Comcast - who runs their customer service dept and why is he still employed?

The BBQ Pit
1

Do they not get it or is a matter of they just don’t care? We contacted customer service in mid-December with a request to disconnect our service and physically remove the wire from our house. The house is going to be elevated (Superstorm Sandy) and the builder wants a letter from Comcast confirming that this has been done. I’m not sure if its his requirement or the city’s. The rep was told in no uncertain terms that this was more than turning the service off we needed the wires physically removed and a letter confirming the job had been completed. He gave assurances that he understood and ticket had been put in. About two weeks later the service is off but the wires are still up. Call customer service and go through the idiotic menu system in an attempt to remedy the situation. The thing is that, once we were disconnected, our phone number (which is used as an account identifier) has been removed from the system. After MUCH aggravation we get through to a live person who must be interrupted because they are reading from a script.

Her: What is your phone number again?
Me: 123-456-8989 but its no longer in your system

(pause)

Her: Oh, you’re not in the system with that number.
Me: I know. We have been turned off and are no longer customers. We need the wire removed from our house and a confirmation letter.

Her: But you already have been disconnected. Is there anything else I can help you with today?
Me: Are there any notes associated with our original request?

Her: Yes and the job has been completed.
Me: No. It hasn’t. The wires are still there. Can I speak to a supervisor?

Her: Please hold.

I’m on hold for nearly thirty minutes.

Supervisor: How can I help you?
Me: I repeat the whole story.

Super: Oh. I see the problem. The first guy entered the job as a “disconnect” but it should have been “demolition”.
Me: I told him five ways to Sunday the wires had to come down.

Super: I’m sorry. I’ll put in a new ticket for a demolition order.
Me: How long until someone comes out?

Super: I don’t know. Maybe seven to ten days.
Me: We need this done ASAP. We have crew scheduled to start work but they won’t without the wire coming down and a confirmation letter.

Super: As soon as it is done I will e-mail you the letter.
Me: Great.

Ten days go by and nothing happens. Deal with the automated system yet again and the fact that our phone number is no longer associated with our former account. Another rep that is of no help at all. Request a supervisor. On hold for nearly an hour! Re-explain the whole story and am told the original ticket was closed out.

Me: I know it was closed out. It was wrong. The wire has to come down.
Super: O.K. I’ll mark this as urgent and get back to you with a tentative date.

He calls back some hours later but I can’t answer the phone and it goes into voice mail.

Super: Hi, this is Comcast the order is in but I need you to call back.

No call back number. Yet another trip through the automated system. This time I ask to speak with a supervisor right away. On hold for another 30 minutes. The supervisor gets on and I explain the whole thing again. She says the most recent ticket (the urgent one) was closed and has no idea why. (The wire is still up because I checked.) As we are trying to remedy the situation I get disconnected. Arrrgh!

So last night I went over, climbed the ladder and cut the damn wire myself. I’m sure I can phony up a confirmation letter with a little effort if it becomes necessary. There have to be thousands of customers raising their houses after Sandy and Katrina. How can this not be a known issue and addressed internally with customer service? We will not be returning to Comcast under any circumstances. There is a reason why their customer service has been rated the worst in the country for two consecutive years. Apparently, no one at the top of that company gives a damn. How the fuck can you run a business like that?

2

Comcast is a monopoly in most markets. They don’t care. They don’t have to.

3

Evil Captor is correct, especially in your case.

So they give lousy service to someone who is no longer a customer. What are you going to do - go somewhere else?

Regards,
Shodan

4

They don’t care even when you are a customer. Given how much everyone hates them, I can only assume this is deliberate corporate policy. We do have a choice where I live, and they still suck.
Many years ago when we still had analog cable (two wires coming in for it) a Comcast guy told my wife that she should expect them both to have good quality. Which is when we trashed them and went to satellite.

If I were the OP I’d have cut the cable long before he did. And figured out how to put a 500 volts spike into the wire to fry their hardware.

5

Same with most other cable companies in most other parts of the United States, for that matter.

6

Ernestine the Telephone Operator: “We’re the phone company. We don’t care; we don’t have to.”

Substitute “cable” for “phone”, and you’ve pretty much got it.

7

I could have sworn Miller closed this before any responses were posted. Am I hallucinating?

ETA: Never mind, saw the duplicate thread. I won’t say what I thought Miller meant by “dupe.”

8

If active shooter situations happened exclusively in Comcast offices I’d petition the government to hand out AR15s on the street corner.

I think it might be part of the strategy. You can’t cancel service online for no real technical reason. You have to call them. However, if it’s physically painful to deal with one of those fuckheads, you’ll resist and delay.

9

I decided to add Internet with Comcast (i.e, buy something from them that makes them money). It took five phone calls and 2 promised call backs that never happened to make it happen. And I still have to call them again because they charged me a set up fee when I used the self install kit.

10

Don’t speak with first tier support. You will not get anywhere.

File a complaint with the utility board or whoever handles this in your state. Comcast will get in touch with you and get you what you need within days.

11

At the local Comcast customer service office (over in Ypsilanti), the clerks work behind bulletproof glass. In the event that a clerk and customer need to exchange hardware (DVR, cable box, etc.) there is a pass-thru cabinet with doors on each side that lock each other out: when the clerk has the door on his side open, the customer can’t open his door, and when the customer has his door opened, the clerk’s door can’t be opened. The few times I’ve had to go there, there’s been a line of customers out the door and down the sidewalk. Thankfully I haven’t had to go there in years, but considering the horror stories I’ve heard from current/former customers, I’m not surprised they chose to install protection that would make a bank teller jealous.

