Got on the phone at 4:05, got to a person at about 4:10. Hung up with the person just now, at 4:18.
Comcast is the only good option for broadband in my new apartment. I’ve heard they’ve got awful customer service, but crossed my fingers I wouldn’t have to deal with it.
I set up my account five days ago, on the 14th. The last step of this was an internet chat session with a CSR. He was very nice, and gave me an installation date of the 22nd. I asked if there was anything earlier, and he said between 12 and 4 today (Sunday the 19th). I said I’d take it. He said, “okay, I’ve set the appointment.”
Fast forward to today. I’m relaxing in my apartment, watching football. 1pm passes. 2pm passes. 3pm passes. I begin to wonder if the guy’ll show up. 4pm passes. Mindful of Comcast’s legendary bad service, I don’t give them any extra time before I call in.
The CSR pulls up my account.
The rep said they’d “look into” the actions of the previous rep. And they’re waiving the $25 installation fee. But this does not bode well for my future with these people.
And a really poor job by the previous agent, who will hopefully get some feedback generated to their supervisor. Doesn’t help you any, but if that agent does that often enough, their job isn’t going to last long.
You may be in for just the beginning. The big broadband providers operate a little like a government sanctioned monopoly which they are in a way and they simply don’t care. Comcast isn’t the only one that does that although they are known to be among the worst. It was hell on earth to get Verizon to install Fios at my place. I was ready for problems as well but it tooks weeks. I would be placed on hold for 45 minutes while I got transferred to “someone who can help” and then the call would drop with no record of the previous one and I would have to start over. I finally just looked up their phone system bypass codes on the web to go straight to the people I needed (you can try the same) and still had problems. It is a good service and I need it so I had to do it but hang on, you may be in for a wild ride yourself. I have heard similar things from many people and the web is filled with those stories. I have no idea what their problem is. It seems like it would take more work to fuck things up that badly than it would be to just send someone to hook up a line.
Sounds like a typical Comcast fuckup. Actually, you’re “lucky” that you got your installation fee waived for the trouble. I dealt with Comcast a lot at my previous job, they would typically just completely deny everything in a similar scenario.
When we lived in Baltimore, we stuck with DSL and avoided cable internet for two reasons:
We wanted to pay as little as possible, and the fairly slow DSL was adequate for our needs.
The cable option was Comcast, and almost everyone i knew with Comcast internet had a horror story to tell.
Here in San Diego, our choice was essentially between AT&T DSL and Cox Cable. Time Warner Cable also operates in the city, but Cox and T-W have been allowed to split the city between them so they don’t actually compete. Cox has the region south of the river; T-W has the area north of the river.
Anyway, we’ve been with Cox for over 2 years now, and so far (knock wood) i don’t have a single bad thing to say about them. They sent out the modem quickly, activated the service on the day they promised, and in the two years since then i can’t remember having any downtime at all. It’s been smooth sailing all the way.
Not only that, but when we signed up, we decided on the second-tier 9 Mbps package rather than the top-tier 15 Mbps package. But, sometime since then, it appears that they upgraded our service, because when i’m downloading large files from fast servers, i can comfortably get over 20 Mbps during the first minute of “speedboost” downloading, and a steady 15 Mbps thereafter.
Of course, the real text of these companies is how they respond when something does go wrong. Luckily, i haven’t had to test them, and i hope that it all keeps working smoothly so i don’t have to.
Me! I was highly amused when I got off the phone with Comcast after cancelling their service, and the rep on the phone was desperately fumbling for reasons to convince me to stay.
Funny, the opposite happened to me. We had a cheap introductory rate that ran out, so I called them to cancel because we could switch to similar DSL for a much cheaper rate. I told the operator such, and she asked “is there anything we can do to keep you” and I said “keep my old rate” and they wouldn’t do it.
A week after they turned our service off they called and offered us the old rate. I laughed at the caller and explained how they could have just kept me as a customer a week earlier if the operator had been willing to bargain. He said they aren’t authorized to do that. Oh well, their loss really. I’m super happy with my “slow” DSL.
