Little Old Lady Hammers Comcast

WheezyJoe writes "The Washington Post reports that a little old lady took a hammer to Comcast. Apparently fed up with the lousy service she received from a botched Comcast installation of "triple-play", and a completely humiliating experience at a customer service center, 75-year-old Mona "The Hammer" Shaw took her claw hammer back to the customer service center and bludgeoned the office equipment into tiny plastic pieces."

Gotta love the older folks, they remember America

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

... when it was good :) When service matters, when companies gave a dam... when people gave a dam doing their jobs...

I say we arm our elderly and let them take back this country. They stood up in ww2, and they might be feeling up to it again.

Local Comcast office vs. Post Office

[jroysdon]

I always wondered why my local Comcast office was behind plexiglass (bullet-proof?). The Post Office down the street has no such physical barriers. I guess Comcast is used to dealing with this sort of response to their customer dis-service. The Post Office is slow and all, but at least you get what they promise. I just wish Comcast could get their programming guide data fixed. I lost a few channels that they block now with their filter. I can still most of one, and a hazy version of another. Comcast's solution? Upgrade my package to digital and pay $40 more a month for the two channels I want. No thanks. OTA looks better and better if there was just another high-speed internet player in the market.

Comcast high-speed internet (without CableTV): $61
Comcast mini-basic CableTV ($15) + high-speed internet: $60

What a racket, eh? It's cheaper to get their mini-basic CableTV and internet than to just get internet solo. Not by much, of course. I wish I could just get high-speed internet for $45 and then that'd be motivation enough to get a nice OTA setup going.

Does she have a fund?

[Belacgod]

I'd contribute to paying her fine for her.

Re:Comcast Is Deluded

[Steeltalon]

Hahahahaha! Oh, that story is rich! Kudos to her for doing what I never had the balls to do. My personal story is one of absolute horror. Last year, I was a comcast customer. I would frequently have lag spikes that pushed my latency up into the seconds (yes, that is more than 1x1000ms). Every damn time that I called Comcast they'd send out a service tech who might be there at the time of a spike or might not be. It was all very random. So, finally I reached my breaking point and I told them that they'd better not just send me another tech who'd tell me that my signal was fine. I was told that I was getting a "network specialist" and this definitely wasn't just another tech. Well, the guy calls me from the road and didn't seem to know what I was talking about when I said "network specialist". Then he showed up and not only was he a regular tech but he was a regular tech that was completely dismissive of my problem. He acted like I wasn't really having a problem because, at the time, I was running on my wireless router... Nevermind all the logs that I'd taken from a direct connection to the modem. So, after nearly throwing the guy out of my house, I called Comcast and started screaming. This got me somewhere as I finally got escalated to the CEO's office where they had a customer care executive assigned to me. Their network guys looked at my latency and determined that my problem was only happening 2% of the time... Which, regardless of when it was occurring, was acceptable to them so while they could have alleviated the issue by adding another link they wouldn't. We just got FiOS in my current place about a month ago and Comcast called to try to get us back. The guy that called seemed to think that all verizon connections were DirecTV and had no idea what FiOS was. He also threw out that BS number of how many of their customers are satisfied and told me that their service is "much better now". I told him it would take an act of God to get me to go back to Comcast. It was a very cathartic phone call to get. I hope that the recording goes to upper management but I doubt it will.

Feeling rebelious

[GregPK]

Having lived through 3 different cable providers giving me the same service. Started with TCI, then moved to ATT, then moved to Comcast. I'd have to say I'm the least satisfied with Comcast out of all three. I hate thier customer service. Thier CRM setup is a complete joke. Personally, I think the woman is a hero, If she had a paypal posted I'd send a buck for making my day. Comcast should have this happen in every one of thier offices every single day until they get the point. Treat thier customers right.

The Solution is Clear.

[Death_Aparatus]

Stop watching T.V. I haven't owned a television in almost a decade. Feels great.

