Comcast's Former Twitter Chief Says Dismal Support Won't Get Fixed Until Comcast Stops Being A Cheapskate

from the captain-obvious dept

While Comcast gets a lot of well-deserved grief for having the worst customer service in any industry, the company was actually among the first companies to use effectively Twitter as a front-line customer service tool, giving the company a more human face and a more direct line to customer issue resolution. One of the people running Comcast's Twitter presence was Frank Eliason, who not only took on an entire Internet's worth of Comcast-related anger on a daily basis, but from what I saw as a telecom beat blogger during his tenure was well-liked by most of the Comcast customers who dealt with him. Eliason left Comcast back in 2010, and has since marketed himself as an expert at treating customers properly.

It's worth noting that despite Eliason's help, Comcast wasn't able to shore up its abysmal customer service back then because Twitter was essentially a band aid attached to a rotten apple. As a result, Comcast's struggles continue today. In a blog post, Eliason rather politely gives Comcast some fairly simple advice: stop upselling everyone all the damn time, and more importantly, stop being cheap:

"Customer service is often the most expensive line on any company’s balance sheet, especially for a company like Comcast which has more than 300 million interactions each year. To help mitigate this we have watched company after company shift service to the cheapest source possible. Call centers tried to shift to become sales centers. This is why any time a customer calls, they’re pitched everything under the sun instead of actually helping you with the reason why you called in the first place. We have been in a age of outsourcing, and finding the cheapest means possible to provide customer service. Comcast has become the poster child for this shift in company thinking."

While Eliason's well intentioned, he likely knows Comcast will never make the kind of financial investment required to improve its customer service, since it lacks the competitive incentive to make these improvements. With no competitive pressure, and DSL providers actually backing away from DSL users they don't want to upgrade (giving cable a larger and tougher monopoly than ever before), there's really no financial penalty for skimping on customer service. The result is what we've all grown accustomed to: a decade of stories about low-quality subcontracted Comcast technicians that fall asleep on the job, blow up homes, occasionally murder people and get arrested for torturing and spray painting kittens (seriously).

With the company trying to get regulatory approval for its Time Warner Cable deal, Comcast has been making an awful lot of promises about finally fixing its unprecedentedly-awful support. Comcast has even gone so far as to hire a new VP of "Customer Experience" and design a new app that tries to tell you when your barely-trained technician is scheduled to arrive. But these are all still inexpensive band aids for a problem that runs to the root: Comcast's not spending the serious money necessary to improve horrible customer service because it doesn't have to. We've spent a decade gutting regional regulatory authority because of an often blind aversion to any regulations whatsoever, yet we've done little to nothing to seriously improve broadband competition woes.

As a result, Comcast's customer satisfaction rankings are actually getting worse, and not even the best advice will be changing that anytime soon.

Filed Under: cost center, customer support, frank eliason
Companies: comcast