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
September 1st, 2010 at 2:09 pm
I have friends in Salt Lake City using Comcast triple play for TV, phone, internet, and they are happy, don’t seem to be experiencing outages or slowdowns.
We are about 20 miles north in Farmington, also near Kaysville. Thinking about becoming a subscriber, I’ve been asking folks along my jogging route in Farmington and Kaysville if they use Comcast, and if so, their opinion of the quality. Kaysville subscribers are happy, but my immediate neighbors in my part of Farmington are not.
So, the message I take away from all of the above horror stories and what various Utah residents have to say is this:
Billing issues aside, the dependability of the service seems to depend on the local equipment (buried fiber optic and other cables, any switching gear that is applicable, and likely in-home behind the wall wiring and how the in-home splitters are arranged). Since our immediate neighbors are not happy, and since our 30 year old home was previously remodeled and god knows what done to the behind the wall wires at that time, we will NOT become Comcast subscribers.
August 27th, 2010 at 2:16 pm
For Laurel #75 – I had this very same problem happen – even when they do actually say they receive the equipment back in the Chicago area you will likely receive those collection notices. Here is what I did, and I will say that this did work – for me; us this strategy if you so wish, but I am not an Attorney so I cannot make any guarentees – When I receive the collection notices I write clearly across the face of the notice, “I dispute the validity of this bill in its entirity.” place my signature underneath with the date. Keep photocopies! When talking with any Representative of the offending Company – keep very good notes and get NAMES! Now when I receive a phone call I tell the person who called all the dates, whom I worked with, dates and outcome of the call; and I always end the statement with the above sentenance: “As stated on your notice of (date) I resubmitted the invoice with the following statement (now I say the statement exactly as I wrote it) then the very last thing I say is – so that I can maintain an accurate log of information for any potential legal hearing if it becomes neccesary – What is your full name – spell it please! and position? Keep the tone polite but insistant – this kind of conversation happend 3 times and then they got the drift that I was not going to pay them one penny more and if they wanted to go to Court on this I had all the documented evidence to support my case of their incompentence! I have not heard from them since the end of June 2010! Like I said I have used this strategy several times, and have been very successful with it – but it is not for the faint of heart – they will push back and you have to stay calm and be what I call quietly insistant. Best of luck in settling this with Comcast they are one of the Big Corporate mentality Companies that just does not care about the small individual user any longer – they have all lost sight of the fact that if it wasn’t for us small-fry they would not be in existance today!
August 25th, 2010 at 1:43 pm
We’ve spent our staycation staying at home waiting for Comcast to show up. After standing in a very long line twice and receiving a “new” converter box each time, we still didn’t have more than 5 channels, so we arranged for the tech to come. The tech finally arrived (though NOT within the arrival window) and after fiddling around with a few boxes, said he thought our picture would be back once the activation was completed, and that he was going to leave for 30 minutes and then return. Well, you know where this is leading. After countless minutes waiting on hold, emails containing promises, etc, days later he’s downstairs (finally!!!) with my husband trying to pinpoint the problem. I have absolutely no faith in his ability to do so (he probably wasn’t trained to fix the real problem), and we have already decided to switch to FIOS or another provider. The service we’ve received from Comcast is appalling – worse than any company I have ever dealt with, and I’m a “fifty-something” homeowner (have owned a home and dealt with service providers for more than 25 years). I hear from neighbors, friends, coworkers, and others that they are switching from Comcast, tranlating into tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue for Comcast. A hard lesson for a corporate service provider: when you get greedy and cannot keep up with customer service demands, you will never be as profitable as you might have been.
August 24th, 2010 at 6:48 pm
I came home from work today and received a telephone call from Comcast verifying a service call for the next day between 11am-2pm. I immediately called them stating I was not the person to request the service call, but my father who lives down the street and requested for another cable outlet be installed in a new additional room to the home – after clearly identifying himself and his account number, telephone number, and address. I attempted to have the service call re-scheduled for the same time for my father because Comcast had canceled his appointment. I was told by Krista in the Salisbury, MD office that I could not do so because I was not on his account. My response was if Comcast canceled his appointment and are not holders of the account, then I can certainly change the appointment. I attempted to speak with a supervisor (Greg in the Baltimore/Towson, MD office) who was non-negotiable and unwilling to give me his full name or identification number. Comcast (both the customer no-service agent Krista and the equally unimpressive supervisor Greg) clearly admitted to the mistake, but would not rectify the situation by reassigning the appointment to my father who made and confirmed it in the first place. My first telephone call in the morning is to Ms. Tina Waters, SVP for Customer Operations in the corporate office. It is funny how the bills never fail to arrive to the proper address, yet service calls do not! My father will also attempt to collect on the $20 credit for a missed appointment…stay tuned for the results.
