America's Most-Hated ISP Is Now Hated By Fewer People (oregonlive.com)

"Comcast's customer service may actually be improving," writes an Oregon newspaper. An anonymous reader quotes their report: In the second year of Comcast's broad customer service overhaul, complaints to Oregon cable regulators are down 25%. They've also declined 40% since 2014. Complaints are falling nationally, too, according to the highly regarded American Customer Satisfaction Index. Its most recent report showed a surge in Comcast subscriber satisfaction... Two years ago, Comcast made Oregon the test bed for its customer service push, responding both to disparaging headlines and the prospect of growing competition from other telecom companies and from streaming video services.

The company is adding Apple-style retail stores around the metro area and introduced innovations to help consumers understand what they're paying for and when technicians will arrive for service calls. It's rolling out new tools nationally to help them improve their home Wi-Fi, and diagnosing problems before customers call to complain... For example, if several subscribers in the same neighborhood use the company's tool for testing internet speeds, that triggers an alert at Comcast to look for a problem in the local network. The company redesigned its bills to make it clearer what customers subscribe to, and what it costs, in hopes of reducing confusion and calls. And Comcast has a robust social media presence, fielding complaints on Twitter.
The article points out that Comcast's satisfaction scores are still below-average for cable TV providers, "and well below the median among internet service providers. And that's a low bar -- the telecom sector is among the most complained about under ACSI's rankings." Their figures show that the only ISPs in America with a lower score for customer satisfaction are Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable, and MediaCom.

Comments

This is not surprising

[rsilvergun]

they're spending money on customer service right now so they can get approval to buy up their competitors. Normally Americans don't think once let alone twice on letting companies merge until there's no alternatives, but Comcast took it too far and pissed off too many people. Even they couldn't buy off enough politicians to pull that one off.

Just wait until they're done with their merger and they'll go right back to making everybody hate them and Europe and Canada can go back to gazing on us Americans and wondering why the hell we let things be so awful. Just as God and Nature intended.

An Insider's View

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Comcast employee I can say that I've definitely noticed a complete change in culture since the entire company adopted the NetPromoter system (https://www.netpromoter.com/know/). In every meeting, there is an undeniable effort to ensure the "customer" has a seat at the table. No agenda here on my part... I don't question the validity of the concerns anyone of you may have. Just giving you a bit of an insider's viewpoint. I can honestly say that an internal, company-wide strategy to improve the customer experience feels very substantive this time around, in contrast to previous efforts I've witnessed. Take from that what you will. I don't speak on behalf of the company. But, on a personal level, I think we offer a pretty competitive product and hope that we continue to do better by our customers. They've been a pretty great company to work for.

The important question:

[Gravis Zero]

Do the Comcast execs believe the result of this monetary investment is worth replicating?

A few ideas

[sjames]

First and foremost, when a customer says they're down, try to ping other modems in the same neighborhood. If those are down too, roll a line truck. Do not claim it must be a problem at their house.

Re-emphasize in training, if any light other than network activity is flashing on the modem, it is not a problem with their computer, don't try to sell them on paid Windows support, especially when they say they don't have Windows.

If the customer is using words you are unfamiliar with such as traceroute or ping, just elevate the call to someone who understands the problem.

Re:A few ideas

[CanadianMacFan]

If the customer is using words you are unfamiliar with such as traceroute or ping, just elevate the call to someone who understands the problem.

Or you'll eventually end up with someone like me who says, "Listen, just create the ticket and pass it back to the tech people. If they need any more information then have someone who knows what they are talking about call me." This wasn't Comcast but a service up in Canada for dealing with credit card payments that federal governments had to use. The first part was a transfer of XML files between the department and the provider which wasn't working. After 15 minutes of the call support person asking for a print screen of the problem I blurted out the above. I turned around to vent to the other people I worked with but it seems they were listening in on the conversation as they were staring at me with mouths open.

It worked though as the problem was quickly resolved. They didn't call back for any more details. Though when they called back to say it was fixed they called one of my co-workers.

I don't really expect the first line people to know enough about their system to be able to fix a problem like that but I do expect them to have a general enough idea of how their system works (transfers of data, etc) so that they don't spend 15 minutes asking for a print screen of an operation that doesn't involve any HTML. Specifically we weren't getting a reply from their server after transferring our XML file over. How do you do a print screen of that? An empty directory listing? :)

May I guess?

[Opportunist]

Complaints are down by 25% in areas where a competitor opened shop and claims they took a market share of about 30ish percent from Comcast...

Re:With all respect

[AK Marc]

Yes. For a company of that size, peering is on the order of $10 per Gbps per month or less (including amortized hardware cost for those links). With 10,000 customers aggregated per $10 per month, "peering" is probably about 1/10th of a penny per customer. Why yes, I have worked for a large ISP with millions of customers. And yes, I've seen the cost to "peer"

I put "peer" in quotes, because "transit" is what you meant. Peering, by definition, is free (Aside from hardware), as it's a mutually beneficial agreement. Paid peering should be referred to as "transit".

Hated by fewer people... of course

[ayesnymous]

That's what happens when you lose subscribers. Less people to hate you.