Dear Comcast, I'm leaving you because...

I worked for a company contracted to do Comcast customer service, so I've got some insight into what goes on on the other side of the phone. Mostly 250+ people in half-cubical rows telling subscribers (subs) to "power cycle" the modem; meanwhile team leads are pressuring the Customer Care Executives (CAEs) to get their call times under 5 minutes (literally 630 seconds, actually) and to stop "escalating" calls at all costs.

When I first worked there, training was 3 weeks. For a lot of new hires, 3 weeks is just not enough time to learn how to use a computer, how the internet works, and what the Comcast service offerings are in each area. Sure, they could pass the wussy multiple-choice "progress evaluations", but that's a far cry from having a workable knowledge of computers, internet infrastructure, etc.. A lot of them barely knew how to look something up in the knowledge base (internal website), and when they did find something, it was likely to be horribly out of date.

When I first graduated to "the floor" from training (and for a long time after), I kept all my class notes in a tabulated binder and referred to it often. This was entirely optional, and a lot of less capable classmates came with nothing but their password sheets. I bet Comcast spent an awful lot on technician visits because of CAEs who didn't know how to release/renew an IP address and subs who refused to pay $50 when the person on the phone had assured them it was not their computer's fault, thus the visit was free.

Eventually someone decided they could make up for general incompetence by introducing software that enforced a specific trouble-shooting procedure. They hoped that questions like "Is the customer's TV working? yes/no" would save time for the CAEs who always insisted it was antivirus causing the problem, whether or not the sub reported a poll down across the street; and questions like "Is the customer's computer turned on (yes/no)" would help the CAEs who insisted it was always a Comcast outage requiring a special technician escalation, regardless of the sub having reported no lights on the computer in addition to no lights on the modem. It's a great idea in theory, except in practice the software was buggy ("I'm sorry, can I put you on hold for 2 minutes? My trouble shooting software just crashed..."), sometimes lead in circles ("Can I get you to check... wait, no. We already did that. What the..."), and when it finally went full-scale and started accumulating hundreds of thousands of tickets, it became slower than slow ("Sorry, I'm just waiting for the next step to come up."). Since the policy for a while was that every call absolutely required a TTS ticket number (only retrieved upon "completing" a line of questioning), we actually had times when we'd say "I'm sorry I can't help you right now, we're having a tool outage," and there were many times I'd just click the shortest path to a ticket number because the system's bias was that the both the customer and the CAE were idiots; it was never the fault of, say, ancient terrible infrastructure that was falling apart.

The process of escalating a call in that center, by the way, was to put the customer on hold, stand up and wave your hand in the air. You'd then hope that someone would notice you before you lost all feeling in your arm. If someone did happen to see you (before "ops" called your phone to chide you on your excessive hold time), they'd ask what the situation was and would then usually refuse to take the call. "I'm going to say the same thing as you told them, deal with it." So the CAE has two options, drop the call and get fired or repeat that to the customer. Eventually we'd try to avoid having call time impacted by waiting for a "manager" to refuse to help anyways. For one particularly bad shift I worked out a deal with the guy sitting next to me: I just passed him my headset. He didn't even have to lie and say he was a manager, just the change of voice turned the trick.

When I left they had shortened training to 2 weeks. The last guy I partnered with for his last day of training (live calls) could not tell the modem from the router (I got the impression he wasn't sure what a router was, actually).

The whole thing was terrible for customers and for people who actually wanted to help customers.

I'm happy with my Comcast. Its always fast and has never once gone out the whole 5 years I've been using it in San Francisco. I've never had to speak with customer service (which is maybe one reason I'm ok with it).

I guess the cap is a bit annoying. But I've never come close to it. I suppose if there were an alternative as fast and as reliable I might consider switching simply do to Comcast's policies. But I've never felt their evil directly.

The two co-founders of sonic.net are both on Google+[1] and come across as the type of ISP that most of us can only dream about. They also frequently discuss the economics of networks[2]... it's pretty rare/valuable to get such a candid view from someone actually in charge of running an ISP business.

Living in NYC, I can't tell you how jealous I am. Time Warner Cable is the only viable (although still unreliable) option for most people here, and youtube.com/my_speed reports the local TWC average as 6.5mbps down (up is less than 1mbps).

Somewhat related note; methinks the next internet protest should be to keep the soon-to-be-released cable TV spectrum unlicensed and prevent the telco lobbyists from furthering their monopoly power by privatizing this public good.

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[1] Co-founders:

Scott Doty - https://plus.google.com/u/0/116236096836985934797/posts

Dane Jasper - https://plus.google.com/u/0/109338113746295186594/posts

[2] Triangulation Interview - http://twit.tv/tri5

I have them in Sacramento. Fantastic ISP, make sure you can get their Fusion service. You won't regret it.

AT&T sucks too.. I've had 2 billing disputes with them. Both times I called and asked to speak to the people who say I owe money, so I could understand what was going on (as it was for accounts I never setup). They told me I couldn't speak to those people. I had to file complaints with the BBB to get the billing dispute resolved (magically it got zeroed out and corrected at that point).

I have to say when I had comcast, I didn't have any billing issues.