Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues

Isn't that fairly risky? What if they had passed the account to collections?

I dealt with this BS during a brief stint with Straight Talk Wireless when I was between regular carriers. I was trying to port my number from Straight Talk to Ting (a wonderful Sprint MVNO) and my account ended up in limbo. Every time I called, I asked to be escalated to the next level of support, and every time I was told that there wasn't a next level, that Tier 1 was it. I pushed it every time, and ended up with a "supervisor" who also read from the prompts, but in a slightly more understandable accent.

I finally got Supervisor Number Three to understand what was going on, and he gave me an entirely different phone number to call, which ended up being their corporate office in India. After talking to three different people there (again, "escalating" laterally) I ended up with someone who claimed to be the director of support, and she was able to unlock my account and allow the port to complete. She said that she had never seen a situation like that before, and assured me that if I ever came back to Straight Talk I wouldn't see this issue again, as they would "fix the porting process" to enable their Tier 1 staff to push the port through.

This entire process took three days of calling from my wife's phone, since mine was in limbo and unusable on either service, and probably shaved several months off my lifespan due to the stress and anxiety over the whole thing. One thing is for sure, I will never, ever use Straight Talk again, I don't care if someone gives me a $600 Straight Talk-compatible phone.

In comparison, on Ting, I call their support line and within three rings I have a real person who has full access to my account and can do pretty much anything I need to with it. Just out of curiosity, I asked a Ting rep how the cancellation process goes if I wanted to go to another carrier, and he said they would help me make the transition as smooth as possible, and would hate to see me go but he wouldn't want to hold me back if another carrier offered better coverage or rates.

Comcast, Straight Talk, and other service companies could learn a lot from them.

Very few people have the job flexibility that many of us here on HN have. This may be the best-paying job available to this person, or the only job they were able to get that they can effectively travel to -- regardless, given the unpleasant nature of the work, it's unreasonable to assume that they meaningfully "chose" the job without additional evidence.

Yikes.

I tried both Speakeasy (now MegaPath) DSL and ClearWire WiMax. They sucked. The 10mbps DSLs downstream sometimes reached up to 200kbps. The TCP/IP behind the WiMax would regularly disappear for hours.

For each, I called to get the RMA (to send their gear back), cancel service, and then I immediately canceled the credit card on file.

Both then sent me to collections. I tried contesting the bills. "Sorry, we don't have any record of you canceling." (You'd think possession of the modems would be a clue.)

Neither have sent these bills to a credit rating agency (e.g. Transunion, Experian), so I've ignored them.

Maybe 9 out of 10 calls to customer service are hassle free for me. In addition to which company, the type of issue you are trying to resolve also matters greatly, for example calls concerning payments/billing and cancellation are much more likely to be contentious.

One kind of customer service problem is low-level abuse, for which a particular rep is likely mostly responsible, usually passive-aggressive behavior like putting calls on hold then disconnecting, endless call-transferring, etc. rather than outright lies or verbal abuse.

The other kind which is more subtle involves higher-level systemic dysfunction and neglect: using call centers or neutered in-house support following very strict scripts / with limited means to resolve all but the most basic issues, active support issues / tickets needing attention yet ignored and unresolved for months at a time, per-call wait times of half an hour or longer, fully-automated systems not even giving the option to speak to a live representative.

Occasionally some of the more outrageous instances of problems of the first kind are deemed newsworthy and given media attention, especially when caught on tape.

Problems of the second kind rarely get any sort of media attention at all, no matter how severe. Companies will suffer customer-service-specific reputation damage for systemic problems (Google for example), but never make headlines for it.

Large companies can also be quite savvy when it comes to pr and the media. Higher tier customers, top-plan-holders often have their support issues promoted internally and expedited to an amazing extent, creating plenty of good publicity to drown out any perceptible, notable criticism.