Comcast customer service stories are almost common these days. Customer service in general is normally a nightmarish ordeal, but Comcast always seems to bubble to the top of the sh*t soup to stand out, mostly due to stories like Lisa and Ricardo Brown’s from Spokane, Washington. After trying to cancel their cable service, the Browns noticed a new name on their billing statement: A**hole Brown:
“I am shocked,” she told me. She explained that her family was having financial difficulties and needed to reduce their cable bill. She’d called Comcast to cancel the cable portion of her account, for which she had to pay a $60 fee. Instead of complying immediately, a representative escalated her call to a retention specialist, who tried to persuade her to keep the cable service and sign a new two-year contract.
“I was never rude,” she says. “It could have been that person was upset because I didn’t take the offer.” (via)
Lisa Brown sent her story to Christopher Elliott, seeking help with Comcast. From there he began to look into the situation, question if it was even real at first:
My first thought was that someone was trying to pull a practical joke on a consumer advocate. So I asked for a copy of the billing statement and the correspondence between her and Comcast.
And no kidding, it looked like someone had changed the name. How impolite!
Next, I contacted Comcast to find out what its records said. It’s fairly easy for any customer to doctor a photo of a bill to shame a large company, so I wanted to make sure Comcast was seeing the same thing.
It was.
From there he got in touch with Comcast and was soon contacted by Steve Kipp, Comcast’s vice president of communications for the region, who confirmed the story to Elliott and Wired magazine and added the following statement:
“We have spoken with our customer and apologized for this completely unacceptable and inappropriate name change,” he said. “We have zero tolerance for this type of disrespectful behavior and are conducting a thorough investigation to determine what happened. We are working with our customer to make this right and will take appropriate steps to prevent this from happening again.”
Elliott updated that Lisa Brown had contacted him to confirm that Comcast had “made it right,” offering a full refund for the past two years and two extra years of service at no charge. It’s certainly not a shock that some customer service reps hold differing opinions on customers, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen it come out in the public in such a blatant way. It’s laughable at this point.
(Via Christopher Elliott / Wired)