The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since 1980 and is recognized globally as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. He's a columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera and Linux Journal and frequently appears in other publications both online and in print. Additionally, Dave maintains four weblogs: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film, and GoFatherhood. Based in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs, as well as active member of his community and busy single father to three children.

Dubious tactic of the day: Comcast

I woke up this morning to my cable modem having all its lights flashing. Not good. Indeed, I was offline, so I called Comcast, my cable modem network provider. Well, first off, they must have the most annoying and convoluted phone system I've suffered through in a while. I am sure I went through at least 10 levels of menu options before I got into the wait queue for an operator. Blech. That's SOOOOo customer unfriendly, but companies don't seem to care any more.

BUT, back to topic. Yes, Comcast was aware that there was an outage in my area and were working on it. "Okay, I'd like a credit for the outage, please." I asked. "You'll need to call back after the outage ends." they respond...

So I've thought about this all morning (finally, obviously, I'm back online) and I have to give the Comcast folk a Dubious Business Tactic Of the Day award for this one: a cool company that cared about its customers would automatically have added me to an 'outage credit requested' pool, and then when the system came back online, automatically credit me the value of that time on my bill. It'd be a breeze to add to their billing system, and you know that they have an exact figure of how long an outage is, right?

Now, a massively cool company would automatically credit everyone affected by an outage without having to call in, but that's going to have more of an affect on the bottom line than the few dozen folk such as myself who have the energy to call and wade through their miserable phone system for a measly $0.80 credit on my next bill.

And I won't talk about how, in a perfect world, cellphone companies would automatically move you each month to the plan that minimized your bill for services used. Because that perfect world is a long, long way from where we are now, and I understand why. (ironically, I realized just about a week ago that I'd been paying $5/month on my Verizon cell phone bill for web access, something I've never used nor requested. They're reversing it back, thankfully, but it's very annoying!)

Enough of a rant. What do you think about this sort of business tactic?

Posted by Dave Taylor at May 21, 2003 12:40 PM

Comments

Dealing with customer service people makes my head hurt :)

btw you're a pinger now ;)

Posted by: gnome-girl on May 21, 2003 12:55 PM

Comcast's weakness is sooooo far beyond the customer service element. I have been dealing with outages for over a year. I have wailed to customer service and have had technicians come to my house and tell me they know there is a problem, it is intermittent and they will monitor it. I dropped their flakey cable tv service over a year ago (thanks to the dish on my roof) and the only thing that keeps me plugged into Comcrapt broadband (if we must call it broadband) is that DSL is not yet in my area. The idea that I would have to ask that for credit when their "fast" (cough) and "reliable (double cough)service is on a reliable tilt is something like a pick pockett only giving you back your billfold after you have him hog tied. God Please never again allow a cable TV company to take on the internet.

Posted by: Ray Anderson on April 16, 2005 2:35 AM

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