Turns Out There Are LOTS Of Rude Name Changers At Comcast

Consumerist said last year Comcast was the nation's worst
company. Not sure what this year will bring.  

Lots of people kind of chuckled and shook their heads last week when a Comcast customer reported that somebody there changed her first name on her account to "Asshole."

It took practically an act of Congress to get this fixed, and it finally did get fixed after the person, who apparently really isn't an asshole, went to the press.

Despite Comcast's poor customer service record, that had to be one rogue employee just being a troll, right?

Well, maybe not. Consumerist reports that a number of other people have come forward with news that Comcast has changed the names their parents gave them and dubbed them things like "dummy" and "whore."

Journalist and consumer advocate Christopher Elliott has been all over this, and has found quite a few examples of Comcast calling its customers mean names.

Way back in 2005, Comcast called one woman a "bitch dog" on her bill. And in the several days after Elliot disclosed that recent customer was called an "asshole," other people who have had dealings with Comcast have come forward.

In December, someone at Comcast changed the first nae of Julie Swano to "Whore."

She said she talked to many so-called customer service reps on a variety of issues for the next month. She wondered why all those people saw that "whore" name and didn't change it until she confronted Comcast with the name problem on January 6.

Another Comcast customer, Carolina Heredia, said the cable provider changed her name to "Dummy" in her online account, Elliott says. 

Heredia said Comcast offered no apologies ore explanation as to why her name was changed like that.

Just today, Consumerist reported another Comcast customer came forward, saying the company changed her name to "Super Bitch."

The name changing can't be by one rogue employee, there had to be several.

I don't know whether any of the customers involved were actually pains in the neck or just normal people trying to get a problem resolved.  Employees at all businesses mumble under their breath about customers they believe are frustrating.

But changing their names to insults on billing records and requiring an act of Congress to change the names back to normal?

What, these Comcast workers never got past middle school?

As is always the case with these public relations disasters, a spokesman for Comcast, this time Tom Karinshake a senior vice president for Comcast customer service, apologized and said systems would be put in place to prevent such things in the future.

"We're retraining our teams on the importance of making name changes properly," Karinshak said.

Good idea. But these insults and incredibly poor service to Comcast customers keep coming out of the woodwork. Remember that epic phone call when one customer wanted to end service.

The drama in that call went on forever

According to The Verge, which did a fairly exhaustive investigation on Comcast last summer, the cable giant doesn't have a lot of incentive for customer service, given their near-monopoly status in many communities. No competition, no incentive to do better.

Plus they shower campaign contributions on politicians.

The Verge had this to say:

"Comcast spends more than $2 billion a year on customer service, a painfully large number for a publicly tradec company eager to maximize shareholder returns. That is perhaps why Comcast pushes its employees in customer service and tech support to make sales  - a skewed incentive when customers are calling in with a problem.

The company also overbooks technicians, leading to late and missed appointments, an relies heavily on contract labor, where quality control can be difficult."

OK, pro-business types, your turn. If the free market is the way to go, and competition makes things better for everybody, why do all these so-called pro-business, free market types let outfits like Comcast be such an monopoly?

Why do they support its proposed merger with Time Warner Cable to make an even bigger monopoly, and why do they oppose local government efforts' to create their own little public utility broadband and cable services?

If anybody's got some good answers, I'll post 'em.

Complaining To Comcast Probably Won't Fix Your Cable, But Might Get You Fired

Did someone at Comcast get a guy fired
from his job because he complained
too much about the company's service? 

If they account in Consumerist of what happened is true, what Comcast did to a man who they apparently decided was too aggressive with his complaints is way too chilling: They got the guy fired from his job.  

The Consumerist article only gives the guy's last name, Conal, but the customer had all kinds of problems with billing, bill that were sent to an incorrect address, and $1,820 in equipment he says he never ordered and never wanted, but was charged for anyway.  

Says Consumerist:

"When Conal returned all the equipment to Comcast and, being an experienced accountant at one of the nation's most prestigious firms, even prepared a spreadsheet detailing every charge, oercharge, payment and credit on his account for his brief time as a Comcast customer.

