July 6th, 2007
Poll: OK, here are the four things wrong with Comcast
When I read fellow blogger Alan Graham’s What’s Wrong With Comcast? post, I immediately began experiencing multiple deja vu flashbacks.
First, to summarize. Back in January, Alan decided to cut back on his Comcast cable tv but retain some of his other Comcast services.
His monthly Comcast bill should have been less, but he’s fought for nearly six months to obtain relevant invoice adjustments. Yet there’s a trail of verbal promises from customer service representatives, followed by multiple incidences of “we don’t have a record of that conversation” from the next rep he talked to.
Reminds me of the fights I’ve had with “Comcash.” Back in Frbruary, 2005 it took multiple conversations to combine my old Comcast account with the woman I moved in with. Challenge was to keep my old Comcast email while giving up my own Comcast cable and high-speed Internet access.
Probably at least a dozen calls, and for each one, no record of previous conversation. That after each of the reps said they would.
Seasons change.
I’ve been back on my own a year next month. When I got my place I reactivated all my other Comcast services. Then, last month, previously referenced woman emails me and says that in talking to Comcast customer “service” to prepare for her impending own move, she was told that she was still listed as a secondary user on my account.
We thought we had settled that a year ago.
OK, so I see four problems here.
First, and most immediate, it would seem that the on-screen customer account review menus available to Comcast customer service reps aren’t too good at migrating and showing previous contact info in an easily retrievable manner.
Second, it could be that the Comcast culture is largely about installing procedural roadblocks toward initiating account adjustments and provisioning of the type that both I and my colleague Alan Graham describe. It’s just too complicated, with too many people needing to give their OK.
Third, these situations sound so much like a corporate culture with separate silos of policiesm people and procedures for each of these services. When you are looking at service level and financial adjustments across different services such as broadband, email, cable tv, etc., success may mean cross-silo human and computerized interactions that must be re-invented every time they need to be implemented.
Fourth, I am not so sure that some of the customer “services” Comcast provides aren’t outsourced. I remember that some of our contacts with Comcast that I have described were with an office in a Canadian province where there is no Comcast service base. Although these people answered the phone with a “Comcast” greeting, the nature of where they were based gave me the unqualified impression they were working for one of those damn outsourcers who companies hire to be their dedicated customer service provider.
Order Internet phone from these folks?
Yea, right.
Loading ...Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
