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VIDEOThe Bad Boys of Business: Comcast
Revenues surge as customer satisfaction plummets.
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Comcast (CMCSA) has never been known for its stellar customer service, but the story of LaChania Govan is something of a revelation. The 25-year-old working mom admits she had been calling Comcast rather persistently to fix her cable service. It took 40 calls to the Philadelphia-based telecom giant before Govan finally reached a customer service representative who solved her problem.
At last, Govan felt relieved. Then came the bill with the wrong name.
“You have to be kidding me,” Govan recalls thinking.
While extreme, this kind of Comcastic customer service isn’t rare. In his article Comcast Must Die, Bob Garfield relates the pains he took to fix his cable.
August 28. Installer doesn't show up at 11:00 a.m. Or 12:00 p.m. Or 1:00 p.m. Or 2:00 p.m. Or 3:00 p.m. Or 4:00 p.m. Or 5:00 p.m. After a call to customer service and 15 minutes on hold, Comcast promises to investigate and call back. Comcast doesn't call back. Total time waiting for installer: six and a half hours. Sunday squandered.
Sure -- cable companies all over the world don’t exactly have the best reputation for making customers feel warm and fuzzy. But there’s something about Comcast that seems to bring out the worst in people. Something so vile and offensive that many customers seem altogether consumed by their abhorrence for the company.
“There are very few institutions in this society that inspire the hatred I feel towards Comcast,” writes one Internet user on an Advertising Age message board.
“Comcast is evil and is Satan's firstborn child," writes another on Techcrunch.com.
Comcast acknowledges its imperfections when it comes to customer service and says it's working on it. "We are focused on providing a superior customer experience, offering the best products delivered reliably and serviced well," the company said in a statement. "We know we have a lot of work still to do, but have a real commitment to this effort and we are making steady progress.” It also said its customer-service ratings improved in June in response to its efforts.
Net neutrality -- or the principle that Internet Service Providers shouldn’t interfere with how subscribers access the web -- has been a hot-button issue for Comcast users for years. Despite offering “unlimited” Internet service, Comcast has a cap for how much data can be transmitted by a single user through its network. If the user goes over, Comcast cuts the service.
To be fair, the imposed limit doesn’t affect 99% of Comcast users. According to a statement released by Comcast: “Customers who are notified of excessive usage typically consume more than 100 times the average national Comcast bandwidth usage. Illustrative examples of such usage on a monthly basis would include: sending or receiving 256,000 photos, downloading 30,000 songs, sending or receiving 13 million e-mails.”
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