Comcast 'Cares' About Not Listening To Customers, Being Obnoxious And Refusing To Cancel Service

from the incredible dept

It's not much of a secret that broadband providers will bend over backwards to try to keep you from cancelling. In fact, many people realize that if you want to get a lower broadband bill you should just threaten to cancel. Rather than actually cancelling, you get transferred to a "retention specialist" who is paid on commission for annoying you into not cancelling. A little over a month ago, Tim Lee at Vox had some of the details, specific to Comcast:

"Everything was very commission-based," says Adam Reinardy, who worked in a Comcast call center in Minnesota until 2008. "You lost commission if you gave deals. If you retained a customer without giving them any sort of deal, you got commission on it."

That's all useful background for the following recording of Ryan Block (former editor-in-chief of Engadget and the founder of gdgt) trying to cancel his Comcast service. The recording starts approximately 10 minutes into the call, at which point Block is clearly already quite frustrated about the whole thing, and the Comcast customer service rep is clearly just trying to play his "part" of getting an answer to why Block is cancelling, so that he can then try to jump onto his big bag of tricks to try to badger and bully Block into staying. It gets more and more painful: The call is pretty much what you'd expect, but taken to a level that verges on Saturday Night Live-level parody. The customer service rep clearly has a script of how to respond to any "reason," but Block won't take the bait by giving him a reason. He just wants to cancel. Even towards the end, after he agrees to cancel the service and promises not to ask any more, he keeps on asking. Block asks when he's going to cancel the service, and the guy pretends that he's "working on it." When Block finally tells him to not speak until it's done, the guy then admits (of course) that it's done. In between all of this, the various salesy pitches get more and more ridiculous. "We're the fastest, guaranteed!" "Why not go with the company you know?" "You'll have to go to the store to return your cablecard!"

Comcast, of course, is famous for their horrible customer service. Just a few months ago, Comcast (and Time Warner Cable) were voted the absolute worst by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, which is "considered the most comprehensive customer satisfaction survey in the United States." That was just a month after Comcast was voted the Worst Company in America by Consumerist. I haven't been a Comcast customer in ages following the October from hell when they cut out my internet service every day at 10am, and when I'd call, they'd tell me it was for "scheduled maintenance." And that it should "be back by 4pm." When I asked if it was "scheduled" for the next day, they'd tell me they couldn't tell me that information. Nor could they explain why I hadn't been told of this "scheduled" maintenance or why they couldn't refund me for all that broadband I'd paid for but couldn't use.

Comcast has been trying, for many years, to change that view with its "Comcast Cares" tagline: But, as a pretty long history and this call clearly demonstrate, Comcast leaves off the full version of Comcast Cares in its promo material:

Filed Under: cancelling service, comcast cares, customer service, retention specialist, ryan block
Companies: comcast