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RE: Finding clue at comcast.net
- From: Howard C. Berkowitz
- Date: Thu Oct 09 11:23:30 2003
At 9:29 AM -0500 10/9/03, Austad, Jay wrote:
Comcast's phone support department is the *worst*, WORST, I've ever dealt
with. I think they are outsourced, they have to go by a script, and many of
them probably hardly know what a computer even is. Once I called because of
a problem on their network, and I told the person on the phone that there
was a problem on their network, and I pinned it down to a couple of routers
where the problem may be, and she responded, very sternly, "Sir, WE DON'T
HAVE ANY ROUTERS"
Same thing here. Last night, I was told that no escalation personnel
were available.
On the couple of occasions where I got escalation, I once had an
informal conversation with a 3rd level. Their phone center is in
Halifax, NS -- didn't find out if it is outsourced or not. While the
person with whom I spoke was reasonably clueful, he told me that
customer support had no interactive communication with network
operations -- at best, they could send an email about a routing,
SMTP, etc. problem and hope somebody would respond.
At the time, I was paying for their "Pro" service, intermediate
between regular residential and full business. My contact said that
while that was supposed to get better customer support, an early plan
to route it to business Comcast failed, and there really was NO
separate Pro support organization. I dropped the Pro service after I
learned that residential service no longer insisted you remove any
local routers and firewalls before deigning to troubleshoot. They
still ask you to do that, but repeated NO responses can get them to
proceed.
A few NANOGs back (Atlanta), I did a presentation on customer
satisfaction, which, frankly, was in many respects a case study of
how I'd reform customer support at my then ISP/DSL, cais.net. If
NANOG ever did formal documents, I'd like to see a guideline on how
to run customer support.
In any case, if you manage to get the call escalated a couple of times
(after lying about rebooting your computer 47 times),
You forgot reinstalling Windows. On a Mac.
you'll get someone
good. Also, there are some good people who read this list. But calling
their phone support to get anything useful is like trying to squeeze blood
from a rock.
-jay
-----Original Message-----
From: Howard C. Berkowitz [mailto:hcb@gettcomm.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2003 7:36 PM
To: nanog@merit.org
Subject: Finding clue at comcast.net
I'm rapidly beginning to believe this is equivalent to finding the
pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. When my broadband alternative
is Verizon and it's looking better, this is scary.
Sometime today, their SMTP server started bouncing messages with more
than 3 addressees. When I called customer support, I was told "we
only handle troubleshooting, not mail service." The operator
"guessed" they might be doing software updates on the mail service,
had no information, and said there was no person to which it could be
escalated.
She insisted that I call my local cable office to find out when the
"server repair" would be completed, because "they schedule all
repairs."
Is this a bad dream?
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