He says even this didn't convince Comcast that there was a problem and that Conal had been overcharged. And even though it wasn't yet past due, Comcast sent Conal's account into collections in February, 2014."

With that, Conal decided he was done with Comcast's customer service reps, since they didn't resolve anyting. He called the company's Controller.

After a few unsuccessful attempts at the Comcast Controller's office, he said someone from Comcast contacted a partner at the firm Conal worked at to discuss Conal. It led to an internal ethics investigation against Conal, and Conal's subsequent firing from his job.

Comcast apparently says he mentioned his job at the accounting firm he worked for because Comcast did some business with it. Conal said he never mentioned to Comcast which firm he worked for, and Comcast looked it up. (You could do that easily with a quick Google search.)

Consumerist goes on:

"When he was fired, Conal's employer explained that the reason for the dismissal was an email from Comcast that summarized conversations between Conal and Comcast employees.

But Conal has never seen this email in order to say whether it's accurate and Comcast has thus far refused to release any tapes of the phone calls related to this matter."

Again, from Consumerist:

"Even though Comcast insists that Conal attempted to leverage his place of business to get his issue resolved, it has not specifically cited languate that he allegedly used in the call.

How many times a day do Comcast reps hear a customer say something like 'I'm a lawyer' or 'I'm a big shot at (fill in the blank.)' ? How many of those result in Comcast going out of its way to contact that customer's employer?"

Comcast responded to Consumerist by not responding. Just saying they want to treat customers well, the standard PR response.

Conal has not filed a lawsuit, but he might. His lawyer has sent Comcast some letters already.

I hope there is a civil lawsuit to get to the bottom of this. Does Comcast retaliate against customers they've cheated when the customer has the gall to persistently complain about it?

Or is Conal lying or mistaken. Comcast could clear this up by releasing recordings of the phone calls and the emails involved.  If Conal is lying or wrong, it would certainly help Comcast and almost everybody else if the cable company proves it.

(By the way, if it turns out Comcast is innocent of all this, I'll post a follow up. Or if there's major new developments that prove Conal's case, I'll do the same.)

Comcast has been getting a lot of nasty publicity lately for treating customers in a well, nasty fashion.

It got to the point where Comcast admitted it will often only refund customers if the customer records the call. 

Here in Vermont, and in other states, it's illegal to record someone without their permission. So if Comcast ever cheated our household out of money, we have no recourse. I guess theft is now legal, as long as it's done by a big corporation, and not by some thug on a seedy street corner.

Free market advocates say that if a company is this bad, people just take their business elsewhere and the bad corporation either improves or goes out of business.

That's true, but in many markets, cable companies like Comcast are a monopoly. If you have a problem with them, tough. And they know that.

Maybe the drumbeat of bad publicity will make Comcast better somehow, anyway. Certainly, I imagine most Comcast employees are not evil. Perhaps many of them are overworked or poorly trained, or their internal systems could use improvement, but most people don't go out of their way to cheat or threaten others, especially customers.

I'm guessing the corporate culture at the top needs to change. Or, I know people are loathe to see more regulations, but maybe some government agency ought to ensure Comcast customers who got screwed don't screwed again.

You Can Check Out Of Comcast Any Time You'd Like, But You Can Never Leave

One customer service rep from Comcast would NOT
let a couple disconnect service.  

People purchase or disconnect from services like Internet connections and cable television all the time.

You gain some customers, you lose some customers. Nature of the beast.

Today, a Soundcloud recording that's gone viral shows, at least if you get one certain Comcast customer service representative.

A couple named Ryan Block and Veronica Belmont recorded their conversation with the Comcast guy when they wanted to disconnect. They declined to give a reason why, and that's cool. It's none of anybody's business. They can buy or not buy anything they like and the rest of us can go pound sand if we don't like it.

Actually, Block said he had earlier given reasons why the couple wanted to disconnect, but I guess the reasons weren't good enough for the Comcast guy.

So he wouldn't let them disconnect.

