Comcast :-(

Wild Card-
It all started with a keypunch error. My story of communication gone wrong involves Comcast and their cable system upgrade. With Comcast’s transition from an analog system to an all-digital system, it meant that four of our televisions would require a new digital receiver. When the person at Comcast entered the serial numbers for the equipment into their system on the numbers was entered incorrectly and did not match the number on the receiver. This did not become evident until I went on line to activate the receivers.
Once on line and having discovered the error your only help option is on line live chat and here is where the problems began. First, there was the wait for the technician to come on line to chat. Next, we had to go through the different security issues to prove that I was I. Then trying to explain the problem to the tech was an adventure. It became obvious the person was working off of a script and a set of “frequently asked questions” it also appeared to me that as mentioned in earlier reading this is one service that Comcast had outsourced to a call center some where other than the US. Our on line session took almost two hours to get the four receivers working correctly. The longest time was spent working on the one receiver that had the wrong serial number. Trying to explain that the last two numbers of the serial number were transposed and therefore the activation signal would not activate the receiver, (I am sure that there is a receiver somewhere that was going on and off) was getting to be almost impossible, I ended up listing the number out with spaces between each number.
I have had the opportunity to run a customer service center for the company I work for granted there were only three of us and our cliental was limited to existing customers who had knowledge of the system and its capability. We did not work with a script and usually worked through issues with normal conversation. When we set up the service, we developed it as a go between the “techies” and the user. The idea was for the customer to work with a person who had a working knowledge of the business and products. If there was a question we could not answer, we would take the question to the programmers rather than have the customer talking with the programmers. We would then contact the customer with the answer. This worked very well; we got the information to the customer and kept the programmers from receiving excess calls. On line customer service should be the easiest customer service available to the customer, it leaves a lasting impression on the consumer.

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