The link takes you to a recording of an eight-minute telephone call where you can listen to Ryan Block exhibit the patience of a saint as he attempts to cancel his Comcast subscription.
I thought this type of harassment was a thing of the past, ever since the infamous ‘Vincent Ferrari tries to cancel AOL’ went viral years ago. Guess not.
Do companies like Comcast really think they’re gonna convince people to change their mind and maintain their subscription by torturing them like this? Wow. Do they think it’s gonna attract new customers? Wow again.
ETA: Note that this eight minute bit is only the last part of his 18-minute call. He only began recording after ten minutes had already elapsed!
I missed the edit time limit but had wanted to mention that much of what the Comcast rep was claiming, over and over again, sounds like absolute BS in any case. Stuff like there being no faster service.
Yeah, I just cancelled a business account - completely straightforward, contract was up, site was being closed, had no provider equipment. Thought I was done. Got a bill with overdue charges on it today and was told that somehow it was my fault for not giving them 60 days notice, and that I would just be on the books for an overdue account until they straightened it out (and sent me my $40-ish refund due for cumulative billing errors) sometime in September.
I only made it a few minutes into the recording, basically just long enough to hear the guy ask again why they were cancelling and the customer pointed out that this service call was a pretty good example of why… and the customer service guy just kept asking why…
I understand that companies might want to know why customers are leaving, but the badgering heard on that call and the evasions and redirection of the conversation are astounding. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Comcast guy gets both a raise and punched in the neck for the way he does his job.
Hell, I just moved and spent over 8 hours on the phone with Comcast (on 5 or 6 separate calls) trying to correct their multiple mistakes… I kept missing the survey calls they do because I was always already on a call again trying to fix the screw up they made on the call I just got off of.
I read about this on another site and one commenter claimed that for a lot of these types of service calls, the reps don’t actually work for Comcast (or whoever), they work for a vendor who contracts out their call centers to Comcast. In effect, Comcast is their customer, not the caller trying to get their service cancelled. So, their focus is not helping the caller, but avoiding letting them cancel. Any truth to this?
Well, the guys that you talk to when you want to cancel are retention specialists. They’re whole job is to get you to not cancel and they get paid out based on how many people they keep.
I ended had a nice long chat recently where Comcast tried to get me to not cancel, even though I told them I was moving in with someone who already had Comcast..
Very possibly. Several years ago I had a major eff-up with Comcast in which it was, effectively, impossible for me to cancel my service because I’d signed up for it via some company they’d contracted to rustle up subscriptions. Comcast didn’t actually have any data about my Comcast account, and couldn’t access it. It was a really messed up situation.
I’m pretty sure I posted a thread to the Pit, if you care to search for it.
I recently had a bizarre conversation with Comcast when I called them to notify them that their subscriber (my mother-in-law) had died and that they should cancel the account.
It was not easy - lots of number pushing to get to an actual person who of course transferred me a couple of times to other alleged actual persons. I finally ended up with someone who acknowledged she could help me. After telling my story complete with 12-digit subscriber number, equipment serial numbers, address, zip code, names and dates yet AGAIN, I was told that I had somehow reached the Southeast Regional call center and since I’m located in the western US, I’d need to call back and talk to the folks out here. Uh, no.
I cut off the representative’s explanation and told her that I’d made my very last phone ever to Comcast and she/they could do whatever they want with the information about their subscriber’s account, but they should know that they were not going to be getting any more money from said subscriber.
Of course, I was free to be sarcastic and hang up - I’m not liable for any charges on the account. And that’s a good thing, because I just saw another bill from Comcast in the stack. Yup yup yo.
When I downgraded my full service cable to internet only with TWC I had to deal with this shit too.
A little quip after already turning down about three counter offers:
Her: “Well, you’re free to cancel if you want to but you should know that lots of people cancel their cable only to come back a month later. I’m just trying to save you that headache”
Me: ‘Thank you, I still want to downgrade to just internet"’
Her: [getting snippy with me] “Whaddya gonna do for TV?! Do you think regular over the air TV is gonna cut it after having all these channels?!”
Me: “I’ve got Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime to lean to.”
LOL that REALLY set her off!
Her: “Hulu and Netflix aren’t the same as cable!”
Me: “I understand that mam.”
