You’ve no doubt by now heard the story of the AOL VP who recorded a call with a Comcast service rep, trying to cancel his Comcast service. If you haven’t heard the call, here it is:
The linked story makes the case that the rep in the recorded call is being made a scapegoat for following Comcast policies.
Comcast’s response to the call:
Tom Karinshak, Comcast’s (CMCSA) senior vice president of customer experience, issued an official apology on the company’s website stating that, “the way in which our representative communicated with them is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives.”
But is that the case? Was the rep’s behavior inconsistent with Comcast policies?
It turns out the rep wasn’t going rogue, according to Lauren Bruce, a former Comcast customer account executive. “Unless a customer was moving, we were encouraged to use retention techniques”.
If someone states that they are dissatisfied with service, the customer service representative must first ask why they are dissatisfied before proceeding with the request. The goal is always to retain customers or convince them to buy a higher-priced service.
You get the sense, reading this, that Comcast puts their reps in an impossible situation, one where the price is paid (literally) by the customer.
Customer service agents are instructed to connect customers to a manager if they become particularly angry and insist on speaking with one. Yet Bruce says that in her office, managers were rarely accessible to the employees, so she often had to deny the request. “Comcast is trying to operate lean, so you weren’t given the support you needed,” she says.
The poor work environment made it difficult to help customers, she adds. “I always felt really disempowered to do the right thing. … It was all about the dollar,” Bruce says. “They didn’t care about the hours you had to work or whether or not their policies made sense for you in their job. The system was really outdated and slow, which is always a drag when you’re trying to help someone efficiently.” She adds that “management was poor” because of constant churn among supervisors.
And just in case you think this is simply one person’s view, take a minute to read the confessions of a Comcast video repair agent. I want to use the word shocking, but it all rings true.
M. gives the example of removing the code for HD/DVR service, which will cut a chunk off the monthly bill, but which will eventually render the set-top box inoperable.
“Then you call back, we add it back on, and you’re back where you started, except we don’t tell you that,” he explains. “We don’t give out what we’re doing to fix your box because we have been told long ago that we are to fix your equipment, not talk about your billing.”
This exact thing just happened to me with another provider. This makes me feel like this is a standard industry practice. Grrr.
UPDATE: Just to add more proof to the pudding, in case you had any doubts about the “confessions” post above, check out this Verge post, Here’s why your Comcast rep is yelling at you. Yeesh.
When will people wake up and demand the cable providers/ISPs local monopolies should be outlawed and then we might see better service.
I have no love for Comcrap but Ryan Block was being a bit of a jerk on the call as well. Listening to it I wondered if he was doing it on purpose so he could release audio of it that would go viral. If I was in the same situation I would have given a simple reason for wanting to leave and if that didn’t work I would have said I’m done with this conversation and hung up. He let it go on so he could record it, put it on the web and make Comcrap look bad.
It’s not difficult to make Comcast look bad.
Had Block simply hung up, his account would probably not have been cancelled as requested. Recording the call was a public service, IMO.
Wish i could say any of this was surprising. These are the shitty oligopolies we’ve all created after deregulating utilities for decades.
Literaly anyone who has worked in customer support in the last decade knows that the Comcast rep was at the mercy of shitty policy.
Really??? I thought he was a model of calm and patience. Bear in mind that his wife had already had 10 minutes of the guy before Ryan took over, and I still didn’t hear him get aggressive or sarcastic. There was only the brief comment about whether this was all a big practical joke and he was being ‘punked’. Other than that, he just tried to move things on in a non-provocative way.
Frankly, it’s completely unreasonable for a customer to have to fight to get a simple request actioned like that.
I would have been demanding a supervisor after about 5 minutes.
I would never stay on the phone with someone for 20 minutes. I’d politely ask to speak with a supervisor or end the call and call back to get someone else. No way would I go back and forth for 10 minutes without resolution.
Not really. Everyone knows how difficult it is to cancel services like cable, internet, phone etc. The easiest way to do it is to say you’ve already signed up with something else (like satellite) so trying to get you stay is pointless.
And replaced with what? It’s not like the infrastructure for this stuff is cheap.
Asking for a supervisor is pointless – the supervisor is just another pimple squeezing jackass that won the lottery that night for the use of the title “supervisor.” They rarely have any more power to do anything than the first idiot you spoke with.
True, but if companies aren’t even allowed the chance to try to compete nothing’s going to change. Comcast basically paid Verizon to abandon its FIOS efforts, and there’ve been cases of municipalities refusing to permit companies attempting to provide a broadband alternative simply because they didn’t want to offend big cable providers who’ve written large checks to them.
Any subscription service lives or dies by customer retention. Unfortunately, it’s easier, and more cost-effective, to make cancelling a subscription difficult than it is to take away the reasons your subscribers would want to cancel. Since cable subscriptions are some of the most expensive, it’s natural that those companies would try the hardest to avoid cancellations. As the Verge article succinctly puts it “Comcast has turned its customer service reps into sales reps.”
The smartest way to approach this situation, if you’re in it, is to work the system to avoid as many hurdles as possible. Knowing the way Comcast incentivizes it’s Retention reps, I’d call at the beginning of the month, when a rep is least concerned about their “gates”, and also expect to spend the full 660 seconds being badgered by the rep. I’d say as little as possible burning up the “average time to resolution” and hope they’re smart enough to cut their losses and eat the cancellation.
Did you seriously just write “grrr” in this post?
The more I read about this situation, the more I’m kinda starting to feel like to Rep behaved this way HOPING that something like this would happen and Comcast would be exposed. Instead of being the “sold out” employee that one would initial expect him to be hearing his pleas, it’s actually starting to seem that he may be a very disgruntled employee that hates his company and did this to spite them. The Fucked up part though is that his hate for his company is not customers’ faults. He should just quit if that’s the case.
I don’t think they should be outlawed, I just think it should be a HELLUVA lot easier for new startups to enter the arena, without these companies being able to lobby for roadblocks.
That pendulum swang a long time ago. And then back again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System
…back when we actually still had a majority of office-holders who understood the danger of allowing any company, or consortium of companies, to become too powerful in their market.
nonsense. he was 1000x calmer than most would be. he doesn’t need to hang up — that’s what they want you to do. instead he was patient and repeatedly only that he wanted to end the service. nothing else was required of him.
you’re doing mental gymnastics, for reasons unknown. I don’t know how difficult it is to cancel, having never done it. and the notion that one must lie to their service provider is insane.
the fact that it took that long is solely on comcast. he asked for a disconnect and it took them 20 minutes to agree to do it. that’s on them, and nobody else. you’re just being obstinate.
It’s fine that they need to ask why you’re leaving, but this rep is TOO STUBBORN…