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| Useless Comcast customer service calls… (182603) | |||
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Useless Comcast customer service calls… |
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Posted by JohnL on Sat Jan 6 22:53:08 2007 This is a vent!I have Comcast internet service which, when it works, works very well! But when something goes wrong, it’s like pulling teeth to find out what the problem is. Tonight, about half an hour ago, I had a power glitch, not enough to take my PCs down, and not enough immediately to stop internet connectivity, but after about a minute or so, things stopped working. My cable modem (which I own, it’s not Comcast’s) had a funny set of status lights, to I recycled it. I could then talk to it and get status (it has a built-in web server). I also recycled my router and it was able to acquire network addresses. However I couldn’t ping the Comcast gateway. Scratched head. So, I thought, the cable plant including the head-end modem was OK, but something behind had a problem. So I called Comcast. I spoke with the less-than-knowledgable Ramone unfortunately. The first problem was that Ramone had a script to follow and couldn’t deviate from it. Moreover, he couldn’t put me in contact with anyone who could deviate from it and actually help find out what was wrong. He had one tool: he could discover whether a given modem was online, given its MAC (hardware) address. But he couldn’t understand that I could ask the modem what its hardware address was (go look at the sticker). He also couldn’t process any of the symptoms I was complaining about, and asked me to connect my PC to the modem and ping the comcast.net web server. Of course it didn’t work, but he didn’t understand that the problem was that I couldn’t resolve the address but I knew that wouldn’t work because I couldn’t reach the gateway. But Ramone didn’t! All he could do was say that he would schedule a service call! Now poor Ramone has a job to do, and I’m sure he was following corporate policy. But surely, it has to be cheaper to have someone who knows what they’re talking about call knowledgeable customers. If nothing else, it might provide insight into what is wrong with the network. Magically, service was restored, but of course, no-one at Comcast can tell me that there was a problem, still less what it was. This information was from Ramone, who called me (on my Vonage service) apparently exactly when the service came back. Ramone promised me a call from a supervisor, about 20 minutes ago. Still waiting. PS: If there is anyone from Comcast out there, please send me an e-mail. I would love to talk to you about how you can improve your first level customer diagnosis scripts and maybe even find out what is wrong! That is, if you care. |
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