So she finally agrees, with a very pissy attitude, to downgrade my service. She tells me it will take 24hrs to take effect. The very next day as I’m about to get settled in for the evening, I plop down on my recliner. I’m about five minutes into my show when my internet cuts out. So I call the TWC to find out what the deal was:
TWC: “It says here sir, you canceled your service.”
Me: "“No I didn’t! I had a very lengthy conversation with your rep. I was very clear I didn’t want to cancel my internet service”
TWC: “Sorry about the mix up sir. The soonest I can have a service guy out there is three days from now. Will that work for you?”
Me: I suppose. :smack:
But yeah, I’m sure that lady didn’t cancel me out of spite or anything. [rolleyes]
We signed up for ‘‘internet only’’ and got a zillion phone calls trying to get us to sign up for their ‘‘triple play’’ or whatever. The rep kept insisting we would save money that way, because we’d be paying less for internet… never mind the $60 we’d be paying for service we didn’t want. :rolleyes: Three years. They called us all three years we were with them, on a regular basis, to try to get us to upgrade.
I’ve heard nothing but bad things about Comcast customer service so I can’t say I’m surprised. It sure makes me want to punch someone in the nose though.
A few weeks ago I was watching a WC soccer game, it was one of the boring ones. Then right as stuff started happening, our cable went out. So I tried to go online to watch it, but the internet was down too.
It was all working again 15 minutes later, but by then, the game was won/lost, and I’d missed the exciting bits. I wrote Comcast a quite cranky email, and got an automated reply promising they’d contact me within 24 hours.
Five days later (…) I got a phone call from a breathless rep who couldn’t have been more apologetic, tried to explain the reasons behind the dropped service, sympathized with me loudly, and put a $30 credit on our account.
Does Comcast really expect the public to swallow their bullshit apology? Does anyone who listened to the recording of the conversation really believe that this rep did anything other than what he had been trained and pressured to do by Comcast?
As others in this thread have noted, the people who talk to you when you want to disconnect are not “service representatives” in any true sense of the word; they’re retention specialists whose primary task is to keep you forking over money every month. There have been numerous accounts over the years by people working in such jobs, and those accounts make clear that if you simply do what the customer asks and disconnect the service, you will lose your job in short order.
The Consumerist website often has stories about these sorts of issues, and in the wake of this particular story, the site has received emails over the last couple of days from Comcast employees claiming that what this rep did was standard operating procedure.
Unfortunately, in the world of customer service, it has become standard practice to provide completely shitty service, and when you get some bad publicity, just offer a public apology, deny that the shitty service is company policy, and fire the poor minimum-wage schlub who was unlucky enough to end up in the spotlight.
These companies need to see far stricter regulation. It’s the only way they’ll change their habits, because they’re certainly not actually competing with one another in any real sense of the word, especially not on the issue of customer service.
I’ve had Comcast for data and for TV for years. Problems have been rare and small. I even cancelled once (this was when I just had TV, and I cancelled because I was going to live without TV for a while) and had no problem.
The only real problem I had is when I went down to turn in my broken modem to get a new one. The guy at the desk asked me some question that seemed just to be confirming that I still wanted to use a modem, then he gave me a kind of a look when I said Yes, but I didn’t question it and went home. I found out within a day or two that he had signed me up for Triple-Play even though he had not mentioned any word about or relating to telephone service. When I called to cancel the Triple-Play and explained to them that I never agreed to that upgrade, they cancelled it without any problem.
I get occasional appeals in the mail to upgrade, also occasional emails, and one time the salespeople were canvassing the neighborhood, but we don’t get phone calls about it.
So, just another data point. I live in San Francisco, by the way, and they are the only choice for cable here.
I want to know why the customer didn’t just ask for a supervisor after a minute of go-around with the peon. I’ve had maybe a couple of what started out as possibly bad phone calls, but when I ask for a supervisor they transfer me immediately and the second person is always able to take care of what I want. This recorded call is just crazy, and I wonder of the nutso CSR guy was desperately trying to avoid the “disconnect” ding mentioned above, by getting the customer to either hang up, or just ask for an escalation, since the CSR can do neither himself.
This reminded me of the runaround I got from Sprint when I tried to cancel my contract early because I had moved into an area where there was no coverage. That’s permitted under the agreement - they didn’t even argue that - but good hell was it a headache.
