Comcast’s customer experience is a mind-numbingly frustrating exercise in futility

Comcast’s customer service is shit. They can reply to you on Twitter all they want after you publicly complain but that doesn’t change the fact that after years of experience with their customer support, most of them don’t care and most importantly, don’t do their jobs correctly.

My experience this summer with Comcast has been one of frustration to say the least. When the Internet first went down in late June, I called Comcast’s customer service multiple times and each time a rep gave me a different story. Once it was the wiring through the house that was faulty, another time the modem was old and going up. For some reason it seemed that the information that each rep looked at was somehow different even though it was all contained in the same account file.

When I finally scheduled a technician to come out and take a look, he looked around the house, telling me that it wasn’t the modem, the reason he was sent out, it was an outside wiring problem and that was something that he wasn’t trained to do. He was an “inside guy” and we needed to get in touch with an outside guy to do the repairs. This, he told me, would take another 3-5 days before they contacted me to set up an appointment. He simply wasn’t equipped to handle the rigors of outside cable work.

So the modem started working again magically and then went down today. I called back to find out that we can’t schedule the “outside guy” because the first guy who came out weeks ago didn’t do his job correctly; he didn’t follow up after he left with whatever paperwork needed to be done to note that someone additional needed fix our service. So the woman on the phone told me that we needed to schedule another inside guy to come out and inspect the problem because they weren’t capable of getting an outside guy to come and fix what we need fixed.

After talking to a supervisor and explaining this whole ordeal, we agreed that tomorrow an inside/outside guy would come and bring a new modem so every possible base could be covered once we find the real error.

This kind of abysmal service Comcast could get away with before Verizon dove into the high-speed Internet game. But now that Verizon FiOS exists and there’s a company that can take Comcast’s customers away. It’s time to step up the customer experience.

Ries and Trout’s fourth immutable law of marketing, the Law of Perception, states that “marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions,” so going forward, if customers perceive either Comcast or Verizon to have sufficient, decent or simply bearable customer service, that company will begin to win the disenfranchised customers from the opponent company.

Ries and Trout go on to say “The perception is the reality. All truth is relative.” People will begin to bend their opinions based on what others say so if one person talks to another and saying that “Verizon came out and fixed my cable all in one trip, they did such a great job, better than Comcast would have ever done,” the other person begins to assume that Verizon offers better customer service. If enough of these occurrences take place, through word of mouth one company will begin to emerge as the more customer friendly service, which should in turn yield more business.

In short: Comcast now has competition and if they don’t want to lose subscribers to Verizon, they need to greatly increase customer satisfaction, otherwise their disenfranchised customers will jump to Verizon’s ship, hoping for a better experience, regardless of the reality on Verizon.