Comcast: a role model for what your business should NOT be

The Comcast user experience and customer service is an unbelievable sequence of frustrations. I was already tired of playing their “please bring my rates back to normal” game every 6 months, but now my bill gets increased every other month. Playing this stressful game with Comcast every other month is insane.

I tried to login to my account to check what was going on, but guess what, I couldn’t remember my account’s username. The reason: Comcast assigns a Comcast email for you when you create your account, so it’s really cumbersome for you to remember such yet another email, that you use for nothing but to manage your Comcast account. Hello Comcast, this is 2011!

I click in the helpdesk chat option to talk to someone to retrieve my user name. I’m redirected to the chat briefing page and a new window opens with the same contents. Why? Didn’t they care to test that two pages are opening with the same content, just to confuse the user?

I dismiss the extra page, enter some info and log in the chat session. The chat window is a mess. It doesn’t scroll down automatically, and when I move focus away from it, it scrolls back up. REALLY frustrating experience. If the window is out of focus, the page doesn’t show any notifications telling that the support analyst has replied. So the customer has to keep going back there and scrolling down to see if anything happened. The analyst replied to me once “May I know are we still connected?” – that’s a mix of hilarious, ironic, and really bad experience. Most impressively, if you scroll down then click in the “Type here” box… the chat window scrolls all the way up again! The cherry on the top of the cake is that the page has a resize “grip” button in the lower right, but it simply doesn’t work AT ALL. How, Comcast, how can you fail in so many points?

The analyst asks for my account number. If I don’t know my username, why the hell would I know my account number? He’s not able to retrieve the account number from my phone number, because it doesn’t match the one in my account. Why? Because in the past, Comcast assigned a phone number to my account (for its phone/voice services, which I have no interest in having), and I’m supposed to remember such an extra phone number. In a previous helpdesk session some time ago, I asked them to replace the phone number in the account with my own phone number. They said it would be a pleasure to help me, and then told it was done successfully. Now I realize I just wasted my time, since the update didn’t work at all.

The analyst took an unbelievable amount of time to find my account number given my service address. Is he a junior intern or something similar? I’d be expecting this to be a really common scenario. Whatever, I was able to find an old file with my account number in my computer and passed it to the analyst. He seems to be really relieved, and gives me my username. I start another chat window with someone from the financial department. I have then to re-provide all the information I provided before! The agent took again a long time to reply, and provided me an interesting reading while I was waiting: the Comcast Customer Guarantee. Sounded like a joke:

• “We will treat you and your home with courtesy and respect.” Why do you need a guarantee for that? Serious businesses call this ethic and that’s implicit for
  them.
• “We will continually offer the best and most video choices”. Why do you care having something as ambiguous and vague as this in a customer guarantee? This is the typical business mumbo-jumbo that can’t be measured, and ends up just causing frustration and failed expectations.
• “We will offer easy-to-understand packages and provide you with a clear bill.” What a joke! Your “Partial Month Charges & Credits” section looks like a puzzle game. How are average costumers supposed to understand why descriptions like “11 days @ $1.4309/day based on a monthly rate of $42.95” sometimes refer to a charge, sometimes to a credit? Fail.
• “We will give you a 30-day, money-back guarantee”. Like the lemon law was the biggest news in town.
• To be fair, the only thing that stands out is that Comcast will give customers $20 if they (1) are late to an appointment or (2) require more than one appointment. And that’s it.

After 10 minutes of chat, the agent told me that “It seems your bill had a slightly increase.” So am I wasting all this time to hear that? Looks like I’m talking to the Ents in the Lord of The Rings, that spend a zillion hours to conclude obvious things. Tell me something I didn’t know! In fact, Comcast has been “slightly increasing my bill” since 2008, and now twice per month!

In a grand finale for my wasted time, the agent gave me a unique sample of the standard Comcast replies, with lots of buzzwords and mumbo-jumbo:

It is because we’re continuing to experience increased business and operational costs, while making continued investments in next-generation technology to deliver innovations. Pricing adjustments happen at different times of the year based on factors like new products becoming available, service enhancements and other increased
operating expenses Doc ID 1287331

What a marvelous piece of BS! My services didn’t change a thing, and you tell me you are not competent enough to keep your operational costs under control in the last 3.5 years? I wonder what the Doc ID 1287331 is for. Am I talking to a robot pre-programmed to provide default replies to customer questions? Was the guy copying the answer from a standard helpdesk answer repository and forgot to remove its ID? Why do you care showing your BS reply’s Doc Id to me, Comcast? Isn’t your “I can’t do anything at all” answer painful enough?

The analyst’s final comment: Actually I cannot make any adjustment to the rate, however you can call our sales department at 1-800-9346489 for them to make the changes if needed. Yeah, I know exactly the kind of change I want to do. Change to Verizon FIOS or
Quest/CenturyLink.