My Trouble with Comcast: A Twitter Tale
This is going to be ugly, and perhaps boring, but bear with me. I recently had trouble with my cable provider Comcast, and if it wasn't for Twitter the tale would not have had a happy ending.
It started after I moved from an area that was covered by Time Warner, which isn't available at my new address, and set up my internet and cable service with Comcast. The problem was that downloads of movies on Apple TV were really slowwwwwww. At my old address if I wanted to download even an HD movie, it was ready to watch in just a few minutes. With Comcast it was more like hours.
So I thought something was wrong with the modem and called Comcast customer service. I was on the phone with someone, obviously from some other nation, for over an hour checking the cables and running tests. Finally he decided I needed a visit from a service tech and he scheduled one for the convenient time of somewhere between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. the following day.
So after waiting around all morning, the tech shows up at noon, takes a quick look at the modem and says nothing's wrong. Comcast it seems has several levels of service and I'm subscribed to the slowest one. To get a faster connection, all I had to do was call the office and they would throw a switch. So, hours on the phone and half a day wasted.
But it doesn't stop there.
Later that evening, I called Comcast and signed up for the faster (and more expensive) service. The woman on the phone told me to unplug the modem for a half an hour and then reconnect it and enjoy foreverafter the life of speedy downloads. I actually waited more than an hour before plugging it back in and.......nothing. Same slow service. I unplugged it and waited again. Same. So another call to Comcast, another lenghty back and forth, and yet another conveniently scheduled visit the next day from the service tech.
I waited all morning for the tech and around 11 a.m. got a phone message from the guy saying he had come to my house, sorry I wasn't home and that if I needed anything else, I should call Comcast. Aaaaarrrrrrrrgh! I was sitting right there! No one came to the door!
I got the company back on the phone (which is no simple process since they have a really annoying automated system so you have to push all kinds of buttons before finally being placed on hold for 20 minutes or so). They said the tech had come to the wrong house. When he finally showed up, he said the switchover to the faster service can take 24 hours, not a half an hour as I had been told. Sure enough, we fired up the TV and it was working fine and faster.
By now, I was steamed. I went on Twitter and made a disparaging comment about the company. Instantly I get a reply on Twitter asking me for the details of the trouble. After I explained the situation in an e-mail, I got a call from Comcast offering me free HBO for three months to cover my troubles. Um.....throw in the Playboy channel, and you've got yourself a satisfied customer.
It's great that Comcast monitors Twitter and responds quickly to problems. But in my case, the problems didn't have to occur in the first place. If they trained their customer service reps better, I would have been told on the very first call that I subscribed to the company's turtle service. (And there's nothing I could find on the Comcast website that even describes the various levels of speed). Or I should have been told that the changeover to a faster service takes more than a half an hour. They've got some work to do.
But the episode did demonstrate the power of Twitter. I'm now sending Tweets slamming Porsche hoping for similar results. We'll see.
It started after I moved from an area that was covered by Time Warner, which isn't available at my new address, and set up my internet and cable service with Comcast. The problem was that downloads of movies on Apple TV were really slowwwwwww. At my old address if I wanted to download even an HD movie, it was ready to watch in just a few minutes. With Comcast it was more like hours.
So I thought something was wrong with the modem and called Comcast customer service. I was on the phone with someone, obviously from some other nation, for over an hour checking the cables and running tests. Finally he decided I needed a visit from a service tech and he scheduled one for the convenient time of somewhere between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. the following day.
So after waiting around all morning, the tech shows up at noon, takes a quick look at the modem and says nothing's wrong. Comcast it seems has several levels of service and I'm subscribed to the slowest one. To get a faster connection, all I had to do was call the office and they would throw a switch. So, hours on the phone and half a day wasted.
But it doesn't stop there.
Later that evening, I called Comcast and signed up for the faster (and more expensive) service. The woman on the phone told me to unplug the modem for a half an hour and then reconnect it and enjoy foreverafter the life of speedy downloads. I actually waited more than an hour before plugging it back in and.......nothing. Same slow service. I unplugged it and waited again. Same. So another call to Comcast, another lenghty back and forth, and yet another conveniently scheduled visit the next day from the service tech.
I waited all morning for the tech and around 11 a.m. got a phone message from the guy saying he had come to my house, sorry I wasn't home and that if I needed anything else, I should call Comcast. Aaaaarrrrrrrrgh! I was sitting right there! No one came to the door!
I got the company back on the phone (which is no simple process since they have a really annoying automated system so you have to push all kinds of buttons before finally being placed on hold for 20 minutes or so). They said the tech had come to the wrong house. When he finally showed up, he said the switchover to the faster service can take 24 hours, not a half an hour as I had been told. Sure enough, we fired up the TV and it was working fine and faster.
By now, I was steamed. I went on Twitter and made a disparaging comment about the company. Instantly I get a reply on Twitter asking me for the details of the trouble. After I explained the situation in an e-mail, I got a call from Comcast offering me free HBO for three months to cover my troubles. Um.....throw in the Playboy channel, and you've got yourself a satisfied customer.
It's great that Comcast monitors Twitter and responds quickly to problems. But in my case, the problems didn't have to occur in the first place. If they trained their customer service reps better, I would have been told on the very first call that I subscribed to the company's turtle service. (And there's nothing I could find on the Comcast website that even describes the various levels of speed). Or I should have been told that the changeover to a faster service takes more than a half an hour. They've got some work to do.
But the episode did demonstrate the power of Twitter. I'm now sending Tweets slamming Porsche hoping for similar results. We'll see.
I feel your pain, I can't stand how these big cable and phone companies treat their customers these days. And the worst thing is that they get away with it, because local governments and regulatory commissions have relaxed all the customer service requirements. I mean any idiot should realize when he looks at your account screen that, "Hey this guy has our lowest tier service, maybe I should recommend a higher grade service", especially since he is having an issue with slow speed. We can only hope that these regulatory commissions will step up and make these companies provide customer service, because when given the task to self govern themselves they prove time and time again they can't do it because profits come before customers.
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