What you get when my brain crashes…

Follow-Up on “Comcastic Support”

In a follow up to this post on my experience with Comcast Support, I have… good news!

I wrote in to Comcast this morning via their website because I was having some Internet trouble - it was being a bit flakey. I wrote to them telling them about my previous experience - which admittedly was probably due to the transition from my old cable provider, Patriot Media, to Comcast (which bought out Patriot Media).

This afternoon I got a call from a very nice lady at Comcast to follow up on my problem. I consider same-day callbacks to be much better than 3 days later!

Basically, she apologized for the problem and explained what was going on - what I had already guessed; namely that they are switching stuff around and that’s never perfect.

I asked about some sort of system to let customers know in advance when work like this will be performed - which apparently they have (it’s email based, which is less than ideal, but at least it’s something). Unfortunately they couldn’t use it in this case, because of the circumstances. (You try acquiring a company and all of its customers and then integrating them with your own systems and see how smoothly it goes.)

In short, I feel less ill-disposed towards Comcast than I did this morning - my flakey Internet even cleared up shortly after I called (apparently they were having issues in my area and were already working on it). Another case where some sort of “status” would have come in handy (maybe Comcast should have a blog or a twitter account?).

Is this a case of a company that’s actually changed its ways and has really committed itself to customer service? We’ll see… here’s hoping.

Comcastic “Support?”

Earlier this week, on Monday, I had some Internet trouble.

My ISP, Patriot Media, was recently bought out by that cable company everyone loves to hate, Comcast. On Monday, my Internet stopped working, and so I set about trying to figure out what went wrong.

I saw right away that it seemed as though my local (as in neighborhood) network had finally been switched over to Comcast’s network - the IP had changed to a totally different class A network, and as a further clue, the host name now said “comcast” instead of “patriotmedia.” OK - so why can’t I connect to anything?

I was getting the new IP address via DHCP, so I knew I was at least connected to Comcast - but I could not ping the DHCP, DNS, or Gateway IP addresses I was given. Very strange! So the problem must’ve been on their end.

Ugh. That means I have to call Comcast tech support and probably go through all my troubleshooting all over again.

Sure enough, that is exactly what happened. Even though I’d already done the whole “connect your computer directly to the cable modem” thing, they made me do it again. And again. I mean, I know why they make you do this, and I know that they’re probably told to ignore callers who say “I’m a tech person, I know what I’m doing” (which I did say, in not so few words), but still…

Anyway, they eventually said they’d have to escalate it (duh!) and would it be OK for a tech to call me back on this number? I said sure, made sure they had the phone number right (they did), and hung up.

Several hours later, with no Internet, I was going through withdrawal. Remember, I live on the Internet!

So I called back to get a status report - and they started making me go through the troubleshooting steps again! So I firmly asked for a status report, and they said, basically, “they’re working on it.”

To keep myself amused, I was periodically checking my ‘net connection, resetting my router and cable modem to see if I had connectivity. Finally, after 6 hours, the Internet came back to life and I was able to get back online.

Fast forward to today, and I get a call out of the blue. It was Comcast… calling to see if my Internet was working now.

For those who can’t count, that’s 3 days later they finally called to check in on me.

I guess you could say that this is what “Comcastic” really means - leave your customers hanging for 3 days before following up on something that you fixed 3 days earlier. If they keep using that word in their advertising, well… to quote a great movie, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

UPDATE: I have a follow-up post regarding this issue - and it’s good news!