News Comcast customer rep refuses to cancel service

[blixel]

Listen to the audio clip in this article. Pretty terrible customer service.

 

[Urwumpe]

You said Comcast. Nuff said. :rofl:

When I cancel something expensive, I usually pay the few Euros extra to make sure that I have something with legal power in my hands.

Does not always work without stress, like a friend of mine experienced, but in the end, every lack of "Yessir, will be done sir" by the service provider only results in much more money to be paid back to me, once the dust settled.

 

[sorindafabico]

An ISP/telwecom which refuses to cancel the service? This happens everytime everywhere here.

But they don't do this so directly here. Usually, if you manifest the desire of disconnection, the call goes down "mysteriously" or you are worried by a very long waiting time listening to Für Elise.

 

[n122vu]

This is what I have to look forward to once Comcast completes its purchase of Time Warner. I'm sooo excited... :uhh:

 

[Hielor]

So, I've been a Comcast customer for ~5 years now, and I've never had anything approaching this kind of bad service the few times I've needed to call.

About once a year there something strange will happen, like the service will be out for more than a couple hours or I'll discover that they've been charging me for modem rental when I own my own modem. I then proceed to call them and have a short conversation, during which they politely apologize for the problem, get it fixed (such as crediting me for the 6 months of incorrect modem rental charges and removing it in the future), and then offer me some kind of freebie for the trouble. In the past I've been upgraded a speed tier for free for a year, or gotten HBO or Starz/Showtime free for a year.

Like every other company out there, Comcast has some bad employees who end up giving the whole company a bad name, but overall I haven't had any major problems with them.

 

[boogabooga]

Probably just an overzealous "phone rep" (read- sales person) paid on commission. I doubt that you would fight so hard if it wasn't your own money on the line.

I wouldn't be surprised if the phone rep was an outside contractor that didn't work directly for Comcast at all.

 

[Andy44]

You said Comcast. Nuff said. :rofl:

Do they have Comcast in Germany?

 

[MattBaker]

Do they have Comcast in Germany?

No, AFAIK not even all US states do. But the names are different, the methods are the same.

 

[Urwumpe]

Do they have Comcast in Germany?

no, but even here you can enjoy their business habits. Like the old German state telecom in evil. :lol:

 

[Andy44]

All cable/telecom companies can be difficult at times, but having experienced more than one I can honestly say I avoid Comcast more than the others. Fortunately we have alternatives these days, in my area there is Cox cable, but Verizon also provides fiber optic service and you can usually go with a satellite dish. Comcast does not service my neighborhood, but I have friends and family that deal with them, and they universally dislike it.

In years past you often had zero alternatives; it was either one cable company or rabbit-ear antenna. Much hate and discontent.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

As much as they will deny it, the cable companies have agreed to not compete with each other in particular geographic areas. Here in Bradley County, Charter reigns, and next door in Hamilton County it's Comcast, one won't reach into the yard of the other so the alternative is a satillite provider (at least there are two to choose from).

Chattanooga also has EPB (Electric Power Board, the city owned utility) high speed fiber optic as an alternative. And the fight that Comcast put up to delay/cancel/berate that whole project was enourmous. The end result is that Chattanooga has 1 gig per second available and it's pretty awesome [ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPB[/ame] (suck it Comcast!) and it beat Google fiber to the party. I wish my county had the $$ to do the same.

Even with netflix, hulu or whatever, you still need high speed internet; so a customer is stuch with whatever they can get from a service provider (I don't have anything to good to say about AT&T) or a cable modem (in which case we're back to the "we don't have a monopoly" cable companies).

 

[Linguofreak]

In years past you often had zero alternatives; it was either one cable company or rabbit-ear antenna. Much hate and discontent.

These days, my general understanding is that most people in the US have one alternative. I saw a stat somewhere to the effect that 90-odd percent of the US population has access to two or fewer ISPs. Generally, in any given area, there is one erstwhile telecom provider, and one erstwhile cable provider, both of which now provide bundled TV/Phone/Net service. It's certainly the case in my area, where we have AT&T (telecom), and Charter (cable). AT&T's service is (from experience) good (with one exception) on the technical side, and abysmal on the marketing/billing/fine-print/tech support side (though five months of doing phone support has changed my perception of the tech support angle a bit). I've heard mixed reviews of Charter.

 

[Krikkit]

A couple years ago when I moved into my new place my life turned into a nightmare worthy of a Franz Kafka novel. While the Postal Service was the worst to deal with, Comcast was right up there.

