142365) on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @08:54AM (#47564957)
You're right, trying for more than five minutes was too much to ask. Off with their heads.
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.
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.
Yes. It's easy to convince yourself that you did something, when in reality what you did was worse than doing nothing. You actually made yourself think that you tried to make a change, and as a result if nothing happens, you have a "well, at least I tried" excuse.
Which is why this is the reality:
http://www.princeton.edu/~mgil...
If you don't know what that is - that's the study of democratic impact of things like "desires of the masses" on actual legislative process. The study that concluded that US is de facto oligarchy, because when masses want something and capital wants something else, capital almost always gets what it wants.
And if you want to know why that is, all you need is to look in the mirror. "Just write your [legislative representative] (so he/she can ask for a bit more money in donations when he/she makes the opposite decision as to have a bit more to finance his/her re-election campaign)" is the solution that is worse than doing nothing.
At least doing nothing makes you feel guilty about it, and may eventually push you to act in ways that may actually bring about a change. What you are advocating is status quo. As a result, you're part of the problem.
And while "sawing people's heads off on youtube" is also a terrible solution, yours isn't that much better.
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.
[Cue Voice of Achmed]: "SILENCE! I bill you!"
The trick is to keep the poeple in charge afraid of what the mob might do while not actually having the mob take over and run things. It's a tough balance to strike.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
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 think the legislature is inept and ineffective. You are wrong. They are incredibly effective at getting laws passed to keep themselves in power.
A weak, mostly useless Federal government is a major step up.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?