Comcast: We're Not Happy Until You're Not Happy

Comcast’s TV and internet service is pretty good.  I mean it hardly ever goes down, and it’s pretty fast.  It’s such a stark contrast with their customer service.

Yesterday I called Comcast to ask them to come out and replace my old modem with a DOCSIS 3 modem.  Their website explicitly states that there is no cost for this upgrade (other than the modem rental fee I’m already paying every month).  But the woman on the phone insisted that I’d need to upgrade my service to a more expensive package to get the new modem.

So I hung up and called back.  It’s impossible to talk to the same person twice at a giant monopoly like Comcast, so I knew I’d get a different person, and I assumed the next person would be a little less dense.  It turned out that he was indeed a little less dense.  He immediately said yeah, no problem, there’s no cost and we’ll send someone out tomorrow, how’s 7-9 AM?  I said that was fine.

So today, 9 AM comes and goes with no sign of Comcast.  I call them at 9:15.  They tell me my appointment is for 11 AM to 1 PM.  I tell them that’s wrong, but it’s no use.  We reschedule it for later in the week.

A few hours later, around 1:15 PM, I get a call from a Comcast technician.  He’s just calling to confirm our appointment and he’s about 5 minutes away.

So, to recap: the first person attempted to extort higher payments out of me based on a lie about DOCSIS 3 modems.  The second person told me my appointment was at one time, but scheduled it for a different time.  And the third person rescheduled my appointment (or so she said) but didn’t bother telling the technician in the field about it.

You’d think that in this kind of bad economy, companies could afford to fire people who are incompetent, and replace them with intelligent people, from the vast pool of unemployed workers.  But apparently not.