After navigating the most unbelievable rabbit hole of disturbingly inept customer service for weeks, and one FULL WEEK without internet at all, I was finally able to get through to someone at a higher tier who had much more interest in resolving my problems. The biggest issue is that I had to call a friend who had a connection through the business side of Comcast’s internet services to get that number. I didn’t know he had something that would help me, I just called him because, as another network administrator, I knew he could understand and share my pain and frustrations.
Through his connection I was able to step further up the ladder and reach over the heads of the other customers waiting in line, or I should probably say stumbling around in circles on the 7th level of Hell, and grab an outstretched hand from higher up the food chain. That connection, that single phone number made all of the difference in the world, but what if I didn’t have that luxury? What if I had nowhere to turn after exhausting the options in the support line calling tree? There was no other information available on their website, and no other option except to go around and around in the Customer Service circle until one of two things happened. Either I would become completely insane or I would become completely insane.
I was able to get my problem resolved once they stopped sending techs out after every single phone call, techs who were unequipped and not allowed to do what’s necessary to troubleshoot a problem which does not exist on their script. They have almost no authority to make a decision, they can only follow the rules. The problem is, when the source of an outage lays between their rules they can’t deal with it. All they can do is fumble around with a splitter and change out a modem over and over and over.
When I finally got through to someone who seemed to care, and they actually listened to me describe the cyclical nature of my issue and the other factors surrounding it they stopped looking at my modem and the pole outside my house and looked in their data center. Which is where I told them to look in the first place. Not directly, but you would think that listening to me scream IT’S NOT IN MY HOUSE over and over would make someone at least curious. However, they are so locked to a script there is no way for them to look one inch to the left or right.
They finally fixed it, and it turned out to be a problem at the data center. In other words, not in my house. However, the steps I had to go through are not available to the average homeowner. So, how would someone else have solved their problems? When every road stops a half a mile from town how do you get where you need to go? I went way out of the box to solve my problem but most people would never have that option. Or, I should say, never find that option.
At the end Comcast assured me that they were aware of the trouble they had with customer service and were working hard to fix it. Unfortunately the only way I would ever know that is to go down this same road again – and that ain’t happening. A week without Internet… even if I wasn’t an IT professional that would have been maddening. My wife would not be able to run her home-based business for starters. I did go buy a Verizon MiFi, which works great but your bandwidth is limited. Even at it’s highest teir there is a line you can cross.
The advice I gave the Comcast representative is this – right now you are the only option, and that allow you to do whatever you want. If you wish to have someone hand-deliver your bills every month so you can spit on your customers in person, they will put up with it. For now. But sooner or later things will change. Either another option will come along and your customers will flock to it, or people will get tired of the game and stop playing. Nothing, no matter how good your product, is worth the treatment I experienced through this 5-month oddesy through customer service hell.
I definitely won’t do it a second time.
