A Comcast Experience

Most folks who know me also know that I work for Market Force Information, a leading Customer Intelligence firm headquartered in Boulder, Colorado. Well, actually, the headquarters is in Louisville, which is just outside of Boulder, but Boulder always seems a tad more impressive. A good deal of Customer Intelligence is wrapped around the customer experience, and the customer experience is based on the customer's perception of the experience and the operational realities that create the experience.

I want to share a story about my customer experience with Comcast, including my perceptions of the experience and the operational realities that created those perceptions. It is fundamentally a story about gross incompetence, which may or may not surprise you depending upon how much interaction you have had with Comcast. For those folks that I have spoken with who have Comcast as their Internet, cable television or telephone service provider, this story is not particularly surprising. For folks who have not engaged Comcast, they are mostly amused by the comedy of errors that have beset me and my family as we have struggled to finalize our service installation. I suppose when I think about the overall experience I also have to laugh at the comedy, but I can assure the frustration is not funny and the time that I have had to invest with Comcast trying to sort out the situation has also not been amusing. Still, when you are dealing with the Three Stooges you have to laugh a bit even though it is painful to watch them.

So my story begins nearly six weeks ago when I decide to cancel my DirectTV contract and move to Comcast cable TV and VOIP to go along with the Comcast High Speed Internet Service that I'd been enjoying for several years. I made the call into the sales department, spoke with an absolutely delightful young lady by the name of April and arranged for three television points to be installed along with the VOIP service. It was explained that porting the existing home telephone number from AT&T with take a couple of weeks, but we found a Saturday that worked for my schedule and finalize the arrangements. So far, so good.

On the Saturday in question, the service technician who had been scheduled to visit my home called me to ask me what he was actually going to be doing when he got to my house. Okay, I said: "Don't you have a service order?" "Well yes sir, but I just wanted to confirm with you." Okay, I thought.....this isn't that strange and so I explained what he was supposed to do. He then explained that there were no VOIP modems available and therefore he would be unable to install that service. Okay I said, how about coming over and installing the television cable service. "No problem, be there in 30 minutes", which he was, but of course without the right equipment or tools, so he ended up doing a rather terrible job and it was obvious he was in way over his head. Of course, it didn't help that he could not get his supervisor on the phone or that his dispatch kept calling him wanting to know why he had not checked-in, what happened with his previous visit, and when the hell he was going to make his next appointment. The net/net is that he left without finishing the job, but promised someone would call me to set-up another appointment to address the gaps. Oh yea, and he also managed to un-hook our Internet service while he was in the garage, which he freely admitted when he returned much later that day after I spent over two hours on the phone with Comcast fighting to have someone return to address the Internet outage. He said he was never told there was Internet service at our location - of course I had told him that morning, but it clearly wasn't on his service order, which he shared with me. In fact, there was nearly nothing on that service order, which is why he called me to begin with; i.e.: he really didn't know what he was supposed to do when he arrived at our home.

Days go by and no one calls, so we call back and to make a very long story short, we have now had two additional service calls and we still don't have the VOIP service and the cable is still running across the floor in the den and the cable point in the home office still doesn't work and no one at Comcast seems to be able to sort things out. I have written to their VP of Customer Service, and his message reader appointed an "Escalation Person" to my case. He/she sent me an email asking me to contact him/her, which I attempted to do about 30 minutes ago, but without success. Voice Mail rules at Comcast and he/she had not updated his/her voice mail since June 18th, which gave me considerable confidence in this person's ability to fix things.

So I just don't get it! An initial problem or two is not the end of the world, but this has to be the most incompetent group of people I have ever encountered in over 30 years of working in the technology sector. They can't spell Customer Service and to give anyone at the firm a title that suggests they actually understand the concept of customer service is simply self-serving and ultimately stupid because they don't have a clue about what it takes to serve customers. And the sad part of all of this is that I don't even know any anyone really cares. The service technicians slam customer service who slam sales who slam the whole eco-system. I had a technician stand in my house and tell me that he completely understood my frustration with Comcast because he was equally frustrated with their lack of process and quality management. Wow! A service technician slamming the firm really gave me tremendous confidence in my decision to switch to Comcast.

So, the saga continues and eventually I'm confident that either the service will be sorted or I'll cancel everything and start over with another service provider. But I'm still baffled that in today's economy companies like Comcast still don't get it.
Can anyone explain Comcast to me?