August 23rd, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Great here we go again. I called this company a number of times in the past coupe of months to get my bill lowered by getting rid of channels that I really don’t need. I managed to save twenty dollars by doing this.Well low and behold I got another bill from them today and guess what I got a increase of $5.11. Does it never end with these people? $99.00 for service from Verizon is looking real good to me, I lost all respect and creditability for this two bit company.
August 14th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
Here is my most recent Comcast drama:
• MID-JUNE:
o I disconnected cable and internet service from my residence in Evanston, Illinois.
o The agent I spoke with promised me boxes to return my cable modem and DVR would be mailed. I had not received them within 14 days.
• EARLY JULY:
o I brought the equipment with me to Minneapolis, where I am living this summer. I called Comcast Chicago and asked the agent what I should do. She informed me that I could return my equipment to a service center in Minneapolis (I now know this to be untrue, but she was a Comcast employee, so I believed her!)
o I returned the equipment to the Comcast service center in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. The location was very busy, so the reps on site instructed me to put my equipment in a return drop box. I did not receive a receipt.
• MID-JULY:
o I received a bill for the unreturned equipment! I called Comcast Chicago. The rep informed me that I was NOT supposed to return my equipment in a different market. He was very unhelpful, but at my insistence opened up a trouble ticket. I asked when he would have an update for me. He replied, “Uhh…. you should call back in a week and maybe we’ll know something more.”
o I then directly called Comcast’s St. Paul, Minnesota office and spoke with Kristy. Kristy was FANTASTIC. While she knew it would be tricky to navigate the system, Kristy and her supervisor were able to get employees on the ground in the Twin Cities warehouse to put their hands on my equipment within a week. Throughout this process, Kristy called me back multiple times to keep me informed about what was going on.
• LATE JULY:
o I subsequently received several other calls (automated and live) from the Chicago office, again trying to collect $515 or the missing equipment. I explained to them the situation, gave them my tracking ticket information. The rep apologized and said it was fixed.
o I then received ANOTHER bill. I wrote to the Comcast Customer Care escalations team.
• FRIDAY, AUGUST 6TH:
o Sarah Elders (800.630.2140 x51508) called me from the Executive Care team. Sarah has been unsympathetic throughout the process. I gave her Kristy’s information so she could follow up on the process thus far. KRISTY called me back to tell me they’d spoken. I repeat, KRISTY, the regular employee in the Twin Cities, gave me good customer service while my “Executive Care” rep did nothing.
• WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 11TH:
o I called Sarah to follow up. She confirmed that the equipment had been located in the Twin Cities and that the warehouse manager was supposed to overnight the equipment to Chicago. She said my account would not be credited until the equipment arrived in Chicago “for accounting purposes.” COMCAST HAS BEEN SITTING ON MY EQUIPMENT FOR SIX WEEKS AND I HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL THEY GET IT IN THE RIGHT OFFICE? THAT MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.
• SATURDAY, AUGUST 14TH:
o I received a collections notice for my DVR from Equipment Recovery Services. (reference #01597588335).
MY EQUIPMENT HAS BEEN IN COMCAST’S POSSESSION FOR SEVEN WEEKS AND YET I AM STILL RECEIVING COLLECTIONS NOTICES.
August 13th, 2010 at 9:54 am
Our YMCA has been batteling with comcast now for over 3 months. After completing a “digital upgrade” our digital TVs on our cardio equipment all of a sudden would not pick up the digital channels that we were paying for. Comcast insisted that this was just an upgrade to their services but that we would have to place a “box” on our treadmills in order to be able to view all the channels that we were paying for. This is ridiculous, as when you are running on a treadmill you don’t want to have to get off the machine to change your tv channel on the box that is now mounted on the front of the machine. After MORE phone calls we were finally told that we could get a “head in system” that would require us to sign a long term contract and raise our monthly rate for cable by $250 per month (at a not for profit organization) to receive the minimal amount of channels that we were already paying for yet not receiving! We finally, after months of arguments, gave in a signed the contract at the end of Jun 2010. It is now AUGUST 13 and we have yet to hear from Comcast (after 3 phone calls to our “rep”) about when our system will be installed and we have received our first bill at the New Higher rate! Now mind you, with all of this, the reps on the phone have REFUSED to let me talk with a manager. Don’t ever purchase comcast for your business or your home.
