Customer Service
by wjw on July 13, 2015
So Walter, I hear you asking, how did you spend your lovely Monday afternoon?
Why, I was dealing with Comcast Customer Service, and it was the most pleasant thing in all the world.
To give you an idea of the utter pleasantness of the whole thing, I refer you to the letter below, which I wrote to Comcast when the whole thing was still fresh in my mind:
[letter begins]
I spent one hour and forty minutes online with a customer representative to discuss the fact that my Xbox 360 wouldn’t connect to the internet, while every other wifi device would. Her training did not seem adequate to resolve my problem (which has, as it turns out, a very simple solution). In the end, she turned off my modem so as to control it remotely, and said if I didn’t hear anything in four minutes, I was to call customer service.
I called customer service after four minutes, and was cut off. I was cut off on the NINE SUBSEQUENT PHONE CALLS I PLACED.
Ladies and gentlemen, YOU ARE A PHONE COMPANY. BY NOW YOU SHOULD HAVE LEARNED TO KEEP SOMEONE ON HOLD WITHOUT CUTTING THEM OFF.
I now had a modem that was in bridge mode, and NONE OF MY DEVICES COULD CONNECT TO THE INTERNET.
I noodled around on your gateway, and after an hour resolved all the problems myself.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, YOU ARE AN INTERNET COMPANY. YOU’VE HAD TEN YEARS TO FIGURE OUT A WAY TO CONNECT AN XBOX 360 TO YOUR MODEMS, AND YOU’VE NEVER WORKED IT OUT.
You are imbeciles. Your company is an embarrassing dinosaur, and I can only hope that a competitor fit to live in the 21st century burns it to the ground so I can dance on the ashes.
Yours sincerely,
etc. etc.
“I feel your pain.”
Comcast is the only provider where I live. Every interaction I have had with them has been as joyous as digging out my own eyeballs with a spork.
“We’re do big, we don’t have to care.”
I rarely call tech support for a provider unless it is something about their service that affects everything. For resolving issues with specific devices I surf the internet first because I’m never going to be the only person with a problem with a particular device on a particular service. I googled “xbox 360 network issues with comcast” just to start things off, and got a few hits.
True. I did that myself, but all the solutions were written in a language that looked like English but turned out to be some kind of jargon-ridden pidgin that made no sense to anyone with a lit degree, like me.
I loathe Comcast. Unfortunately it’s also the only option for real broadband in my area. I long for the day some new tech will put all the old communication companies out of business.
There’s a reason we in the tech industry call them Comshaft. Although I’ve never had Comcast techs threaten to throw me off a building, the way some NyNex guys once did to a former colleague whom they viewed as treading on their union turf.
We actually have cable competition here in my particular part of the Baltimore metroplex, and I was very pleasantly surprised to be one of the first areas to get FiOS service when Verizon began offering it. Verizon hasn’t always been a great service provider, but even my worst interactions with them are better than an average interaction with Comcast.
You need to make some friends at Google, sir, and convince them you would be an excellent candidate to test out Google Fiber service.
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