This wasn’t meant to be today’s post. I was going to wait and write it a bit later. But it helps explain why the posts that were scheduled for the past few days have been lagging, so I decided to go ahead and write/post it today.
When we first moved here, we had telephone, television, and internet bundled with another company. Now, there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as a telephony company with really good customer service, but they did okay by us. And their actual services rendered were just fine. But you know how those contracts go. Eventually the introductory price “wore off,” and our monthly bill went up. So we switched to Comcast’s bundle because, of course, they had an introductory offer, too.
The television service was mediocre and the telephone service was pathetic. (Caller ID is hit-or-miss, as far as whether it is able to display any useful information. And voicemail…I hate checking my voicemail, because it’s so much trouble. The options are so complicated I have to listen to the whole list every time. There doesn’t appear to be an option to skip a message, so you have to listen fully to every. single. message. every time you need to listen to any one message. And as far as I can tell, you cannot find out when someone left a message. Which becomes an even bigger problem when it starts giving you the messages out of order!)
But the internet…the internet was awesome. It was FAST. I was on my laptop, and I never (or at least rarely) had any difficulty with WiFi. It just worked, and wow, was I more efficient!
Until…
Until a little over a month ago. It was time for this contract to be up, and once again we were looking to switch companies for the sake of the budget. Michael actually had us all set up for someone from another company to come out and get us set up, when they told him that their highest-speed internet is up to 3 Mbps – as compared to Comcast’s 105 Mbps. Yes, you read that right. There is more than a 100 Mbps difference in the speeds they can offer. He said, “My wife would kill me.” (Obviously, I wouldn’t kill him, but you know what he meant. That is a huge drop in speeds, for someone who uses the internet all the time!)
So he canceled that process and called Comcast back. In the process, they decided they needed to bring us a new television box. I guess they finally figured out that the one they have was programmed in such a way that it looked like it hadn’t been updated since 1986. (I don’t like the new box, either, by the way. It definitely looks more modern, which is a plus. But it’s one of those things that’s so obviously designed to be mobile-friendly that it’s not very friendly to the primary device it was theoretically designed for – in this case, the television itself. It takes far more effort to find a show than it did on the old box.)
When they brought the new television box, they also brought a new modem – and replaced the modem and router we already had. And here is where our big issue began. They did not tell us they were going to replace our modem and router. They did not ask to come out and do this. They made arrangements to replace the television box and swapped the modem while they were already here. And from that time forward, my WiFi has been screwed up.
Sometimes it works okay – although mostly much slower than it did before – but it often just simply cuts out. It’s like being on dialup and getting kicked offline. It’s making me extremely inefficient because I never know when the service will work and when it won’t. I’ll be right in the middle of trying to get something done, which should take about 25 seconds, and the WiFi will die on me again and I’ll spend 30 minutes trying over and over to reload a page, just waiting for it to decide to kick back in.
That’s not the problem, though.
This is really frustrating. It’s especially frustrating, because it’s their problem. The service worked just fine, they came and replaced our internet equipment without asking us about it ahead of time, and now it’s broken. But my issue with Comcast is not it’s now broken. Stuff happens. You address it and move on. But that’s just the problem. Comcast will not address it. They believe they can break things, and they can waste our time, that they never have to make anything right, and somehow, miraculously, we are going to keep paying them.
We have called them back no fewer than three times, and spent no less than 6-7 hours talking to them trying to get this thing fixed. First a technician tried to fix some things from their end. They didn’t work. Finally I called and told them I don’t want to discuss it with them anymore; I don’t want them to try to “troubleshoot” anymore; I just want someone to come back out and bring me back the equipment I had before, because it worked. So they set that up.
When the technician came out, he did not bring the equipment I asked for. He spent a good chunk of time at my house – time that I also had to be there, taking time out of my schedule – fiddled with a bunch of settings, and reset the modem. (In his defense, the modem reset was reasonable. The idiots at Comcast headquarters haven’t even bothered to inform their telephone reps how their equipment works. When the tech explained to me how our box works, it was immediately obvious that they should have known they’d disconnect me during an earlier phone call when they “sent a reset signal to my modem” – the piece of equipment that happens to provide my telephone signal – and that their stupid instructions to reset the modem by unplugging it will never, ever work because it has a battery.)
When all of this didn’t work, my husband called back again and was on the phone for another hour or two with probably six different people before finally being told that he could drive to our closest Comcast office and pick up one of the older-style modems and routers. I thought this was unacceptable to begin with. They broke our service when they replaced things with incompatible equipment. They should have just immediately brought back the old equipment when we asked. Certainly at this point, they should have been replacing it. But no, they are expecting us to go on our time, and on our gas money to take care of something that they should have taken care of already. (That’s not even considering all the hours we’d already lost, fighting them over the issue.)
So my husband took a day off of work to (among other things) drive downtown and pick up a new modem. He had to take the old one with him when he went, so we had no internet and no telephone while he was gone, either. When he finally came home, he had the same box he left with. They still weren’t able (or willing?) to give him the box style we had before. (Keep in mind, every time we talked to a tech on the phone, they told us to ask for this. But every time we talked to someone who actually handles equipment, they’d tell us they couldn’t do it. It sure looks like they can and just won’t.)
It turns out, this isn’t too surprising. While all this was going on, Michael came across an article about Comcast. Turns out they really don’t have a dedicated customer service team at all. Just an overblown sales team. That’s why they’re constantly trying to sell you new stuff even while the stuff you already have is broken.
Comcast was wrong.
So Comcast was wrong about all that, “We can do whatever we want and people will pay us anyway,” garbage. They’re not getting our money anymore; we’ve found another internet, television, and telephone provider. Yes, a 100 Mbps drop in internet speeds is worth it to not be paying them anymore. And I am using my social media to let them know that you can’t just be a persistent jerk to your customers not see any consequences from it. A content customer stays on as a customer. A happy customer tells her friends about you. An UNhappy customer…well, you don’t want to see our wrath on social media.
(And in case any other companies are reading this, don’t worry. I’m not quick to slam a company. I’m definitely not quick to slam you on social media. I know that stuff happens sometimes and has to be fixed. You have to work at being lousy – to be persistently laissez-faire about customer service (that is, pretty much not know what customer “service” is). In other words, if I’m saying Comcast’s customer service is bad enough to blast it around the world…it is BAD. Care a little, and you will never be on the receiving end of a social media smack-down like this.)
So here’s the deal: Comcast may think that customers don’t matter. But customers are the bread-and-butter of a business. Clearly, they have to be shown that customers are essential to them and their business and not to be taken lightly. So I’m using the resources at my disposal (even while on the sketchy internet I still have for the next few days before our new internet is hooked up) to make them aware that blowing off this customer was not their best idea ever.
(And now you, my readers, also know why I’m having trouble getting posts out. ‘Cause my internet won’t consistently work.)