^I personally find that the highest DSL speeds (around 12Mbps around here) are usually too much. For most websites that actually need the faster speed, the bottleneck is on their side, not mine.
Jesus. I signed up for a “low introductory rate” when one of their people was canvassing the neighborhood offering it. Turns out that the guys who canvass neighborhoods, and the guys who answer customer service on the phone, HAVE NO LINE OF COMMUNICATION. Even though I’d been getting the service at the rate, they had no way of “knowing” I was getting it, therefore no way of cancelling the service (just, you know, of jacking up my rate after the introductory period).
Uhhhhh huhhhhh. Eventually I told them I was leaving the area and moving somewhere they didn’t service, so please discontinue ALL Comcast services to my house. I made do with DSL, till i really did move.
Absolutely – as I said in the last thread, they’re all about customer retention.
They have good reps – plenty of them. Trouble is, Comcast’s CS department is so fricking huge and has so much turnover that there’s no way for them to consistently have all quality reps – or even a very high percentage of them. So, yes, you’re going to call them up and come across reps who will tell you whatever bullshit it takes to get you off the phone. It sucks, but there’s little that can be done about it.
Any changes they make to hiring or training practices are going to lead to higher rates for you. If you want really good customer service, then they’re going to have to pay their CS reps as professionals, not call-center monkeys – and they’re not going to eat those costs. Their most cost-effective method is what they do right now – give par-to-subpar service, and wait until you make a stink before they do right by you.
Customer service costs them money. They want to keep it as cheap as possible. Since they don’t have to compete they can cut it to the bone and you can not do anything about it. When there are only a couple companies delivering the service, they will both fall cut the service as far back as they ca. They make more money . You have no where to go.
Yeah, here in Las Vegas, Cox and Verizon run competing cable and DSL services, and Cox has been awesome for me for over 11 years now. My one complaint is that they made me switch to a “home business” account for having a static IP address and the ability to run servers without violating the terms of service; on the other hand, that gets me higher bandwidth and faster customer service, which is nice.
My last two phone interactions with Comcast have been pretty good. After the huge “snowpocalypse” in February, our cable was out for 2.5 days after the electricity came back. I called to find out what the deal was and got an honest answer: if electric lines come down on/around damaged cable lines, they have to wait for the electric company to come out and deal with their lines first, and the electric company doesn’t tell them when or where they’ll be and basically, we were all at the mercy of Duquesne Light (who can, collectively, go suck a tailpipe). The woman was really nice, even though I’m sure a lot of people were calling to yell because they were stuck in their houses with two feet of snow on the ground and where was their TV?
Then I called back in when the service was restored, to make sure I’d get a proper credit on my bill, and that person was really nice too. And the credit was generous in my favor, too.
But we’re about to try to schedule them to come out to install cable in two rooms where we don’t currently have it, plus internet, and I’m expecting that my “okay with” Comcast is going to be shortlived.
I have a home theater PC at home and I installed a cablecard tuner for it a few weeks ago. Getting a CableCard installed in the thing proved to be a major pain.
First, they wouldn’t send me or let me pick up the CabeCard, they force me to have a tech who (of course) had absolutely no clue what an HTPC was or how to configure the CableCard for it. In the end I ended up paying for a clueless tech to sit on my couch watching me install the thing for 5 minutes.
But that’s not the only thing that had me fuming. You see, I had to make 3 service appointments with Comcast in order to get the stupid CableCard in the first place.
The first guy showed up and his first words to me were “I don’t have a CableCard”. Well, then what the hell are you doing here? Go. Come back when you have one.
The second time the tech waited until he was in my home and behind my TV before patting himself down and then announcing that he too didn’t have a cablecard. It’s at that moment that I was thinking back to that episode of Seinfeld when Elaine gets a visit from a cable/phone tech. “I could kill you, and no one would ever know”.