Comcast and Me: a Twitter tale, in seven (little) acts

Comcast has achieved renown for how they respond to customer service problems on Twitter.  An interesting social media case study, until it happened to me. 

9:45 AM. Internet and phone crash, just before a big client call. I'm a Comcast triple play customer. I got no data, only TV. Fortunately a colleague has a draft of the prezo so I'm able to call in changes from my iPhone and she sends it off before the meeting.


10:00 AM. Service is back. We start the call.  


Over-the-next-hour AM Comcast service craps out twice more. Good thing for cell phones. They make everyone (including ISPs) think "land lines, who cares?"


11:00 AM I call Comcast to complain, asking elegantly "WTF?" Comcast informs me, "We can get to it in 48 hours. If you were a business customer, we could do it sooner. But you're not."  Worse, until they send the repair guy out to investigate, they can't have their network people look into whether there is a problem in my neighborhood. 


My response? "NOOOOOOOO." (Cue SFX: guy throwing a fit)  "That's a terrible way to run a carrier. Even the phone company of yore was more on the ball." The customer service rep assures me TINMWCD (There Is Nothing More We Can Do. Why does Jarvis get all the nice acronyms?)


And then it dawns on me:  I am An Empowered Consumer. In the Post Mass Media World. In the wake of the Jarvis Playbook I don't need to threaten to throw a stink, I already stink! I've got 1,132 Twitter followers . So I wonder, if I Tweet, will anything come of it?


What follows is tweets,  with commentary in red. 


1. 
   hirshbergComcastFAIL: "Since ur a 'residential' subscriber, Comcast can't fix your internet/phone service for 48 hours." I feel so 2nd class!27 minutes ago from web    

1. 
   ComcastBonnie@hirshberg we fix folks based upon the available quota alloted to the techs in your area. not based on type of customer26 minutes ago from Seesmic Desktop
2. Yikes That was fast! Less than a minute. And it wasn't automated, Bonnie was talking to me! But what she said didn't square at all with what Comcast told me on the phone.
1. 1.     
   2. 
      hirshberg@ComcastBonnieThanks,but the comcast rep specifically told me, "if you were a business customer, we could get to you faster. But ur not."25 minutes ago from web in reply to ComcastBonnie
    
1. 
   hirshberg@ComcastBonnie As distressing as the service problem is, i appreciate your rapid attention to my tweet!25 minutes ago from web in reply to ComcastBonnie
2. I'm torn between their virtual attentiveness and their inattentiveness. I'm just delighted. And unhappy. 
3. 1.     
   2. 
      ComcastBonnie@hirshberg most areas have SLA's in contracts with business accounts, that's why.25 minutes ago from Seesmic Desktop in reply to hirshberg

   3. Holy contradiction, phone man! How can you "not distinguish based on type of customer" and simultaneously serve "business accounts" better because they contract for good service? That's what I'm talking about. I'm feeling distinctly steerage about being a residential customer. Even AT&T didn't say this to me before I threw them out last year!
      

      1. 
         
         hirshberg@ComcastBonnie So u do base service on customer type. Residential = no SLA = much slower repair time than AT&T or other LECs24 minutes ago from web in reply to ComcastBonnie
      2. 1. 
            ComcastBonnie@hirshberg o_O my parent's had verizon, who took three weeks to fix a no dialtone issue on their phone. it happens everywhere. manpower etc.22 minutes ago from Seesmic Desktop in reply to hirshberg

      So in the space of a few tweets we've gone from the lofty possibility of customer service in the era of transparency to "Dude, don't you know, phone service can suck. Just call my mom. Help in today's world...."
      

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   5. My takeaways: 
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   7. 1. Its just amazing you can complain and they are on it so fast! 
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   9. 2. Comcast is in a world of hurt about what kind of service they guarantee mere residential customers. Beyond the "we can fix it in 48 hours," silliness there is the fact that residential customers can use only so much high speed data, or else. Or that if you actually transfer data for more than 15 minutes continuously at the maximum speed you signed up for, they'll put you in the slow lane  
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   11. 3. I heart transparency.  Tell me what service level I do or don't get as a residential customer. When you tell me that triple play is such a deal, let me know that you are the cheap carrier with less service unless I'm a business customer. Tell me what I gotta pay for you not to cap my speed or throughput. 
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   13. 4. Of course we do have more transparency than before. When i was a kid in New York in the '70s both phone lines went out one day and mom had a fit! She looked at me, then outside (at manhattan, mind you)  and yelled, "We've lost communication with the outside world!" Back then she had no one to complain to but me and the wall. I was sent down the street to call New York Telephone from a pay phone and then hope they'd show up.  Which may explain why mom, in addition to using the phone more than anyone I know, is so damn curious about twitter. 
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Comments

[gfox]

Great example of customer service at least TRYING to use twitter to help customers. Not my experience with United Airlines with whom I've had a most unfortunate recent experience and tweeted it - even bothering to find their corporate twitter account and @ing them. No contact back, at all. Apparently, you have to be pissed enough to spend a weekend making a music video to get their attention: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

[Jeff Jarvis]

Peter,
But they didn't fix it. They just found a new way to say you're screwed. That's why Comcast still sucks. The goal is to get the service you paid for working, no matter who you are. I'd still throw a stink.

