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Comcast Employees Change Customer Names To 'Dummy' and Other Insults
An anonymous reader writes: According to customer bills and screenshots submitted to and reported by blogger Chris Elliot at BoardingArea, Comcast employees have repeatedly changed the names of customers to insults like "dummy," "w***e," "a*****e," and "b***h." Elliott notes although reasons and consequences for this behavior are unknown, "one thing is clear: At least one person, and maybe more than one person, really doesn't like Comcast's customers. Enough to put it in writing. Repeatedly." Comcast has apologized and is looking at ways to prevent it from happening in the future.
I wonder if anyone has looked into which region this might be happening in.
Comcast has undergone some significant growing pains since, while in theory they are one big company, in reality they have a maze of poorly connected systems left over from the hundreds of smaller ISPs and cable providers they bought up over the last decade or two. Some of these systems have better controls (and auditing) on them than others, and each absorbed company has its own corporate culture and oversight.
dummy
whore
asshole
bitch
Here is some more info: The Comcast-Time Warner Cable Merger May Not Happen
seriously, this is a news story, use the fucking words they fucking wrote you fucking fucks. worse yet, they were used in quotes meaning it's literally a misquote.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Comcast has apologized and is looking at ways to prevent it from happening in the future.
How about if Comcast offers better customer service, so their customers don't get so angry? Given how bad their customer service is today, "better" is really low-hanging fruit.
I had my own run-in with Comcast support recently.
We're a customer of theirs. And something is screwed up in their phone tree such that I *always* get disconnected when calling any of their #s, right before getting transferred to a live human. Even if a rep was transferring me, as soon as my call was associated to my account, my call would get dropped when being transferred. Our business depends on internet, so this is more than just an annoyance.
I constantly pleaded for help via Twitter and email for ~2mo before I convinced someone to contact me. The support person I talked to was probably the worst support I've ever had. She acknowledged that it was a "known issue", but that there was no timeline for a solution and no way to provide me with status updates.
More surprisingly, she informed me me that some online chat option was sufficient for getting Concast assistance when I needed it. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to use online chat if our business internet connection goes down. I told her that wasn't an adequate solution. She told me that it was. I told her I wanted to speak to her manager. She refused ("I can't put anyone else on the call"). All the while, I heard her "gaming" the support notes system ("Okay, let me just record this.. I informed the customer of the chat option, and the customer opted not to use it").
Think about this. We're a somewhat large customer, and their team isn't the least concerned that I have no method to contact them at all.
We'd switch to another provider if one was available. And I'd at least dismiss it as a fluke if it wasn't so fitting with all the other stories out there.
There's a real problem at Comcast.
At least one of the customers that got called asshole did nothing more than insist on cancelling a premium option on their cable service. Her 'offense' was actually wanting the option cancelled.
As for the rest, for better or worse, these people are the only people reachable and so their job is to listen to the complaints. I do try to avoid screaming, but when I tell you there is no signal on the line at all anywhere on my street, I do not want to hear "reboot your computer" or I can't ping your modem, please be home between Monday and Thursday of next week so I can send someone who doesn't have any equipment to fix the actual problem (yes, paraphrased). Of course you can't ping my modem, your network is down. Apparently they haven't been provided any training at all and can't even look up other customers in my neighborhood so they can try pinging their modems.
Yes, it's the management's fault that they don't even have that very basic knowledge and necessary tools, but since they can't or won't put a manager on the phone (probably a matter of policy), all I can do is ask them to take dictation into a note on the account.
"Human Shield" has never been a pleasant job title, but it's the one that fits their role in the company more often than not.