- One month before moving in I call Comcast to have tv and internet installed in my new place
- Two months later, after a month of no TV or internet and several calls to Comcast, a package finally arrives. It contains only a couple of cable splitters and a few lengths of co-ax cable. I am left scratching my head. Where were the box and modem I asked for?
- Call Comcast again. They say their records indicated I already owned a cable box and modem. Why would they assume a first time customer moving into a new place would already own both those items? Why would they assume that the only reason I have been calling them and complaining about not having tv and internet was because I was too lazy or poor to go to the store and buy my own $2 co-ax wire?
- Two weeks later I finally get my box and modem. I plug them and they don't work.
- Spent the next week making numerous phone calls to tech support (in India) where they asked me over and over again inane, condescending questions like "Are you sure your box is plugged in. Are you sure your TV is set to the correct input."
- Eventually they decided to send a tech out but there aren't any appointments for two weeks.
- I have to take a day off work. The tech shows up, plugs some diagnostic tool into my wall co-ax, says I have bad signal, says I need to have my condo's co-ax wires replaced. He is only there two minutes.
- I ask him if maybe the signal is bad because my condo is wired for another service like dish or fiber. Says he can't tell without access to my electrical room.
- Have to go through another Kafkaesque labyrinth with my HOA, property management company, and custodial contractors just to get a key to the electrical room.
- Before that happens I get a call from a contractor while I am at work. They say they are at my place to tear down my walls and replace the co-ax. Comcast has sent them. I tell them to bugger off.
- When I finally do get a key to my electrical room I find that the Comcast and Verzion fiber conduits are thankfully (and dangerously) open and exposed. Find co-ax tagged with my unit number. Find it is plugged into the Verizon splitter. Pull it out and plug it into Comcast box. It works! I have tv and internet!
- For a week before it stops working
- Turns out Comcast has been billing me for the past three months of service.
- The post office is still refusing to deliver my mail (story for another rant) so I was not receiving the bills.
- After yet another week of deliberation Comcast refused to waive the bill.
- I had to pay for three months of service I didn't have and outstanding late fees.
- Despite acquiescing and paying (online because I had no mail service), bill collectors will still calling me months later.

 

[Andy44]

I hate having to take a day off work for these service calls. One time they told me the guy would be at my place between 10 AM and 2 PM, basically killing my whole work day. I get home at 10 and the guy never shows. When I call I find out he was there at 9:45 and decided not to wait for me! :chainsaw:

 

[blixel]

I hate having to take a day off work for these service calls. One time they told me the guy would be at my place between 10 AM and 2 PM, basically killing my whole work day. I get home at 10 and the guy never shows. When I call I find out he was there at 9:45 and decided not to wait for me! :chainsaw:

"Then our barely trained technicians will come to install your service somewhere between the hours 8am and 10 pm, knock once while you're in the shower, and promptly leave."

 

[Loru]

Situations like that are typical for many companies that have large group of customers and are operating in competitive market.

The sad parts are "working guidelines" for call center operators. I wouldn't call this guy "overzealous". Remember that in many call centers each worker has to meet certain goals to stay in the job. Sometimes this goal consists of persauding certain number of people to stay with the company. This guy was probably afraid that loosing that customer can hurt his wage/get him fired.

And management should understand that when customer calls to cancel the service it's usually too late to keep him.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

When I dropped AT&T I got a hard-sell attempt for them to stay on, when asked what they could do to keep me as a customer I said something along the lines of "You could give me free internet for 10 years, and I'd still decline your service. Now please cancel my acount."

There is a reason their corporate logo resembles the death star.

When companies get so big, I think they quit caring about the customer (particularly when they have a monopoly).

 

[Loru]

When companies get so big, I think they quit caring about the customer (particularly when they have a monopoly).

I think the problem of not caring about customers arises from the fact, that in bigger company departaments lack proper communication between themselves.

For example higher management staff sets arbitrary goals without proper analysis why goal isn't achieved yet. Instead of hearing what's wrong with their product from lower staff and customers they usually say "we need 10% customer increase this year and we don't care how you do it (because we don't know how to achieve it as we're financial specialists and we're not paid to know this)". Mid management then invents some procedure to quickly gain/keep more customers as they're afraid of their salaries/job security and poor call center worker has to meet impossible criteria in order to keep the job.

Specialized branches don't know about procedures of other branches and that results in more and more detachment from customer. I suspect that in this comcast call mid management implemented this "procedure" just to shield their branch's butt, and contact center guys just have to follow it, however stupid it looks.

It's much easier to do on much smaller scale. If I lost (or I'm about to loose) my customer I investigate why it has happened and I can implement solutions to the problem in much smaller timeframe (sometimes even bring customer back).

 

[n122vu]

I had free dial-up for 2 years via AOL back in the day. I'd picked up one of those CDs at Walmart and gone through their 90-day free trial. I called to cancel, and the rep said "We'd hate to lose you as a customer. What if I extend your free offer another 90 days?"

Each subsequent call was basically the same, and I was usually more than happy to accept their offer. But there came a time I grew tired of their service and actually wanted to cancel, and the conversation sometimes resembled the Comcast call, but with me reluctantly agreeing to continue using their service for free. It wasn't until my ex wife and I moved into a small town that did not have a local AOL access number that I was able to talk them into letting me cancel.

 

[Linguofreak]

When I dropped AT&T I got a hard-sell attempt for them to stay on, when asked what they could do to keep me as a customer I said something along the lines of "You could give me free internet for 10 years, and I'd still decline your service. Now please cancel my acount."

In our case the customer service panic reaction when we tried to cancel got us a quick and dirty fix to the technical issue that had us wanting to cancel (actually, it was tech support's inability to handle said issue that had us wanting to cancel). They shipped us a replacement router whose firmware lacked one of the two bugs we were encountering, and as soon as we discovered the second bug was still there, we basically left our LAN as it was (with the previous router, we'd gotten our LAN into a completely broken state because of said bugs, and resetting the router only made things worse). Sometime within the next year, the second bug disappeared, so there's nothing immediately motivating us to switch. We are still in the mindset that we probably will sometime "soon".

When companies get so big, I think they quit caring about the customer (particularly when they have a monopoly).

I think that's half true. And from my experience, Loru's point about communication is also true. Everybody individually wants to help the customer, but each person has their own specific area of authority and knowledge, and lines of communication get stretched out, and customers fall through the cracks.