12

The wife took up the fight yesterday and somehow ended up being handed off to the billing department. The person she spoke there said, “I can’t help you. Since you closed your account, you are not an account holder. If you wish me to help you you’ll have to open a new account.” The funny thing is, had all this gone smoothly we would have opened a new account. We were told by someone along the way that you can’t just suspend service for a few months. You have to continue to rent the boxes and pay for some level of service even though there will be none since THE WIRES NEED TO BE PHYSICALLY REMOVED FROM THE HOUSE! I have no way of knowing if that’s actually true or not. Today an e-mail showed up confirming the actual removal of the wires.

There are too many other non-Comcast options out there between dishes and Firesticks etc. to re-sign with them. Adios Comcast. Its been (un)real.

13

Just a warning MikeF… DirecWay/TV works just fine for TV, but the internet absolutely sucks. I would go to cable in a flash if I could.

14

I hesitate to say this for fear of jinxing it, but my wife and I recently moved to a new house where the only Internet option is Charter Spectrum, so after much consideration, soul-searching and careful weighing of the pros and cons, we decided to go with them.

And so far, the experience has been… almost painless(!!?) I placed the order online, the installer came the next day (right on time, after calling ahead as promised), hooked it up, left and gave us a follow-up call that night. We consistently get over 60Mbps downstream (compared with the 18Mbps we had with AT&T U-Verse), and in three months have only experienced a temporary outage on one day. The bills have been for the correct amount.

I sense your skepticism. Trust me, nobody is more shocked than I am. This is not what I’ve been trained to expect from many years of dealing with Internet, phone and satellite providers, where there is always, *always *at least one fuckup somewhere along the line, the only questions being how many, how major, and how quickly and satisfactorily they get fixed.

Granted, they do send occasional nag letters trying to get us to add a TV package, and I haven’t gone through the service disconnect process with them, but so far it’s like a beautiful dream of competence that I don’t want to wake up from.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must return home, where I fully expect to find my Internet service out, my house in flames and my credit card laden with multi-thousand-dollar charges. And of course, they’ll have no record of me in their system.

15

Cable companies seem OK at doing strictly routine operations. They will only occasionally mess those up. But the minute they have to do anything slightly out of the ordinary, they fall on their faces.

Now, the difficulty people have in canceling service is another matter. That’s willful resistance, not incompetence.

16

Yeah, i’m in a similar position. Even with monopolies, there are probably millions of customers all over the country who are pretty happy with their providers. The problem is that, if shit does go bad, you’ve got no leverage.

I live in an urban neighborhood in San Diego, America’s 8th most populous city. It’s a comfortable neighborhood, with plenty of professional families, and with an average household income above the California median. It’s just a few miles from downtown, 15 minutes from the airport, is served by a decent bus system, and has multiple restaurants and bars within a short walk.

And yet, in this thriving neighborhood in a large, modern city, in the wealthiest country in the world, i have exactly one provider of proper broadband internet to choose from. One. For me, it’s Cox or nothing.

Time Warner Cable does operate in San Diego, but the city, in its wisdom, allowed the two companies to split the city geographically. If you’re south of the San Diego River, you have Cox; if you’re north of the river, you have TWC. No price comparisons or competition allowed.

In some areas of the city, i could check AT&T to price compare their UVerse system with Cox, but where i am the best internet connection i can get from AT&T is 1.5 Mbps DSL. These days, that might as well be dial-up. With Cox, i’m on their third-tier system and still get 50 Mbps (officially at least; when i test it’s usually about 30-36, which is plenty for us).

Luckily for me, Cox has been great in terms of speed and reliability, but their prices keep creeping up and up, and there’s absolutely nothing i can do about it, because there is literally no-one else i can go to. I can’t threaten to leave Cox in order to get a break on my bill, because they know that i have nowhere else to go. And if their service suddenly became unreliable, i’d be equally fucked.

17

If they didn’t care while you were a customer, they seriously don’t care now that you’ve cancelled.

18

At least you have one option!

Both Comcast and Verizon FiOS are available on my street. But I can’t have either of them, because my house is older and farther back from the street than the others. I have to use a cellular connection. I’ve thought about satellite, but I’m not convinced it’s worthwhile.

19

So, anyway, my son, the Err Apparent, worried that he couldn’t get ahold of me if I fucked up my whizbang gimcrack phone. So he wanted me to get the land line option. They send you a fancy new modem with quick and easy instructions. Set up was quick and easy, give 'em that. But nothing worked.

Six hours, I shit you not. Six hours of my name, address, and last 4 digits of my SS number. Turn it off, wait ten minutes. I’ll send a signal. I’m sorry to hear your call was dropped, what is your name, address…

By sheer accident I got connected to Julie, may the Goddess bless her and hold to Her bounteous bosom all the days of her life, amen. The fancy new modem has a wi-fi capability! Yay! Wait, WTF? Did I ask for some way to fill my living room with hipsters? No, its just part of the machinery, doesn’t do anything much BUT…you have to establish a wi-fi account. WHAT THE FUCK! Calm down, sir, all you have to do is feed in a bogus addy and a bogus password once. Since you don’t actually have wi-fi, it will never check because you won’t ask it to.

So we did. Can’t even remember what it was, by then my brains had turned to weeping cheese. But that was it. Now, fancy new modem works just like my other one did. Plus, I have a landline. Joy.

And may the thousand venereal diseases of the camel cluster in their tenderest parts and fester therein…

20

These threads are always funny to me. I’m not at all denying anybody has had bad experiences with them but in 8 years as a Comcast customer I’ve never had a negative experience (other than them being too expensive).

They’ve solved all technical issues quickly and efficiently, they showed up for installations and removals at the agreed on time and when the last install required a lot of rewiring they did that quickly and well.

Kind of like how I’ve really only had good experience with United and all my terrible flying experiences have involved Southwest.

The Customer Service Gods just look upon me differently than everybody else apparently.