Is Customer Service Comcast’s ‘Best Product’?
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, presumably apologizing for something (Photo: BGR)
Just a few weeks ago, Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit pledged that “customer service will soon be one of our best products.”
This week, the company made headlines for replacing a customer’s last name with an expletive on a cable bill, referring to him as “A—hole Brown” instead of his given name, Ricardo. “Soon” apparently is yet to arrive.
Related: Comcast Apologizes After Customer’s Name Shows Up as ‘A—Hole’ on Bill
The claim that customer service will be a Comcast specialty in the near future might sound a little fishy. Comcast seems to make news almost constantly for its spectacularly bad customer service, with one jaw-dropping incident after another.
On the other hand, customer service really is Comcast’s best product. Think of the hours of entertainment the company has provided us all with its never-ending parade of bonehead maneuvers!
Remember the epic stonewalling by one of its service reps who simply refused to let a customer cut off his service? That excruciating exchange was recorded by that customer and posted toSoundCloud, where it’s been listened to nearly 6 million times.
Sure, sure, cable companies in general tend to excel at failing to excel.
Related: 6 Jaw-Dropping Cable Provider Horror Stories From Yahoo Tech Readers
But can any other company match Comcast’s record ofcustomer-service actions so heinously entertaining that they become full-on viral hits? I think not.
For starters, Comcast has a history here that few can match. Back in 2007, somebody documented a Comcast tech who while at the customer’s house to replace a cable modem, had to call the home office, got stuck on hold for an hour, and fell asleep. And in this post, a former Comcast service exec points out that the renaming-customers-with-profanities episode has a precedent: a 2005 instance when a consumer’s name was changed to “Bitch Dog” on her bill.
History aside, Comcast has really been hitting its stride lately. A 13-year-old wrote an “emo ballad” based on that aforementioned bad customer-service call. Another disgruntled customer made a YouTube video of his experience allegedly being left on hold until the customer service department closed. Yet another frustrated consumer took to YouTube and Reddit with a tale of a missing broadband package. And one even claimed Comcast got him fired for complaining about his cable service.
If only Comcast could package this stuff up and sell it! Call it Xfinity Screwups.
Those are just anecdotes, of course. But Comcast also triumphed in the reader-vote-driven contest run by the Consumerist website to win the title of The Worst Company in America for 2014. It fared almost as badly in a separate consumer-satisfaction survey, trailing only Time Warner Cable.
In a cunning and comical twist, that’s the company Comcast wants to merge with. Imagine the avalanche of shareable customer-service horror stories that would result if that deal goes through!
Because really, this is what Comcast has become: a creator of improbably terrible customer-service experiences that also happens to offer cable and Internet services. So now I see what Smit was getting at. He was just identifying what management gurus refer to as his company’s “core competency” — incompetence.
In fact, at this point, Comcast’s biggest challenge will be coming up with some even more ridiculous way to express contempt for its own customers. But I’m sure they’ll think of something!
Write to me at rwalkeryn@yahoo.com, or find me on Twitter at @notrobwalker. RSS lover? Paste this URL into your reader of choice: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/author/rob-walker/rss.
