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.
- 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.
- I'm torn between their virtual attentiveness and their inattentiveness. I'm just delighted. And unhappy.
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!
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...."
- My takeaways:
- 1. Its just amazing you can complain and they are on it so fast!
- 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
- 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.
- 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.