travis' brain dump

So… I wander away from the blog for a few hours to go get some things done (meetings and such) and come back to discover a comcast related comment and additional login on my blog… wow?

The comment, which you can see in the previous post, was:

Travis if you are still having trouble with your speeds or bandwidth please contact us at We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com and we will be glad to help you out.cmcstcaresbill

So you’re telling me that there is someone out there watching the web for posts with comcast bashing? Un-freakin-believable. LOL I went out on the web to do a little research just to see if this was for real. I’m not one to be readily open to the idea that a company which gives you a laundry list of excuses of why their speed is not the issue but it is in turn an issue with the customer’s computer, switch, firewall, etc… is ready to be of assistance. Well, it turns out this is completely real.  o.O

cited from: http://www.thenewstribune.com/business/story/343270.html

Frank Eliason, a Comcast Corp. manager in Center City with the daunting assignment of monitoring the nation’s blogosphere for venomous posts aimed at the company, answered right away: “That should not be. We should have that looked at. Send an e-mail with account info to We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com“>We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com.”

Under siege for customer-service woes detailed on Comcastmustdie.com and other blogs, the Philadelphia cable giant has gone on the offensive, trawling the Internet for Comcast chatter. Eliason’s assignment is very specific: If someone has a Comcast problem and is talking about it online, he contacts that person and offers help.

If Eliason thinks it’s an emergency that could spiral into unpleasantness, like an expletive-loaded blog bomb, he gets on the phone and cuts through the corporate red tape.

But a cautionary note: Eliason’s quick action and kind words don’t necessarily lead to a quick fix, as Chambers discovered.

Eliason’s blog spotting is part public relations and part acknowledgment that the Internet is playing a broader role in defining company brands. Technology companies woke up to this fact after “Dell Hell” postings by blogger Jeff Jarvis in 2005.

Comcast executives say the company’s customer-service problems deepened as it expanded through acquisitions and added millions of high-speed Internet and phone customers. The company, with $31 billion in annual revenue, has leaned too heavily on outsourcers for phone help and repairs, they say.

On Twitter, where users write blurbs on what they’re doing or thinking at the moment, a passing complaint can be an early warning signal to Comcast. The site, said Biz Stone, a Twitter cofounder, is the sort of forum that Comcast should monitor.

“If Comcast can get to those influencers, the complaints will not grow to a full blog post,” he said. Eliason has posted about 600 messages, or “tweets,” on Twitter.

Comcast is “waking up to the fact that a bad rap in the social-networking space could spread like crazy,” said Shel Holtz, a public-relations consultant in the San Francisco area. “If consumers are talking to each other about your brand, you should participate in that conversation and have a good story to tell.”

The story in this case is more like a horror flick on Comcast’s FEARnet channel. Comcast has had a public-relations nightmare with Comcastmustdie.com, launched in October by Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield.

If you go out to google and you search out the email address from the comment, it’s all over the place. I’m not sure how I feel about this. It seems like a damage control effort which, in my own opinion, is a bit too little and more than just a bit too late. I’m not even going to bother writing an email to the address however it does merit a blog response.

Instead of spending so much effort on trying to do post-loss damage control, why aren’t more resources being put into training customer service reps to be more technical and provide logical thought out responses which are helpful as to opposed to canned messages which deny all responsibility by comcast for the issues being experienced. Today’s world, while it still contains many users who are absolutely clueless, there are many individuals who have some or even a lot of technical expertise and find it offensive that you’re having a tier one support phone monkey question even the most basic of troubleshooting with us? If you had someone trained to assess the situation and quite possibly offer some level of support worth a darn you might save more customers from leaving disgruntled. At the very least the person may come away from it, despite going to another provider, with a feeling of ‘ we tried everything we could and this setup just didn’t work out ‘ leaving you with less work to do in damage control.

Beyond that… don’t patronize people who are obviously way smarter than your CYA department by feeding them lines of complete bull to try to quell their rants and raves when they’ve discovered that they have been cheated out of bandwidth they’ve paid for and had it reduced in quality when they utilize it to it’s fullest. There is a REASON we want a 6mbit pipe and pay for it to be that speed and when you let some tier one phone jockey who is either a) a complete idiot or b) someone with intelligence that has been bound and gagged by internal policy that they are at fault you’re going to lose customers and you’re going to get blogsite comments and websites dedicated to the hatred of your system.

My advice… take a good long look at yourselves before continuing to point the finger at the end user and or standing by policy which is completely wrong. Evaluate your customer service expectations and deliverables and make a change to better yourselves. This also includes informing your installers and service technicians of truthful information and not filling their heads full of propaganda to spread as well. Those poor guys are so brainwashed it’s almost sad.

*shrug*

I just don’t know. I’m done writing.