Comcast Customer Service Woes
Today I was talking to a friend who happens to be a Comcast customer. This guy lives in a fairly rural area, and Comcast is his family’s only option for high speed access. Until 2 years ago, he had dial-up and bad cable. Then the new system arrived and he was able to obtain broadband speeds.
He also ended up with his local TV channels via Comcast, due to the stupidity of government regulations that prevent many cable customers from obtaining such channels via satellite. He’s been a Dish Network customer for years, and will never go elsewhere.
Things worked fine until about two months ago, when they started experiencing random outages. Their Internet connection would die, then restart itself. At the same time, they’d experience image pixellation on the locally provided Comcast channels. A service call was placed. Then the fun began.
The first guy showed up, inspected the house wiring (all installed by Comcast 2 years earlier), and said it was fine. The problem must be on the pole. Two days later a bucket truck pulled up, the pole was checked, and also pronounced problem-free. They said the problem was inside the house, which they couldn’t touch. When my friend said the earlier engineer had cleared the house wiring, the truck operator said “oh those inside wiring guys, what do they know?”
It’s now been two months, and the problem is still not resolved fully. Comcast said they’d completely replace all the wiring and transceivers, so a crew pulled a new line…across the front lawn. Oh, sorry…they weren’t allowed to dig the trench. So they left a long snake of cable across the lawn. Several more weeks elapsed, and the trench guys finally appeared. They dug the trench, and installed a PVC conduit for the new line, then disappeared. The temporary wire is still snaking its way across the lawn, making it hard to mow the spring grass.
This is customer service? Is it any wonder Comcast has a bad name among so many consumers? I had similar problems with them half a decade ago, and sent the company packing in favor of DSL. One would think they’d have learned by now.
This is why competition is good. More communities need multiple vendors, as well as the ability to choose service providers. Hopefully this will soon be the case, as broadband continues spreading into more isolated areas. Single-provider markets inevitably lead to bad customer satisfaction.