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Comcast
Where Does The Customer Fit Exactly?
Customer First, Customer Second, Customer Third,
… where exactly does the customer fit in the Comcast hierarchy?
Important - this post was originally published on December 2nd, 2016 … it was updated on January 16th, 2017 and then again on July 10th, 2017.
I have just written the following email and sent it back as a reply to the confirmation email I received after I scheduled an appointment for this morning. I then sent it to any other email address I could find on their site. (Actually, that was zero … Comcast don’t make it easy for ‘customer engagement’.)
If I get any update, (I did - see below) I will be delighted to report back as an update to this post. Mainly writing here as a reference and link that I will provide to @ComcastCares when I tweet in a minute.
Message To Comcast
You have unilaterally cancelled this appointment - which I discovered this morning AFTER waiting for two hours for your engineer to come. You didn’t call, message or email me of this change. I have written to ‘Tom’ as follows; I have a TV issue - been happening for weeks - intermittent - not repeatable - but I finally engaged with your chat line on Tuesday this week. The result of the chat was an appointment was set up for this morning - between 8 and 10. I waited and waited - with nothing. I logged on to the site to be greeted with a message that my appointment had been cancelled. On Tuesday … no call to me. NO message to me. No email to me. And I certainly did not cancel it - I struggle enough with engaging with your support team already. Nevertheless, I tried to engage again through chat - and the service is not working. I need a new appointment set up. And now you are failing to give me a consistent and reliable TV service - not to mention wasting two hours of my day this morning … some clarity on what kind of SLA you actually are committed to. I await your reply. BTW - Your chat is currently not working - and I have zero faith in your call center to book something …. please let me know how this gets rescheduled.
Added January 16th 2017
I caught this today … reporting that Comcast is top of the list of America’s most hated companies - and in fact their internet service is specifically called out …
The company’s internet services received the fourth worst score out of some 350 companies.
Seeing that - prompted me to come back here and update this post. I don’t hate Comcast - it really is such a divisive, emotional word that we see used far too often in these modern times. But I do wish they were more thoughtful, proactive and actually delivered what their advertising promises. Comcast, eventually sorted out the problems described above. An engineer was sent, I was supplied with new cables, stuff all tightened up … dust in the sockets … pretty much everything was wrong - or at least that was what I was told. Bottom line, the TV service has worked just fine ever since. In fact - their internet service had as well. It wasn’t called out in my original communication - because you have to talk to mission control in one of the stove pipes of Internet., TV, Phone etc I went for TV. After the engineer left - all problems had gone away. Including my internet issues.
Added July 10th 2017
I just wish Comcast had better support in their headquarters. I gave up on their call centers a long time ago - discovering that if you tweeted to Comcast Cares - the level of service was orders of magnitude better. And then in that process, I unearthed an email that I won’t share here - but that now is how I engage with them. I just don’t have the time to jump through their hoops. Why am I writing this today? Well over the weekend I had internet issues. This tells you what kind of issues … 
Should I buy a dial up modem? U wasnt a one off. there were consistent issues throughout the weekedn and sometimes the download speed got as high as 5 Mbps. So I have been having some back and forth with them. But before I get to that - did you know that …
Comcast was ranked by Advertising Age as the biggest U.S. advertising spender in 2016, edging out packaged goods giant Procter & Gamble in promoting a product line that includes not only cable TV, but a film studio and theme parks, as well.
Fierce Cable
If only they spent on Customer Service and their sytems what they spend on advertising - how much better would life be. Anyway, back to the plot. I got this email from them this morning
Is your Internet service currently working? If it is working, please describe what issues you are having which are causing you to experience slow connectivity. How often do you clear your cache and cookies? Please make sure your computer is securely connected to your gateway. Unplug your power cord to the gateway for 30 seconds, then plug it back in. Wait two minutes for your gateway to reboot. Restart your computer. Please perform a speed test with a wired connection at http://speedtest.xfinity.com. Spyware and viruses are a common cause of slow connection. Your computer may be infected if web pages take a long time to load, your computer is slower to turn on and shut down, and/or non-Internet programs take longer to open. Another sign is a pop-up message telling you to download a certain program to fix a problem. Make sure you have up-to-date antivirus and antispyware software installed on your computer. Run a full system scan with both the antivirus and antispyware software.
… it’s a nice enough email, sent from one of the team, so I took the trouble to reply …
Is your Internet service currently working? Yes If it is working, please describe what issues you are having which are causing you to experience slow connectivity. As per my original message and the screen grab of the Xfinity speed test I sent to you, which was actually sent back to me as part of your reply - I have experienced massive slow down on my internet speeds over this past weekend, including at least 4 ‘mini-outages’ … when service was suddenly dropped completely causing me to lose work. Also - during the weekend I ran 4 browsers - all with different settings so I can understand how adblocking and other tracking software may or may not be choking page loads. You should also know that I was running two computers - and had the same results on both - even if I was using different browsers on the machines. How often do you clear your cache and cookies? Over the weekend I was developing a web site and was flushing local cache and server side cache regularly. Please make sure your computer is securely connected to your gateway. Unplug your power cord to the gateway for 30 seconds, then plug it back in. Wait two minutes for your gateway to reboot. Restart your computer. For now - I am not going to go through this rigmarole. So you know, I last rebooted my router this past week - when the Comcast TV service froze. I rebooted everything I have from Comcast. Beyond that - I have done NONE of what you suggested - except run a speed test just now - see below. I didn’t hit anything like this level over the weekend. But to be clear - today I have run that test three times - and each time I get a download speed of 5 to 6 times the maximum of what you gave me over the weekend. Please perform a speed test with a wired connection at http://speedtest.xfinity.com. See above and the earlier email I sent you. Please also note that the speed tests I did could change by an order of magnitude within a second. That said - this is what I am getting now …
Spyware and viruses are a common cause of slow connection. I understand - I am fully protected Your computer may be infected if web pages take a long time to load, your computer is slower to turn on and shut down, and/or non-Internet programs take longer to open. Yes - got it.
I will report back when I hear more. In the meantime … here are a couple of thoughts for them.