ComCast alleged customer service

[meburke]

I have some customers who use ComCast now that they own Houston's RoadRunner customers. (That is not really a typo...) I had occasion to call ComCast the other day asking for technical assistance for a customer replacing their Linksys Wireless cable gateway. Comcast told me they would have to fill out a form with the new MAC address and the account would be updated in 5-7 days. After an hour of being transferred around I finally found someone who updated the account MAC address in 5 minutes. Then I asked for the DNS address of the nameservers. They told me they didn't support DNS. I got transferred to four people who didn't have a CLUE about Windows XP needing a nameserver address (if you have a static IP, even if it's an internal NAT address) before I finally simply hung up, set the workstation to DHCP and derived a DNS address from ipconfig.

There is such an abundance of crappy customer service out there you would think that any company that provides outstanding (or even reasonable) customer service could steal the market.

My biggest advice for companies wanting to reduce the cost of customer service is, "Clean it up upstream." Don't put out crappy products and you will have fewer customer service problems. This means solid design and VERY good documentation, plus some solid troubleshooting tips. Then pay your customer support techs better money, give them a nice place to work, and reward them for SOLVING PROBLEMS instead of just closing tickets or answering calls. (This means the customer support function needs to be "designed" instead of just being an afterthought.) Provide constant and high-quality training and alternative ways for the customer to get support, and for God's sake, ANSWER THE PHONE!

I ask my customers, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate our service?" Then I ask, "What would it take to make it a 10?" I have managed to retain some really loyal customers this way, and I have dropped services I can't provide good service for. Noone can please everyone, so I have also dropped customers who are impossible to please. Cleaning it up upstream for me (an integrator) means clarifying the scope of work and the customer expectations before I start the job. I also evaluate the customer's reasons for wanting my services. Many times they are trying to solve a problem by "jumping to solutions", and I have saved customers a lot of money and grief by helping them troubleshoot the whole problem before committing to help. It takes more time, but it prevents hassles downstream.

White Alert

[Tablizer]

I used to work in IT for a cable company, and whenever a customer went bizerk in the customer service office, a white clicking light would flash in most offices and pre-designated "bouncers", mostly employee volunteers, would walk briskly down the hall toward the service area. The theory was that large quantities of large people would make customers think twice about violence.

Re:That's not all...

[Aczlan]

she could sell the hammer on eBay... it would probably bring in enough to more than pay for the equipment she destroyed... Aaron Z

Re:Reminds me of a joke

[vidarh]

It's pretty telling that when Virgin Mobile merged with NTL-Telewest, they expected (and got) a massive increase in customer service calls, and had to staff up their call centers. Not because service got worse, but because people expect better of a Virgin branded company, and had previously just given and resigned themselves to not getting any service from either NTL or Telewest...

Now, it's too early for me at least to tell if it's made a genuine difference - I haven't had to deal with support since the merger - but I do remember trying to order extra services from Telewest and giving up because they were so unhelpful. Way to throw away revenue.

Re:here is a similar story

[KingOfBLASH]

Out of curiosity, why couldn't the college ditch comcast and purchase bandwidth via a couple T3s and buy a couple switches? Was that ever an option? It seems really weird that a college would power their net with a Beowulf cluster of cable modems...

Re:Tiger...and Comcast's (false) advertising claim

[Anonymous Coward]

...and Comcast's (false) advertising claims:
"your calls won't change; they'll only cost less".

Well, um, no, my calls cost more now, that I've switched from (phased-out) Comcast Digital Phone, to (intermittently working) Comcast Digital Voice, to (reliable old analog, but still overpriced) AT&T phone service. After losing tons of my valuable time to switch twice (at Comcast's urging--none of this was my idea; Comcast "threatened" to discontinue my (reliable, relatively-inexpensive, but technology old-fashioned) Comcast Digital Phone, so I had to "act now"). And I'm still resolving billing issues with multiple vendors.

