It’s been a bad year for Comcast’s customer service image — probably not what the company wants to hear when it’s trying to convince federal regulators to let it swallow up millions of Time Warner Cable customers — and while many consumers are taking this week off from work, the folks at Kabletown know that bad service doesn’t take a holiday.
The latest customer service debacle comes to us via the above YouTube clip, in which a Comcast customer tries to figure out why he’s not getting the broadband package he was promised only months earlier.
See, after a few months of getting Comcast’s high-speed “Blast” service for the promotional price of around $50, the customer’s bill began to rise. When he called Comcast the other day, a rep told him that the $50 price was only good for three months and she doesn’t know where the “miscommunication” was that led him to believe that this price was intended to last a full year.
But the customer wasn’t imagining things and didn’t mishear the offer. How do we know? Because he has a recording of the call he made in August where the rep clearly and repeatedly states the $50 price is good for 12 months and does not require him to re-up his contract.
When he offers to play this recording to the rep trying to give him the bad news, he’s told that the only thing that the recording is only useful as something she could pass on to her supervisor “for coaching” purposes.
“So you’re telling me your company doesn’t stand by what they tell their customers when they’re trying to get them to sign up again?” he asks while the rep tries to say “no.”
“You said ‘I understand that she told you 12 months’ and ‘I understand that you’re saying you have a recording…’ but you’re not going to honor it because you don’t stand by your word?” the customer implores.
“I would honor if that was something that I had in front of me,” responds the rep, who claims that she is the highest-level person he can speak to and that she has access to all available promotional offers, but laments that, “Unfortunately, I do not have that promotion right now.”
After the rep explains that she can go back and tweak the dates so as to remove the most recent month’s over-charge, the customer suggests that they just go the full year and then he’ll call back at the end of that time and have the over-charges reversed then for the remaining months.
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that,” says the rep.
That’s when things get really sore, as the rep tries to sell the customer on the value of paying full-price for Blast service.
Then she offers him a promotion that would be for half the speed of what he was getting at the same price as he was paying.
But of course, Comcast has charged the customer a different price each month since he first began the service, so it’s impossible to pin down exactly what he’s being offered.
“You’re doing the exact same thing as the last person,” he points out to the rep when she tries to negotiate a year of different promotional pricing. “I’ve never gotten a contract in the mail saying that I had this new price. What the hell are you going to send me? It’s just your word, and you obviously don’t honor what other people say.”
She then says that they send customers the contract “via e-mail, usually.”
“So I should have a contract from the last one?” he challenges.
A hesitant rep replies, “This one I can send to you. I wasn’t the last person you talked to, so I don’t know who the last person you talked to was.”
On Reddit, the customer provides an update, saying that he spoke to someone from Comcast Executive Customer Relations who refused to allow him to record the call.
However, this rep did send him an e-mail saying the call couldn’t be recorded “due to the nature of the reasons or possible intent that you may have for the recording,” like, for example, wanting a concrete record of what someone from Comcast tells you.
This rep says that, after listening to the “original and unedited version of your initial call,” (funny how the previous rep said she had no record of who he’d talked to back in August), that the customer had been given the “correct information on the service plan and promotional services at the time.”
The rep explains that the promotional pricing was for the entire pay-TV and broadband package, but that the upgrade to Blast Internet was only good through October.
“We have extended this promotional offer as a gesture of good will for an additional 12 months as long as you understand that at the end of that term if you wish to keep it, it will be billed at its standard rate,” reads the message from the rep.
The customer maintains that he was promised a year of the high-speed Blast service for a full 12 months and believes that while Comcast isn’t “accepting responsibility for anything, but they are offering me something.”
He’s asked Comcast to clarify that he will receive “100mbps down, 25mbps up” service at a monthly total of $53.85 and is currently waiting for a response.
When reached for comment by Consumerist, a Comcast rep said, “This certainly isn’t the type of experience we want our customers to have. We have reached out to the customer and are continuing to look into this.”
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