If you don't want to listen to the entire Soundcloud torture session with the Comcast guy, Consumerist offers us a helpful partial transcript. Here's some excerpts:

R: We'd like to disconnect, please.
C: Help me understand why you don't want faster internet
R: Help me understand why you can't just disconnect us.
C: My job is to have a conversation with you about keeping your service, about finding out why it is you're looking to cancel your service. If you don't want to talk to me, you can definitely go to the Comcast store and cancel your service there."

OK: Sounds like the Comcast guy gets a stiff penalty any time somebody cancels. I get that there a company wants to give employees incentive to retain customers, but if you go overboard, boy, will you lose customers.

I work on and off in a call center for a well known gardening equipment company. Us employees there are certainly encouraged to talk with customers to see if there are additional items the customers might be interested in beyond what they called for.

But if the customer gives a firm no, they don't want anything else, then you agree, process the order, thank them and wish them a great day. You leave them not pissed off, not frustrated, and chances are they'll call again in the future with another order.

However, it seems you're in BIG TROUBLE if a customer disconnects, so they go to great lengths to frustrate the customer into keeping the service.

Of course, recordings like the one in this post are  PR nightmare, so I'm sure we'll hear from Comcast that the customer service rep, went too far, he was fired for it, we're sorry, yada, yada, yada.

In fact, we already have that: Sam Gustin from Vice tweeted a response from Comcast. "We're investigating the situation and certainly want to apologize to the customer......This isn't how our customer service representatives are trained to operate."

Let's hope not!

Still, I wonder if  the rest of the Comcast customer service reps are still under pressure to go to HUGE lengths to retain customers. Doesn't sound like fun.

Let's go back to the transcript. Around and around it goes, and where she stops, nobody knows. Becuse the Comcast guy won't ever EVER let it stop:

R: Can you cancel us by phone? The answer is yes, correct?
C: It sounds like you don't want to go over this information with me. If you want to go over that information, that's the easiest way to get your account disconnected.

Oh, OK, so the only way to get disconnected is to listen to a never ending commercial as to why the service is so great. I guess that would be OK if it were a brief ad, but it sounds like it isn't

Let's go back to the conversation:

R: I am declining to state why we are leaving Comcast because I don't owe you an explantion. So, if you can proceed to the next question. If you have to fill out a form, the fine. Please proceed to the next question and we'll attempt to answer that if possible.
C: Being that we're the number one provider of TV and Internet service in the entire country, why is it you don't want the number one provider?

Oops. Looks like we got our Comcast commercial anyway.

More of the conversation:

C: I'm just trying to figure out here what it is about Comcast service that you're not liking.
R: This phone call is an amazing representative example of why I don't want to stay with Comcast. So, can you please cancel our service?

There! Our customer offered a reason why he is cancelling Comcast, even though he didn't have to give it. So we're done now, right?

Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no.

R: You can help me by disconnecting our service.
C: How is that helping you?
R: Because that is what I want 
C: There has to be some sort of reason behind it. We just want to find out what it is that's causing a customer who has been with us a long time to leave."

Um, maybe they're leaving because they're sick of wasting time with you, spending all morning on a task that should have just lasted a couple of minutes.

It gets worse, if you can believe it. Let's listen in some more:

C: Why don't you want a good service? You don't want something that works?
R: Is this a joke? Are you punking us right now?
C: I'm trying to get information. I'm trying to help our company be better. That's my job.
R: I can guarantee you right now, you're doing an incredibly good job at helping your company be worse."

Ouch!

Of course, basically calling a customer stupid, as in he's too stupid to realize what works and what doesn't, isn't exactly the best way to sell a product. But whatever.

From what I hear, they did eventually get their Comcast service disconnected. Which is just as well. They're probably too exhausted to watch TV after that long conversation.

Like everyone else except the Comcast guy, I really don't care why Ryan and Veronica wanted their cable service disconnected.

But now I'm afraid to disconnect my cable service, if I ever wanted to do that. So maybe the Comcast guy was crazy like a fox. Yep, Ryan and Veronica are gone from Comcast, God bless 'em. But the rest of us are now too terrified to leave.

If that's the case, Comcast just got a nation full of hostages customers for life.