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Comcast Cares -- But Only About People Like You
from the @techdirtcares dept
You might've already heard about the Twitter account @comcastcares. Run by Comcast employee Frank Eliason, its purpose is to find upset customers before they even know they're looking for help. I'd heard of Eliason's project, but had completely forgotten about it when, on Sunday, I found my HD service mysteriously missing and broadcast my frustration to the Twitterverse. Frank's immediate Twittered response was unexpected and reassuring. When the next day's service call proved fruitless, he asked me to email him. Within a few hours I had received phone calls and emails from three different smart and seemingly concerned Comcast employees, and by the evening my problem was solved. I had been prepared to settle in for a weeks-long fight with the cable company. Instead, Frank's quick intervention left me feeling oddly positive about a company that I had long considered to be more or less the embodiment of of malevolent, slothful incompetence.
I'm not the only one who's noticed Frank's project, of course. Mike Arrington wrote about a positive encounter with @comcastcares earlier this month. And although Dave Winer remained peeved by his cable internet woes, it's clear that he found @comcastcares helpful and worthwhile.
It certainly is those things. But is it anything more? Arrington is right, of course, when he says that more brands should be using Twitter as a buzz monitoring tool. But we should all keep in mind that the sort of concierge-style customer support offered by @comcastcares is unlikely to ever scale beyond the size of a PR exercise.
In this case Twitter's chief virtue is its userbase: a collection of highly-wired early adopters whose online complaints about cable provider malfeasance frequently find their way into press accounts and Google results associated with the company. As handy a notification system as Twitter is, it's not as if it offers a technological breakthrough that suddenly makes competent customer service possible: there's been nothing preventing Comcast support from answering email, or getting on IM, or even just using a phone system that calls clients back rather than making them sit on the phone until they hang up or are driven mad by the hold music.
The reason Comcast and companies like it don't do those things is simply that providing high-quality, personalized support is expensive. Providing high-quality support to influential users is expensive, too, but there are many fewer of them and they make a lot more noise, which makes it a better investment. I'm sure Frank isn't undertaking his project cynically, but it's hard to see how Twitter can change the economics of tech support.
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And for the record, Comcast isn't the only one monitoring the twitter-shpere. DirecTv followed my tweet to a blog post I did about problems with their Customer Service. They called me about an hour after reading the post. And (for now at least) I'm still a customer.
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What they're really doing is attempting to stamp out publicized problems people are having with Comcast all while ignoring the vast majority of other problems people are having.
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Re:
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Re: Re:
I never said or even implied it was different.
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Mr. T
I never thought I would see the day that I could reply to a blog post while shopping.
Hey, sale on Newman's Own tomato sauce is on sale at safeway this week...
News Flash: copper = fixed.... Read about it online.
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Get your fix on the intertubes!
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My Comcast service is ok...
The internet service is good because I have not had a problem in months. When problems do occur Comcast is usually quick to fix it, especially since I insist on refund of lost service.
The HD side, the Motorola box is terrible. Slow to channel change, it rattles, the fan on the bottom is broken, it just doesn't work well. Comcast installed a used box for HD service. I am working myself up to not liking Comcast again.
The CableModem Internet is good and I am happy.
Internet down and I am mad, not that mad lately.
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Re: Mr. T
You might have to elaborate on that so we can read about it online.
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Comcast is fine by me
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When you have a choice
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Verizon Fios watched my Tweets
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Auto-callbacks
When I call Comcast and the wait is going to be more than about 2 minutes (well, I'm not sure what the cutoff is), they offer me a call-back.
On the other hand, I'm not sure you can get a call-back from anyone but first-line support, and since their procedure is "read the script that says: unplug your modem, bypass your router and plug in a Windows XP box" it's not all that useful.
They also do some automatic troubleshooting before connecting you to a(n apparent) human - checking response and rebooting the cable modem.
Something I've wanted for a while is a way to bypass all these "dumb" responses - I've tried them already by the time I call. So having a separate support line for "technical" users seems helpful, or at least not _unhelpful_.
What would really be helpful though is not to have to sit there lying to the support staff in order to get any help - I've had technicians *hang up* on me when I explain that I don't have Windows. So now I lie: "Yes, I've got the control panel open. Okay, clicking on Network Connections. TCP/IP? Ok, here we go..." as I type 'ifconfig -a'...
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No thanks
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Re: Mr. T
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Have you actually talked to Comcast about their plans?
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Thankfully, I don't have them. And with any luck, it will remain that way. I will be free to use whatever ports I like, not that I use Torrent much - but if I used Comcast I may or may not have been able to download various service manuals and tech bulletins for my car this weekend, as the site that put up these freely distributed (legally) documents is now using torrent. Tech service manuals get somewhat large for PDF files.
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Sky
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Is Anything Really Better?
But I had AT&T in my current place for one week, the internet I paid for was 3mb, but they told me they could only deliver 384k. I cancelled. I received my refund check last week for service cancelled on November 15, after approximately 20 calls and huge amounts of wait time for the last five months. They even told me they wouldn't refund my service because I had it for five days, which I finally convinced them was stupid. On top of that, it took them two weeks to find the modem I sent back a few months earlier.
So it's not like one utility is really any better than any other. They are what they are, which is customer-unfriendly.
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