[DT]

I had a very different experience with @Comcastcares. My cable tv (also a triple play customer in rural VA)went out during the US Open Golf tournament (main reason I have cable is to watch golf) They fixed it remotely within a half hour and everything was back to normal.

[Mary Baum]

DT and Peter,

I notice a subtext here: If they fixed DT's cable for a golf game, were they mad Peter was using his residential service for business?

Did they want Peter to ask to upgrade to the business-class service? Peter, if you did, would they have fixed your outage? Or would they have told you there was a weeks-long delay for installation? (AT&T pulled that on a client of mine who had bought an existing business and just needed to transfer existing DSL . . . )

It kills me that these companies refuse to staff at levels to maintain service to paying customers - all in the service of a few points' worth of net earnings, so some VP's bonus can be a few thousand dollars bigger.

[Tom O'Brien]

Peter:

One time on the phone with Sprint I was so mad I went (while on hold) and bought the domain name www.sprintmustdie.com

I recently let it expire because I don't have that much negative energy in me.

It strikes me that Comcast twitter presence is a nice effort, but essentially a band-aid on a mortal wound. They need to fundamentally change how they care for customers rather than chase the really p*ssed ones around on Twitter.

I appreciate the efforts of Frank & others, but really, where is the commitment to do something different?

TO'B

[John Zeisler]

Peter - you should feel lucky. I spend $250 a month with Comcast, but when my internet connection crapped out it took 4 days to get a service call scheduled. Their CS couldn't/wouldn't escalate the call, blaming the delay on "the system". I immediately sent an email to the heralded "we.can.help@comcast.cable.com", the email site to quickly resolve Comcast issues, but NEVER heard back. I guess they only look at Twitter feeds these days, not email.
Four days later the tech shows up, tests the line and announces that their system upgrade was overdriving my cable modem, and fixes it. No apologies, no credit for downtime, and now I've got to negotiate with them again just to see a credit for lost service.
Their days are numbered.

[peter hirshberg]

I must have been on nice pills. Jarvis is right--- I was bamboozled. To be fair the problem was intermittent. It was a real disaster when all my communications crashed repeatedly in the time leading up to my phone meeting with executives at NYSE. I was just plain lucky that I had sent a copy of the slides to a colleague moments before the outage so she could finish them and send them on.

By the time I was on the phone with comcast the service was up, but the rep said "we clearly see a low signal going to your modem, so we need to trouble shoot it. We have to send a guy out and we can't start troubleshooting in the neighborhood until after we visit you. And that will happen in two days." He now famously added "if you were a business customer we could do it sooner." In full disclosure he also added "if it weren't intermittent and you still had no service we could probably get to it sooner too." But since the service was so iffy all morning and they had confirmed they did see a signal strength problem that needed fixing i felt and still feel second class. Its also been 24 hours and no one from comcast has contacted me to set up an appointment to come out tomorrow (2 days into the incident as promised) and do the trouble shooting.

As to whether comcast was secretly unhappy that I was doing business on the line, I doubt it. Im sticking ( i have no choice--- they'll throttle me down if i dont) within their bandwidth requirements. And who doesnt work from home? Thats the whole point of the internet, which is their only growth business. If they were smart they'd actually try to sell me their business service... i might be interested in unrestricted bandwidth and faster response if it were properly packaged and marketed to me. I pay apple a few hundred dollars a year for better support (applecare on several macs, procare for better attention at the genius bar, mobile me and one on one) and am delighted that when i get into a jam they mostly provide great attention and real answers. Somehow apple figured out how to run a service business better than one of Americas most vital telecommunication service companies. And that's why Jarvis is right to demand stink throwing here.

Jeff you have my word, I'm not done yet!

[Esteban Kolsky]

Thanks for highlighting the problem I have been talking about for months!

ComcastCares is not a better solution for Twitter, it is just a faster escalation ticket into the company. Problems are only solved if they could have been automated (which they won't do) so essentially we are talking about putting 6-10 people to replace an automated process (rebooting modems in most cases) which would cost less -- but also produce less PR.

Twitter for CS does not solve issues, but it certainly does make for good PR.

I would not end this stream at their assertion that since you are not a biz customer you don't count (what they are saying) since that is an assinine way to do biz (which I know is their latest excuse for we don't know what we are doing -- i am certain you can find at least one biz customer with same problem and same answers as you had -- we don't have capacity to handle this problem).

[vicki]

Late to this but as a Comcast customer (185 per month) here are the problems and solutions I've been offered:

1. Complete system outage: from Comcast "might be back in three days". It actually came back two hours later but after I'd moved to a friend's house to finish a project.

2. Macbook wouldn't connect: Comcast: 'macs are always a problem, buy a PC'.

3. For every other problem regardless of what it is Comcast's solution is to unplug, take the battery out of the router, wait 15 minutes and all will be fine. Never works.