August 11th, 2010 at 12:24 am
You guys think all of your complaints are bad? I’ve dealt with all of that, but you’ll never believe what happened to me. Not long ago we moved into our beautiful, brand new home. Of course, as usual, it took weeks for Comcast to figure everything out, supposedly because no cable line was laid down our easement yet even though I repeatedly tried to tell that there was in fact one. So then the four Comcast guys finally came to get everything installed (don’t even ask why they needed four people, that’s still not clear to me). About half an hour into their visit, I was inside working, I decided to go out and ask about their progress. As I walk out of my front door and around the corner, I discover, to my great astonishment, a Comcast guy URINATING AGAINST MY HOUSE! Urinating!! Against my brand new house!!! I was so flabbergasted by this, and disturbed (and a little concerned, since my husband wasn’t home and I was alone with the four Comcast men), that I didn’t even know what to do, and just turned around and walked back inside. I never even filed a claim with Comcast because I was too embarrassed by the whole ordeal, but plenty of friends and family members have heard the story by now, and we, like a number of them, have canceled our service with Comcast. Free at last.
August 10th, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Actual conversation with a Comcast CRS today:
Me: Hello, I had a promotion that provided me with free premium channels that is going to expire this month so I would like to remove them from my account.
CSR: Okay no problem, would you like that effective today?
Me: Yes please. Now I have a payment due in two weeks for the billing cycle (8/9/10-9/9/10) that has a charge for these premium channels.
CSR: Yes, you must pay the full amount for this bill and then on your next bill you will see the adjustment for the downgraded channels and a credit for this month.
Me: But I do not have access to the premium channels until Sept 9th, correct? They will be gone as of today.
CSR: Yes, that’s correct
Me: So this month I am paying for premium channels that I do not have access to during this month?
CSR: (Realizing how completely illogical this is)…Uhh yes.
Me: So my balance cannot be changed this month?
CSR: No, you must overpay this month for the channels and then next month you will see a refund.
Me: You can just put a credit on my account and will pay the remaining balance?
CSR: No, you must pay for the premium channels this month and then next month you will be refunded for them, the bill was already sent out.
Me: So I am going to overpay you this month, once again for channels I can no longer access only for you to turn around next month to refund me this same money?
CSR: The bill already went out.
August 10th, 2010 at 5:06 pm
I am going to be giving Comcast the boot after many happy years with them… I can honestly say that I never had a problem with the service they provided, I would always recommend them to friends and family when they moved in the area, and I would always tell people that were having issues with them that I thought they were great… Well, all that changed pretty quickly today! I have Comcast in two locations, my home and a friend that needed help paying for some of her bills. I told her I could cover utilities and I immediately called Comcast for her cable needs. They came, seeing she had no TV first said they could not set up her cable, and then decided to do it anyways… Once the TV arrived two weeks later we found that the cable box was not working at all, the time would not even come on the cable box… I was out of town when this happened so when I arrived back I called the man who set up the cable (he had requested I call him to service the cable if I had an issue), after leaving two messages and allowing ample time for him to call me back I finally called Comcast. Comcast informed me, the customer that has never been late once on a payment, has nothing but kind words to say about the company, and has been a “valued customer” for five years, that I would still have to pay for my cable due to the fact that I didn’t call them right away! They even sent out another man to look at the cable and he confirmed that my box had NEVER been authorized for use!! So, even though they know I was never able to use it, and even though I have been an ideal customer for years NEVER asking for handouts or freebies, they are telling me I owe nearly $400 for a service my friend never even received. What awful customer service! The manager spoke to me as though I was an idiot, telling me how I still could have hooked up cable to get basic TV… Thanks for that, even though I asked for the premium package your basic crap cable sounds like a great deal for almost $400!! Thanks Comcast, but NO THANKS!!
My question is: Do you have any respect to the loyal customers that have been with you for years? For over five years I never complained, I never asked for rebates or hand outs, I never called trying to get money off my bill… But, when I really do have a complaint, a real issue, you completely disregard me. I find this LACK of customer support unforgivable and completely disgusting! You have lost yet another LOYAL customer to Verizon, and all my friends and family that ask from now on, I will say DO NOT GO WITH COMCAST WHATEVER YOU DO!!