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jlivingood
Premium Member
join:2007-10-28
Philadelphia, PA

1 edit

1 recommendation

jlivingood

Premium Member

More than Twitter

"But is it really curing the underlying problems that consumers are complaining about?"
IMHO, it is having an effect (speaking on a personal basis, with an inside view). What you see with the Care team using Twitter is the tip of the iceberg in an ongoing effort to transform our customer care approach. There are of course other tools used, ranging from Twitter to web forums (incl BBR) to online chat - not to mention regular phone.

All of these different care channels carries its own challenges and each of them improve at a different pace. But it looks to me like the organization is making a genuine, concerted, and intense effort to improve and change, and it has some visible effects like Twitter use. And one of those effects is that customers can be heard more quickly and the organization has become substantially more responsive. These are all really good things. There is of course lots of room to improve, but the ship is turning and they've signaled the engine room to set full speed.

That being said, why does someone call Care? When something doesn't work or a customer can't figure out how to do something, generally speaking, which means focusing on reliability, usability, and what features customers would like (and would like improved/changed).

So that's kind of why I tend to hang around places like BBR and our web forums, as well as a number of people on my team. This is obviously not accidental. A large part of that effort is to identify and resolve usability or other problems sooner, to open up our 'development feedback loop' to influence and input from customers, and to get a much better idea of how customers use our services, what challenges they have, what they really want, and more. It may seem pretty basic to interact directly with your customers and directly learn what they want, but as companies become larger that sometimes becomes more difficult to do. Luckily, this little Intertube thing helps break down those walls.

As to the posters, while sometimes you think you may just be seeing a post from a customer care person, that may not always be the case (it's not for me). It could be one of the engineers that runs the network backbone, or who runs the DNS servers, or the email servers, or who developed some new service feature that people are talking about, or a million other things.

We may not always be posting, but we're often reading. And for every person posting there are probably several other folks just reading and taking it all in. But know that people are watching, listening, learning, adapting, and experimenting with new approaches.
jus10
join:2009-08-04
Gainesville, VA

jus10

Member

Eh yes and no. In some cases the "more openness" Comcast policy has solved problems. In many cases I just think it mitigates the general outrage over something minor. Folks are less likely to be ticked off at someone who generally seems to care and make it right vs BigFaceLessCompany (regardless of who they are).

Recently I've asked about getting some more speed; both on the phone (useless) and with ComcastSteve. I believe I'm on old Adelphia plant so there isn't much Steve or anyone can do but he gave me the equivalent of the a corporate cookie while I wait for the upgrade. It was unexpected, but a nice gesture and I appreciated it. That's sort of a mitigation example.

I reinvested the discount cookie by buying a DS3 modem (even though its still at DS2 speeds) which unfortunately put me back in the Comcast DNS "helper" service. Since I don't have any idea what my Comcast.net login is (I don't use it for anything and haven't touched it since I set up the account years ago), I couldn't easily opt-out, however having the dns ips on dns.comcast.net, I could just switch the dns settings in the router and its done. No phone call for Comcast or me to have to deal with. That's a tiny savings.

And of course, I do think it helps your overall PR. That and AT&T new quest to be "most evilest tech/net company ever". .

As for JSRoman's comment, frankly, the install was my worst experience with Comcast. It's in my review but some guy showing up at 9PM, talking on the phone the whole time, and pretty much just tossing a RG6 cable at me and running doesn't exactly woo you in the whole customer service department. I'm techy enough to pretty much take it from there but had this been a non-tech person, the install would have had to been rescheduled and that wouldn't have gotten any gold stars. I know that's not everybody but still ...

And I would say that I am more likely to deal with you guys through the forums here (or the direct forums) than on twitter or the phone. If nothing else, it's been more successful. It is appreciated.

del ftl
@algx.net

del ftl to jlivingood

Anon

to jlivingood
Kudos for sure to you and your team Jason.

A few months back there were several comcast support issues that were virtually impossible to resolve via the telephone. Such as provisioned for the wrong config, or modem syncing with a lower QAM than necessary.

Now with eyes in the BBR comcast forums from those who can actually fix these issues it makes a big difference.