And, no, my calls *did* change, for a while (until I gave up). During four weeks of (really poor) customer service phone calls (dozens of people, so many hours on hold, listening to many falsehoods or displays of ignorance), a half dozen technician visits (some good, some bad), replacement of every wire and piece of Comcast equipment in my house (and bogus double, triple, incorrect, ultimately backed-out billing for all sorts of things instead of their advertised "Free Professional Installation" which consisted of backfeeding the phone signal from a new cable modem to my existing phone jacks, i.e. plugging in one wire=$60!?!), they could *not* get Comcast Digital Voice phones to work reliably at my house: No dial tone and/or noisy, one-way, or dropped calls several times a day (every day for four weeks). And now, I somehow pay more per month, because they "improved" my TV packaging with "free" premium channels, that I've canceled, but somehow I cannot go back to my previous plan.

During the outages, I pointed out that the phone service broke whenever the internet access also broke (pinging an IP address would time-out whenever the phone was dead--I was initially told that this is "impossible" even though the phone is plugged into the cable modem, somehow the phone should always work, even if the cable modem was disconnected? WTF?). I coded a little program to ping a (reliable server) IP address once every minute and log successes and any timeouts; the logs show multi-minute time-outs 10 to 20 times a day, every day (and still does--we just live with it, waiting for a competent internet provider to come along (and we're willing to pay more for reliable internet service).

The Comcast technicians (off the record) blame the decade(s) old wiring under the street (that Comcast has no intention of repairing or replacing). So now I pay more for (reliable, non-Comcast) AT&T analog phone service. Oh, and I signed up with AT&T for a free installation of DishNet Satellite HD-TV/DVR, which looks better than Comcast's, so buh-bye to Comcast's HD HDVR. (I do have to point out that the AT&T and DishNet customer service also sucks, though perhaps less than Comcast's. I'm already thinking of trying DirectTV instead for better baseball coverage than DishNet. I guess I'm an optimist to keep expecting some technology to deliver on its promises.)

I can only hope that either AT&T runs fiber optic cable to the houses in my neighborhood, or moves the "central office" closer to enable DSL, or that Google somehow provides wireless broadband (but I'm in a valley, with really poor cell phone reception). I am so looking forward to dropping Comcast internet (my only viable choice right now; I'm too remote for DSL or Wireless; I telecommute daily and really need internet access to work from home, and I cannot use Satellite because it doesn't work with VPN).

Wouldn't it be great if every home had coax, fiber, and wireless access to a menu of internet, voice, and TV options, where competition drove prices down and drove customer service (the only differentiator) up? How many years away is this?

Re:Comcast Is Deluded

[ozric99]

I used a series 1 TiVo in the UK and loved it. I now live in the US and have a series 2 TiVo.

• It's slow, often taking a couple seconds to respond to the remote - sometimes I can wait 4 or 5 seconds before hitting the 'tivo' button until the menu comes up. When the menu does come up I can see the redraw.
• Even though it's networked it can't view media on other devices.
• Adverts all over the place.
• Can't view its media on other devices unless you want to copy the programmes in real time and install some DRM bullshit.
• When it loses the wireless connection, for whatever reason, it requires a reboot to reconnect.
• 50% of the buttons on the remote are totally redundant.
• Adverts randomly appearing in the menu structure.
• Say I've recorded a couple of episodes of programme X and want to delete them. Can I delete the folder? No. I have to go into the folder and delete each individual programme. Then, to top it off, when I've done that, instead of removing the folder and dumping me back to the main menu it gives me a screen that says "Hey, there's nothing in here, you should press left to go back to the main manu". Honestly, the entire menu system is littered with these lazy UI choices.
• Did I mention fucking adverts in the main menu! After this last update I stopped a program recording in order to change channel and, no shit, my three choices were "stop recording", "continue recording", "advert link". It hasn't happened since, so either it was a mistake or it only happens on certain programmes, but still, I'm paying a monthly fee for this serviec - why are there advert at all??

When it came out TiVo was simply awesome but tech has moved on - TiVo is currently the device that is "almost there". At the moment the only thing it has going for it is ease of use and the occasional suggestion it throws up. I haven't seen the new series 3 devices - perhaps they're perfect, I don't know. The reason I still use TiVo is because I'm too lazy to setup and maintain MythTV/freevo/mediaportal. XBMC is about the best media player interface out there right now. If it could record TV I'd be right there - I hear there's a linux version in the mix but haven't looked at that in a while, so I may just do that right now.