Comcast Dispatch Phone Numbers > This posting will only hurt the Comcast customers in the end

This posting will only hurt the Comcast customers in the end

What would be a really interesting figure would be the ratio of techs to [customer accounts]. The +10K you're quoting could be entirely disproportionate to the number of [customer accounts] they gained in 2006.
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They added roughly 5 million new RGU's or Revenue Generating Units. This does not mean they added 5 million new customers but added 5 million subscribers to their various offerings. If you subscribe to digital cable, HSI and CDV then you count as 3 not 1. It's hard to get a clear picture of how many new customers they added. This might be the closest thing you can get.

OK, being generous to Concast then, 5,000,000 divided by 3 is:
1,666,666 actual [customer accounts] to 10,000 techs. So the ratio would be 166 customers to one tech. If the tech saw 5 customers a day (again a stretch in Concast's favor), it would take him/her about 7 workweeks to see each one of them. Hmmmm....

Edit: Forgot to mention the the RGUs you mention make their customers sound just a little like assimilated Borg, no?

reply to fuego24
One thing people don't understand is that a lot of the time the reason the tech is late is due to things outside of his or her control. People love to bitch about how the techs are always late but never once do they stop to think that it just might not be the techs fault.

I've worked service calls before. My dad and I were sub-contractors for Comcast (through a company called Comtrac) a couple of years ago. We were there for power supply transponders but occasionally we and the other techs were "strongly urged" to do service calls.

When we would pick up the work orders, 90% of them would be coded as "video problem" or "no service" when it would have absolutely nothing to do with that. Before heading out in the morning we would input all of the locations into the laptop and plan out our route to maximize efficiency. Most of the time it worked very well and we were one of the few crews that were on-time.

Many times we would get to the customer location and find a much bigger problem on our hands due to incorrect coding that I mentioned before. I'm not going to bore everyone with all of the details but basically if the work orders had correct info on them we could better plan out our day. Sometimes this is laziness on the part of the person writing up the work order or the CSR talking to the customer. Although I think often times it is the customer themselves that does it to us by simply saying "I have no service" or "my tv doesn't work right" when in fact they either don't know how to turn on the TV or want to know how to work the guide (yes, we really went on a call where the customer simply wanted to know how to work the guide ).

One last thing that can slow us down is the customer not being home when we show up. If we show up during the window and you are not there, we are supposed to call the number listed on the work order to attempt to get someones attention. If no answer we had to call dispatch and they would then call the customer to confirm a no-show. Only then could we stick a door tag on the door and go to the next job. I remember waiting 30 mins to an hour in the truck on dispatch to call the customer.

Making those numbers publicaly available was a BIG mistake and as others have said I would not be surprised if those get changed quickly.

reply to Kylemaul
I dunno, 5 customers a day isn't too hard as long as you don't get stuck with a bunch of long jobs. We would usually grab 10-12 work orders a day and many times we would get to all of them. It might be 6 -7 PM by the time we are done with the last one but we would certainly make an attempt to get to all of them.

In general I agree, it does seem like the scales aren't anywhere near balanced but there is no way it could be either.

said by Kylemaul:

Forgot to mention the the RGUs you mention make their customers sound just a little like assimilated Borg, no?

reply to Kylemaul
My ship is docked already lol. Dad retired from Comcast in 2003, we went back as contractors in 2005 and stayed there for about a year. Now we are both doing other things. Up until a month ago we were both in IT related fields but he wanted a change so he went back to auto mechanics; I'm still in IT though. We still have friends at Comcast and stay in touch though.

reply to fuego24