[BC] Poor customer support

[Jeff Glass]

In a message dated 2/26/2010 9:34:32 PM Central Standard Time, broadcast-request at radiolists.net writes:

>He drove his truck from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a town north of Boston, Massachusetts, to fix my cable. The supervisor said that the company was afraid of "job actions" if the work was done locally. They felt that it was best for someone from the corporate office to respond because someone's feeling might get hurt if they were told they disconnected the wrong house.

>Cheers,
>Richard B. Johnson

Richard,

No wonder comcast charges $300 for an install with a business model like that.

I worked for cable TV 30 years ago when I got out of college. DeKalb is a college town and the techs and installers alike would be swamped when the students left town after finals, and when they returned again in the Fall. I was a tech and often had to do "disconnects" and "reconnects"

People must be real wimps these days if a big company like Comcast has to worry about someone's feelings getting hurt. It was not uncommon that I (or one of the other guys) would disconnect the wrong customer. We would get a call on the two-way about. We simply went out and hooked the service back up. No hurt feelings, no messy kitchen floors to mop up. Management knew that mistakes happen, and the customers were happy because we responded to them.

Our General Manager got fired a couple months before I started with the company. One story among many others was, he wrapped the drop cable from a nonpay subscriber, around the bumper of his car, and then drove off. The customer's little TV supposedly went bouncing along the hard wood floor of the family room, slamming itself against the interior of the outside wall :-D  The customer supposedly filed a lawsuit for damages as well as assault charges against our manager. The company then said enough is enough :-D

Things are just too complicated these days. We've lost the ability to keep things simple.

If the truth were known, corporate in your case Richard, probably did not have the confidence in their field staff to sort out the address thing properly, or to handle the situation in event you ended up being the one trying to get cable for free ;-)

Nothing more hilarious than to catch someone in the act of stealing cable service. Maybe the corporate guy that came out was hoping for just such a thrill. Been there, done that. It is just TOO funny :-D

Jeff Glass