Sunday: Cable internet outage. Margie calls. After being told there’s a 110 minute wait time on hold, someone immediately gets on the line with her (which, I guess, is the better way to err). They note there’s a problem in the neighborhood that’s under repair. Internet comes back later.
Monday. Margie works from home. Hilarity ensues as the internet connection bobs up and down like Don Knotts’ adams apple. Calls to Comcast yield a similar explanation. Everything is copacetic by end of day.
Tuesday: I work from home. About 8:30a the connection goes down. I call Comcast. Very nice lady tells me there’s no outage showing in the area. I schedule a house call. I am told that if the problem turns out to be Comcast’s, the house call is free. If it turns out to be ours (bad cable, user error (PEBCAK), whatever), we’ll have to pay a $40 service charge. Fine. First available tech is Wednesday, when nobody will be home. I opt for early Thursday,
when I will be. Connection comes back up shortly before 10a.
Wednesday: Margie and I both in the office, so no observation of whether the connection goes down. Margie notes to me that she saw a lot of Comcast activity at the top of the street when she left, so maybe there was a problem there. In the afternoon, I go ahead and call to cancel the service trip — and am told that the appointment had already been automagically canceled from their end because a problem had been found and corrected.
Nobody, however, had bothered to tell us this. There was no message on our phone when I got home. There was no e-mail in my Comcast e-mail account. I might have done some serious rearrangement to my life to have made sure I could be home this morning. I might have had additional things I needed them to look at …
And I would have been sitting at home until 8 a.m. or longer before I called up to find out that the appointment was canceled. If I had “canceled” the appointment without saying anything, do not doubt for a moment that I would have been invoiced for a service call. Comcast gets no penalty accrued to it except a nastygram from me and an uncomplimentary blog entry, letting folks know how Comcast sucks.
Which, of course, is hardly a news flash.
Lesson Learned: Verify the appointment is still on (or canceled) yourself. It’s a PitA, but Comcast isn’t going to do it for you.
Comcast did supply a not-quite-generic-but-still-pretty-vague response.
I sincerely apologize for any unpleasant experience you had recently with your Comcast service and thank you for bringing this matter to our attention.
We need to hear about any unsatisfactory situations in order to correct them and to enhance our level of customer service. I have forwarded your comments to the appropriate members of our development and management teams for further review and action. We appreciate that you took the time to help us keep our commitment to quality customer care.
Not quite generic to match any old submission — but not specific enough to convince me that it took any thought (or even human intervention).