Bob and I did the first radio call in on Comcast on a cold December night two years ago. We had an all star line up on the show including Mona “The Hammer Lady” Shaw, My Damn Channel’s Harry Shearer, In January, I think it’s time to see just how much progress Comcast has made. Are they COMCASTIC? Is your Dish service DISHriffic? Let’s find out.
I am proposing we invite a few Comcast Executives to be on the radio show, which will give some of you a chance to call in and ask them questions about your Cable service, your Triple Play Package, or just to vent or rant about how good or bad you’ve been treated, over-promised or lied to.
Please blog your comments below and let me know some of the questions you want me to ask on the next radio show.
I’ll email everybody a few times in advance to let you know of the call in date for the radio show.
Remember; If you’re Fed Up with Crappy Customer Service, if it’s Smelling a lot like Customer Circus… then Talk Back until you hear back.
– bart
February 9th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
We’ve been Comcast customers for 17 years and are fed up. If we did not have 5 TVs, I would have switched to DishTV a long time ago. We have an HD box that has not allowed us to receive ON DEMAND since I picked it up and several months have passed with Comcast pinging it and then telling me the box was faulty so I finally unhooked it all and took it to them yesterday. They then informed me it wasn’t the box as they previously told me, it was the wiring at my house. Scheduled someone to show up between 11-2 and at 2:35, still no repairman. I called and raved and ranted and got the stupid $20 credit on their new “no show” guarantee. A stuttering call center guy let me know I was still set up for the repairman and he had till 7PM tonight to show. The call center guy even made up things to say why the repairman didn’t come or call. Why do I have to sit at home for 8 hours for Comcast’s great customer service???? And to top it off, last week the wind blew really hard here and I had digital camo frozen pictures on 75% of the channels and a sketchy intermittent internet connection. So the commercials about satellite going out in weather situations and Comcast not EVER doing that is a crock. If no one shows by 7PM tonight, I’ll bite the bullet and pay DishTV the extra $$$ for that hookup on that 5th TV just to escape being mad all the time at things Comcast is apparently never going to fix.
February 8th, 2010 at 11:24 pm
We left Comcast approximately 6 weeks ago. We went to DirecTV and have had no problems. It’s amazing how much more professional they are. I am writing to tell all of you that we hestiated for years about switching from Comcast because we had a fear of the “satellite dish” and didn’t want to take a chance of losing service in severe weather. We haven’t lost service EVER and we’ve had severe weather! We also hesitated on making a switch because we didn’t want a dish on our house….well, that’s a small price to pay when we have un-interrupted TV service at all times.
In the past week, 3 of our neighbors have contacted us (unsolicited) to ask about our satisfaction with our satellite provider (they either saw the DirecTV truck when we switched our heard us talk about it) and are so fed up with their pathetic services with Comcast that they are most likely leaving Comcast too.
You’d think after all this time, Comcast would invest just a bit of their advertising dollars in upgrading their services instead of focusing on TV commercials and acqusitions. Didn’t they learn in Marketing 101 that it’s more expensive to recruit new customers than to retain the ones you have?
I know change is difficult but it’s worth the lack of headache and stress Comcast causes you (and you pay them for that grief)!
February 8th, 2010 at 12:29 am
If y’all will read the post I put from Jan 20th, thats what I’m talking about. You say “i called in again” but the point is, there is no communication between Comcast and the people taking your calls. They are told what to say and are FIRED IMMEDIATELY if they say the wrong thing or say anything that makes comcast look bad. I’m telling you… go to Dish or Direct TV! To get anything done you have to call in and ask for the supervisor’s supervisor and no customer should have to do that…EVER! And as far as the billing goes, I promise, when they say “its an automatic charge” or “the computer does that” they arent lying… There is little to no control over billing over the phone other than issuing little $20 credits here and there.
February 1st, 2010 at 9:47 pm
For 6 moths I paid my bill and no servace I finaly git fedup told them to fix it and thay sent yet another guy out who did nothing…the next bill came with a $38 charge for the guy coming out and NOT fixing it..Told comcast I wont pay till it’s fixed thay shut it off sent the bill to collection for 3x’s the amount I owed…How can you owe for a servace you never had?…This is B.S.
January 28th, 2010 at 8:31 pm
Randy its the same as when a tech carries in a 10year old beat to crap digital box, wharehouse gives us what wharehouse is given from managment, when they feel more worried about their books and bonuses they stop ordering stuff and reissue junk. Ofcourse then they turn around and complain at us about the sudden increase in gobacks and repeats.
Right now my area has a problem reissuing the old big giant black digital boxes, half fail within days, no to mention is INcompatible with tv caller id. That model DCT2000 has been put on the end of life list like 5 times but yet they stash them away and use them whenever they feel its time for “Customer First” lol that hole campaign was a joke as well. For every ad and slogon they put out they made 2 discisions for policy, stock, or sceduling that did the complete opposite. Its so bad now I dont even worry about the contractors, I been bagging inhouse techs with the workmanship code when I close workorders out. Its not hard to understand why either.
