Digital Culture Studies

I have Comcast, and I am unimpressed. My service goes out quite a bit (although to be fair, the last 4 - 5 months it has been pretty good. Sadly, the 60+ months before that were not), and when I call, I always get the worst customer service, in part because, before I call, I reboot my computer, router, and modem, and the first thing they want me to do is those three things, and if I say I have already done them, they are flustered, because that is all they know to ask me. After that, you go to a more advanced tech. More than once, that advanced tech has heard a female voice on the line, and asked me to put my husband on the phone, ‘to expedite the process’.

The account is in my name. And my ovaries, thus far, have not gotten in the way of renewing my IP addresses and rebooting my router. Thus far. Perhaps there is something they know and aren’t telling me.

When my service is out, I always call the billing office now, and get credit for the time. If it happened a few times a year, I wouldn’t bother, but at a few times a week, it adds up. Recently, when I called about an outage, the tech support rep gave me a little attitude about how I don’t pay for the service anyway, since there was so much credit on my account, and I was actually speechless that he would suggest I did not deserve to have my problem fixed in a timely manner precisely because there was evidence on my account that my service is down all the time.

What is so funny about this to me is that Comcast pays a man to monitor blogs like this for complaints. Frank Eliason is a ‘digital care manager’, and I am guessing this in response to the large number of unhappy customers who blog about their Comcast woes. What is so frustrating though, is why Comcast lets it get like this in the first place, although I know the reason why. Call centers are the devil’s own invention. Allegedly there for ‘customer service’, those CSRs taking the calls have minimal training, and maximum standards, and they work in pressure cooker environments, because their jobs depend on managing call volumes and completing customer calls under a certain number of seconds, and in all that time-management, notions of service disappear. Is it strange to anyone else that Comcast pays a man to clean up the mess made by Comcast customer service reps? Perhaps rethinking the CSR roles, and rewarding them for fixing customer problems the first time they call, instead of by lowest number of seconds of call time might be a first step.

Mr. Eliason, if you stumble upon this, please ask your customer service reps to stop telling me that ’some women have trouble with this’ when they ask me to do something to fix the problem (something very technical and scary, like…rebooting my computer), and to stop asking me to put my husband on the line to fix the problem (when the problem is, the cable line coming into my building is lying under a felled tree branch in the alley out back and that is why I called), and when they book a tech to come out to swap out my modem it would be great if they could stop telling me it would be easier if my husband was home, in case the computer needs to be on. Oh, and finally, the big one - when I call Comcast and a tech is dispatched, tell me in advance that he does not work for Comcast. Tell me that you are actually booking this call through an anonymous third-party company, and that the man coming to my door is not a Comcast employee, and that Comcast is therefore not liable for his actions at my home or the work he does. And it is a man, because even though the very helpful Comcast employee who booked my tech call told me that she would schedule a female tech (at my request), a man showed up, because that anonymous third-party company you use in my city does not, in fact, employee any female techs.

That would be a nice start.

Tags: "customer service", cable, comcast, ISP   Posted Ranting |