Apparently The Reason Comcast Has Crappy Customer Service Is Because It Was Lacking A 'Customer Experience' VP

from the now-that-that's-been-solved... dept

Comcast is notorious for its terrible customer service. It's not hard to find story after story after story after story after story after story about Comcast's customer service failures. And those are all just from the past three months (and we skip over plenty of those stories as well). It's gone on for years. It's why Comcast keeps winning the Worst Company in America award.

Every time these things happen, some top exec from Comcast comes out of his or her cave to tell us that these things are unacceptable and will change. As Karl Bode at Broadband Reports sums up, it's becoming like clockwork:

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts emerges every six months and makes a promise to fix things, though it's always with a dismissive attitude. It's because we're so big that we see so many complaints, he'll say, as if every other major company has employees consistently making the news for falling asleep at customer homes, murder, digging in the wrong yard blowing up laptops, dishwashers or homes -- or even animal cruelty.

But, apparently that's all over now. You know what was missing? A "Senior VP of Customer Experience" and now Comcast's got itself one of those:

The latest seemingly bi-annual promise to fix their abysmal customer satisfaction ratings comes via Comcast Executive VP Neil Smit, who in a blog post informs us that Comcast has hired Charlie Herrin to be the company's new "Senior VP of Customer Experience." Herrin will, according to Smit, "reimagine the customer experience and ensure that we are delighting our customers at each touch point."

"Over the last few years, we’ve been incredibly focused on product innovation and delivering great content and technology experiences," insists Smit. "But this is only one half of the customer experience equation. The other half is operational excellence in how we deliver service. The way we interact with our customers – on the phone, online, in their homes – is as important to our success as the technology we provide."

That's an interesting rewriting of history. The reality, of course, is that while Comcast has improved speeds, it's spent an awful lot of its time over the past few years on buying up companies and getting regulatory approval to grow its monopolistic appetite. And, it seems noteworthy that each time Comcast tries to do a big merger, part of the rationale presented is that this will somehow improve the customer experience. And yet, now they're more or less admitting that was never actually true.

Furthermore, what giant monopolistic provider of service do you know that has a reputation for providing good customer service? Competition leads to both innovations and good customer service, and that's not something that Comcast really faces anywhere these days. A VP of Customer Experience isn't likely to change that

Filed Under: charlie herrin, customer experience, customer service, neil smit, reputation
Companies: comcast