When you take a job and break down a route, your given max 1hour. That includes travel, activation/provisioning, using these crappy PDA’s that rarely work right, a full meter scan and filecreation/save that we have to do now that takes almost 10 minutes, these guys are left with about 20 minutes to physically do a job. Let me give you a real scenario.
Where I work average drive 15mins(best case). Meter scan 10 mins, 10-20 mins on PDA depending if I need to provision phone/internet(best case scenario without service issues/crashes; add another 10 mins if it needs a reboot) Add that up 35-65 minutes and I havent even touched the job yet, troubleshoot where the signal break down is, replace outlets, outside drop cable, put in maintenance tickets if needed(also done on PDA 5-10 mins for that). Strange that realworld breakdown shows us no way to do a job per hour every hour if I need 1 hour just to get there and do the side tasks, but yet corporate always has some bullshit study saying they alot us MORE time than actually needed. The DREAMBIG campaign is the only one that was truthful, cause these guys dream so big reality is a myth.
January 28th, 2010 at 11:32 am
just ordered comcast – and after two scheduled install attempts, they have not been able to bring a HDMI receiver for installation. Rather than bring the equipment I need to hook their service up to my television, they want me to drive to some office location and pick up a HDMI receiver – since they couldn’t coordinate with their installer to have them resolve this.
Certainly I can go pick something up, but why not make a simple phone call to their installer? Why place the technical burden of finding the right equipment directly upon their customer? Doesn’t that make the support and process more expensive for everyone involved?
Maybe I should be rethinking my decision to hook up with this company?
January 27th, 2010 at 10:46 am
I am having an ongoing problem with my cable tv service whenever it rains. Shortly after the rain begins, I, as well as my neighbors, lose cable tv. I have contacted Comcast and they tell me that they can make a service call in 2-3 days.
Hours (sometimes as many as 12) after the rain ends, television service is restored. Each time I place a service call, and each time a technician makes a service call to my house, I tell them the circumstances and suggest that it is probably a short somewhere in the line. Of course, at this point, the television is working, so the call is closed and the technician goes on his way, doing nothing.
Once again, I lost television service earlier this week during a rain storm, and as usual, Comcast set up a service call for two days later when the rain had stopped, and the problem had gone away…….until the next storm……..
January 22nd, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Somewhere in another post somebody mentioned the notion of allowing the FCC to step in and regulate Internet Service Providers such as Comcast. This is a great idea, especially when you consider the fact Comcast clearly has no clue about the fact their role in society is rapidly changing. No longer is the notion of having a data pipe into one’s home a simple matter of elective entertainment (i.e. cable TV) or casually “surfing the web.” In many cases, these data pipes have surpassed the role of the traditional telephone in terms of being a pipeline to safety (e.g. e911 service) and an important communications channel.
As our society continues to rely more and more on technology, I believe we should be holding the companies that provide the connectivity to an appropriate standard. In many respects, people’s safety and livelihood will depend on it.
Nobody likes the notion of regulation, but when left to its own devices and the dynamics of an unregulated marketplace, companies like Comcast will behave exactly as described within this site and countless other places where people express their frustrations.
January 20th, 2010 at 9:01 pm
………..Oh and as far as frustrations with Comcast Policy? I agree..none of the policies make a whole lot of sense and, in working for the devil, it sucked being placed in a position where we were FORCED to uphold them. and when i say FORCED i dont mean they say “do this or you lose your job”…no no no…I mean they take away any other options from employees just so they get their way. When a customer would ask me to do something, even as a supervisor, most of the time I was forced to say “i’m sorry, I dont have the ability to do that”….AND IT WASNT A LINE. Trust me, I had no reason not to WANT to help! I was extremely limited as to what the stupid (<—- as opposed to all of the other words that fit oh so well) would LET us do! There is no excuse for rudeness at all and, to anyone who got a rude and inconsiderate rep on the phone, I apologize. But most of the time the issue goes WAAAAAY beyond them. Beyond the call centers entirely!
January 20th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
I actually worked for comcast (note the past tense) and was a supervisor there. The main problem is that there is NO communication and/or widespread organization. one department takes care of one thing and another department takes care of another. The right hand very rarely knows what the left hand was doing. Agents were trained for 2 weeks and then stuck on the phone to learn as they go.
I worked in an outsourced call center in Texas (which irritated a lot of customers to begin with) but furthermore, our call center was in a part of Texas in which Comcast isnt even offered. haha. so when you call in saying how many problems you are having, its hard to be empathetic when our cable was working just fine with our local company. (and i’m so sorry. not meaning this to be rude at all, but hopefully this will clear up why it seems like the agent on the other end doesnt care. its probably becuase they dont
…sorry again)
Here’s the kicker: I worked there for 4 months before I was “promoted” (with no actual pay raise) to “supervisor” status, basically meaning a team that was there just to take escelations (a.k.a. Pissed Off Customers) who want to speak to a “supervisor”. I AM 19 YEARS OLD. If I call in anywhere and ask to speak to a supervisor becuase I’m THAT pissed off, I want to talk to someone a little closer to my mothers age. I wouldn’t even take a 19 year old seriously as a “supervisor” at McDonald’s.
Needless to say, if it strikes a 19 year old as being problematic and rediculous? There’s an issue.