As for Comcast, they have gotten much better at responding to customers because the conversation is in the open. Comcast cares…about what we say about them were others can read it. In there defense, it actually takes a long time to make changes at an organization of their size and even longer when you have no competition and actually having good service is expensive.

John, the best tagline I ever came up with was for an online printing company I worked for, one that had relatively low end equipment: “Good Enough For Most Of Your Stuff”

I don’t know why management wouldn’t let us go with that one.

The Comcast tech is safe. He was awesome and worked very hard to fix whatever the hell was wrong at my place. I am online and watching TV at the same time and nobody can stop me! [ chest bumps the Comcast tech ] YES!!!!

I’ve had good and bad experiences with them since the mid 90s in various markets. Sadly more bad than good. There was this one awesome salesman who worked very hard to drop our bill down after my dad died. He crunched and crunched and knocked over $60 off the monthly bill and we only lost a few channels.

SADLY the internet service here is spottiest on the weekends (high demand) but the digital TV service is pretty reliable although it goes down too but not as often. I’ve had 4 techs out in the past month and asked them each time for a new modem, they refused. The last one I demanded replace it since the previous ones saw nothing wrong although it was over 4 years old. Most weekends the modem switches to a router IP and I have no connectivity until it cycles through “disconnects” (complete with red X in the LAN icon) and restores the normal IP. This has taken minutes to over 24 hours in one instance. I’ve done all the normal things but they still can’t figure it out. It is happening in their equipment, not mine. I’ve replaced cables, moved the computer, and now replaced the modem. It’s still happening but less than before. Do I call them every time? I was. I didn’t call them the two times it happened this weekend because I’m tired of the condescending attitude of the techs. The account is well documented that this is an ongoing issue yet it’s not much better.

The techs who come to the house can be funny, and candid. Some have been fully clueless. Our local office seems to be poorly managed though. Most times the tech arrives without paperwork, having written down his stops on the NCR paper rather than it being printed out. So he doesn’t get all the information in his hand for the call and relies on me to remember it rather than having it in his hand from the phone call when I scheduled the visit. ALSO for the high rates we pay (albeit less thanks to that awesome salesman) none of the cables in our area have been replaced. They’re all still above ground, exposed to the weather and worn from years of exposure to extreme temps. One phone tech diagnosed the problem to temperature variance and squirrels. Yes, he said squirrels. They tend to like the wiring for a light snack.

The awesome salesman made me laugh when he admitted that they’re only in it to bring up their bottom line, not to help the customer. But he was a rebel and worked hard to help us get into an amount we could afford rather than try to sell us things we wouldn’t use. I appreciated the honesty and the extra mile.

Yes they’re doing better in some things. Being honest with the customer MUST come first. Don’t condescend. Most of us with ongoing problems don’t need your tech script. In fact we know it by heart and could probably write a better one for you. I must hand it to them lately though, they’re not as wooden, the people who do the phone response speak clear English (unlike Alltel service) and they are more ‘human’ than before. I find that is usually after I’ve gone through the first line of support into the second line of help though. First line are all scripted and somewhat wooden with few exceptions. And many of them disconnect the calls when transferring to 2nd line. It’d be funny if it wasn’t usually when I was frustrated already after waiting 10-15 minutes for the call to be answered.

If we had another option we’d switch. They may be improving but it’s to little too late in my book. Their excuses ran out long ago. The rates we pay are WAY too high for them having a monopoly in most parts of the country.

Sorry for the length but I had more to say as I went on. Thanks for an awesome article and Frank, good to know you’re listening. Accounting listens too each time I ask for a credit. One woman even gave us two free OnDemand movies which we haven’t used yet. Yes, you’re improving. Is it enough? After over 20 years of iffy service I don’t know.

Turning around issues with a giant like Comcast is like turning around an oil tanker. Having a bunch of people screaming about the sailboats you’re running over and saving as many as you can is so much better than just rolling over them blindly. And hopefully will give

I agree that Comcast has to start somewhere. The fact that they responded immediately to this post suggests that they are taking proactive steps to work with their customers and respond to issues discussed on the web.

Although I know that many people have been dissatisfied with Comcast I have to say that I have used their services for over ten years in the metro Detroit area and have always had great service and solid customer support. Maybe I am an isolated case, but I really have had no complaint with them.

@ChrisHyacinthe

That said, I wouldn’t play down the value of what they’re doing with Twitter. Turning around issues with a giant like Comcast is like turning around an oil tanker. Having a bunch of people screaming about the sailboats you’re running over and saving as many as you can is so much better than just rolling over them blindly. And hopefully will give them something they can build better future results on.

However, I know Frank personally and I can vouch that he and his team are making a concerted effort to resolve concerns that people share on social media and make internal changes the best they can. What I’m saying is that Frank is not to fault. It’s the larger / stiffer customer service management team at Comcast who is largely to blame for their customer service inequalities.

And that is where the pain is — the inequality in customer service between superior “social media response” vs. phone-based service. This problem speaks to the ignorance and possible the internal problems that Frank and his team have at actually changing the status-quo within the walls of Comcast.

The feedback Twitter provides is unfiltered, raw, and authentic. If someone doesn’t like something, SOMEONE is going to hear about it. I can draw many correlations back to my time at a certain large ISP and how antiquated that their customer support offering was and how it wasn’t in the customers’ best interests.

The bandaids go only so far, and must be addressed internally at a customer service management level. Frank can’t be blamed for that, he’s fighting for it.

~Joe