The New York Times is the latest to write a love letter to Comcast top lobbyist David Cohen, who skirts federal lobbying rules by simply pretending not to be a lobbyist. Cohen's currently in the middle of selling lawmakers on Comcast's $45 billion attempted acquisition of Time Warner Cable, and the Times pays more than a little adoration towards Cohen for his lobbying skill set, while also highlighting his close fundraising ties to many of the politicians reviewing the merger.
As he's done in most interviews, Cohen addresses the company's Achilles heel: horrible customer service. As Comcast has also done in other public comments, the company tries to pretend that they simply have
so many customers, it's a small vocal minority of complainers that are to blame for the company's bad reputation, not the company itself:
quote:
"I point out we get over 300 million service calls a year,” he says. “A million a day. So if we do a great job on 99 percent of them, then we are going to have three million people” who are angry — “and we do a great job on way more than 99 percent."
This is effectively what Comcast CEO Brian Roberts
also tried to argue several times over the last year:
quote:
"What unfortunately happens is we have about… 350 million interactions with consumers a year, between phone calls and truck calls. It may be over 400 million, and that doesn't count any online interactions which are over, I think, a billion. You get one-tenth of one-percent bad experience, that's a lot of people — unacceptable. We have to be the best service provider or in the end, this company won’t be what I want it to be."
Except the data doesn't support that argument. Comcast is dead last or close to last in nearly
every single customer support study. They're the lowest ranked company not only in cable, but across
all industries. Worse, it has been this way for most of the last decade. That kind of abysmal showing simply wouldn't occur if it really were just a highly vocal minority of customers having problems (either users report you have good service, or they don't), and arguing otherwise allows Comcast to perpetuate the problem instead of actually addressing it.