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.

Comments

Hmmm, what about management???

[messymerry]

I would like to suggest that the lower level employees are merely aping the culture of management. We have a global epidemic of bad corporate manners and of course, occasionally evidence of these bad manners will leak out. All of this can be chronicled back to when they bifurcated the client base into "customers" and "consumers". Customers get helped, consumers get slapped around, called names, and abused. Just sayin'''

As someone who used to do support for Comcast

[Anonymous Coward]

This would get you fired once caught. At least at the Beaverton, OR call center I worked at.

Now why would a bottom tier employee do something like this? Probably because management treats you like crap, corporate wants numbers and management is there to make sure you are on the phone with as little time between calls as possible (you are timed on everything...). They want you to take as many calls as you can by making them quick. They want you to suck up to customers too. On the other hand, they don't want you to give customers a god damn dime.

The customers that have this stuff written about them? Odds are that they're a problem customer that calls frequently. You get those. People who demand moon from you. Sometimes they believe that you have the power to set company policy when in fact we have the least power in the entire organization (our bathroom break times/frequency were monitored). People that believe you have a personal stake in making their connection suck and actually fixing it is the last thing you want to do. It's quite the opposite, we want to fix the problem with a smile on both ends and have a pleasant conversation then move on to the next nice person. Being screamed at actually makes our job loathsome. People who refuse to help you in any way when trying to troubleshoot an issue. People who call you a liar when it's obviously a problem on their side. People who think you're in India and berate you for being a stupid foreigner and treat you with zero respect. Doctors and lawyers are the worst in that arena, even if they know you're American they feel that they know more than you do about your job and you're some shiftless loser lackey barely able to answer a phone. The doctors like this even demand you call them "Dr. SoAndSo" because that is their title. The power trippers like to scream at you and tell you that you're losing them hundreds of dollars per hour, but they refuse to upgrade to $99/mo. business class service where we could have sent a technician out 24/7. Nope, saving hudreds of dollars per hour isn't worth tens of dollars per month more on a billing statement.

Re:w***e ?

[jd2112]

Sometimes the world gets more tolerant, sometimes less tolerant. The word is 'whore' and not even the Parent's Television Council thinks it needs to be censored.

It's the most vile insult imaginable. They are comparing their customers to the congressmen that Comcast is bribing, er, lobbying.