RE: Finding clue at comcast.net

["Howard C. Berkowitz" <hcb () gettcomm com>]

At 9:29 AM -0500 10/9/03, Austad, Jay wrote:
> Comcast's phone support department is the *worst*, WORST, I've ever dealt
> with.  I think they are outsourced, they have to go by a script, and many of
> them probably hardly know what a computer even is.  Once I called because of
> a problem on their network, and I told the person on the phone that there
> was a problem on their network, and I pinned it down to a couple of routers
> where the problem may be, and she responded, very sternly, "Sir, WE DON'T
> HAVE ANY ROUTERS"

Same thing here. Last night, I was told that no escalation personnel 
were available.

On the couple of occasions where I got escalation, I once had an 
informal conversation with a 3rd level. Their phone center is in 
Halifax, NS -- didn't find out if it is outsourced or not. While the 
person with whom I spoke was reasonably clueful, he told me that 
customer support had no interactive communication with network 
operations -- at best, they could send an email about a routing, 
SMTP, etc. problem and hope somebody would respond.

At the time, I was paying for their "Pro" service, intermediate 
between regular residential and full business. My contact said that 
while that was supposed to get better customer support, an early plan 
to route it to business Comcast failed, and there really was NO 
separate Pro support organization. I dropped the Pro service after I 
learned that residential service no longer insisted you remove any 
local routers and firewalls before deigning to troubleshoot. They 
still ask you to do that, but repeated NO responses can get them to 
proceed.

A few NANOGs back (Atlanta), I did a presentation on customer 
satisfaction, which, frankly, was in many respects a case study of 
how I'd reform customer support at my then ISP/DSL, cais.net. If 
NANOG ever did formal documents, I'd like to see a guideline on how 
to run customer support.

> In any case, if you manage to get the call escalated a couple of times
> (after lying about rebooting your computer 47 times),

You forgot reinstalling Windows. On a Mac.

> you'll get someone
> good.  Also, there are some good people who read this list.  But calling
> their phone support to get anything useful is like trying to squeeze blood
> from a rock.
>
> -jay
>
> >  -----Original Message-----
> >  From: Howard C. Berkowitz [mailto:hcb () gettcomm com]
> >  Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2003 7:36 PM
> >  To: nanog () merit org
> >  Subject: Finding clue at comcast.net
> >
> >
> >
> >  I'm rapidly beginning to believe this is equivalent to finding the
> >  pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. When my broadband alternative
> >  is Verizon and it's looking better, this is scary.
> >
> >  Sometime today, their SMTP server started bouncing messages with more
> >  than 3 addressees.  When I called customer support, I was told "we
> >  only handle troubleshooting, not mail service."  The operator
> >  "guessed" they might be doing software updates on the mail service,
> >  had no information, and said there was no person to which it could be
> >  escalated.
> >
> >  She insisted that I call my local cable office to find out when the
> >  "server repair" would be completed, because "they schedule all
> >  repairs."
> >
> >  Is this a bad dream?