For the past several weeks, we have been dealing with cable television frustration on two levels.
First, all of the digitial channels we receive through our Comcast box were showing a distorted picture and distorted sound which made watching anything other than basic cable pretty much impossible for the past two weeks or so.
That was the first frustration, the second one came about because Comcast’s customer service problems herein in Northern Virginia.
Telephone calls to the local customer support desk were, to say the least, mostly worthless. On three different occasions, I was asked to unplug the cable box and allow it to reboot to see if that would fix the problem. Each time, it failed to have any impact on the issue at all.
Finally, we had a service appointment scheduled on Tuesday July 1st between 9 and 12. The night before, we’d even gotten a phone call from somone in tech support asking me to tell them yet again what our problem was even though I’d done so at least three times in the past two or three weeks — they even wanted me to reboot the cable box again, at 8:30 at night no less.
Anyway, 9am came and went without a visit or a phone call. 10am. 11am. Then, it was after noon and, as several of the Twitter messages I sent out that day show, I was getting annoyed (for some reason, Twitter’s time stamp is an hour behind when the post was actually sent):
Comcast supposed to be here between 9 and 12 today. They have 5 minutes left. What do you think will happen ?
On hold with Comcast phone support. 5 minutes and counting on that. 4 minutes to go before the 9-12 window expires
Well, it’s after noon and no Comcast. Color me surprised.
Now, I’m waiting on a call from the Comcast dispatcher to explain why they missed the appt. And waiting. And Waiting.
Needless to say, that call never came, and the frustration grew:
Maybe I should research Verizon FIOS while I’m waiting for Comcast to show up
Considering how happy I was to drop the land line and get rid of Verizon a year or so ago, that’s saying alot.
By mid-afternoon nothing was happening and I was getting really annoyed:
Another 16 minutes on hold with Comcast in Manassas trying to figure out how they totally f**ked this day up
Breaking News: Comcast sucks. In other news, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
Fifth phone call with Comcast. Fifth different explanation for why nobody came today.
At that point, I was told that the appointment had been canceled because, thanks to a missed phone call, the driver assumed that nobody was home even though I hadn’t left the house all day.
That’s about the time I received a Twitter message from @Comcastcares asking how they could help. It turns out it was a guy named Frank Eliason, who works with Comcast out of Philadelphia. Not only did we exchange several emails that afternoon, but, that evening, I spoke with Mr. Eliason and had secured an appointment for the next day, yesterday, after being told that the first available appointment was a week away.
So, by 10:30 yesterday morning, a technician had been to our house and the problem, which was due to a weak signal coming into the house from the outside, had been fixed.
And the proactive response that Frank Eliason took deserves credit for that.
But if I hadn’t been the guy making the noise on Twitter to begin with, we’d be in the same boat as pretty much every other Comcast customer is in when a problem like this arises.
So there’s two lessons here.
One lesson is for Comcast, which needs to improve customer service, at least here in Northern Virginia, which is something that Mr. Eliason was candid enough to admit on the phone Tuesday night. It shouldn’t take two hours of posting bad news on Twitter for someone to get something done that should have been taken care of long before.
The other lesson, though, is for the rest of us; that old adage about the squeaky wheel getting the grease is still true. Companies don’t like bad publicity, and in the Web 2.0 world bad publicity can spread very fast and be very hard to counter. That’s why it’s smart for Eliason to monitor places like Twitter and respond proactively to problems like the one we had.
Finally, here’s an interesting article about Eliason and Comcast’s Twitter strategy:
Welcome to what might be called the Twitterverse of Frank Eliason, who, under the name comcastcares, has “tweeted” everything above, jumping onto Twitter like a virtual knight in shining armor.
Maybe you’ve read about him over the last few weeks. He’s the guy now appointed by Comcast to communicate with those who complain about their Comcast service on Twitter, and a day in his life is one filled with tweets issued by BlackBerries, RSS feeds that alert him to the latest Internet outage in Palo Alto, and sometimes being the canary in the Comcast coal mine. A recent problem in the Chicago area became immediately apparent to Eliason by monitoring Twitter, and he believes he knew about it before Comcast staff closer to the situation did. “I can take care of pretty much anything — and if I can’t, I’ll call someone who can,” he says. (If that sounds like a boast, in conversation Eliason is an extremely sincere guy.)
The fact that Eliason’s job even exists illustrates the serendipity required for most companies to get with the social networking program today. His emergence on Twitter is the result of his own long-held interest in tracking customer sentiment — along with a nudge from a Comcast executive a few months ago to check out what people were saying about the company on the micro-blogging service. Eliason just observed Twitter at first before tentatively wading in. But earlier this month, his dalliance with Twitter burst into the blogosphere, when he noticed a tweet from Michael Arrington, who runs the highly influential blog TechCrunch. Arrington was complaining that his Comcast Internet service was inexplicably down. Eliason reached out to help, and Comcast soon dispatched a team to Arrington’s house to fix his Internet connection. It was, Eliason says, a turning point, but not in quite the way you’d think. Sure, Arrington’s experience with Eliason turned into a lengthy post on TechCrunch, but what seems to have interested Eliason more is how his Twitter followers rallied around him when some said that Comcast had only helped Arrington because he was Arrington. No, his supporters said, he’d helped out many other people too. Comcastcares was forming relationships.
I’ll agree with that one completely. I’m not Michael Arrington and I certainly don’t have his influence, but Eliason still reached out and did what he could to make a bad situation much better.
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:27 am
And this is why I love my DirecTV…
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Riley,
Perhaps, I just don’t want a dish on my house
July 3rd, 2008 at 3:46 pm
One time Comcast turned off our broadband, claiming that we had not paid our bill (which we had). In similar fashion, it took many phone calls, many router resets (like your cable box) and a total of 3 days before they turned it back on. Unfortunately they pretty much have a monopoly on service around here.