Even before my recent move to Seattle from California, I received lots of well-meaning advice and warnings about the world awaiting me. Watch out for bicycle groups riding at midnight. Trash pick-up rules will drive me nuts. Avoid at all costs the Fremont Bridge, the country’s most active drawbridge.
The list goes on and on. But there’s one warning I heard more than any other: It will take Comcast numerous visits to get it right.
For me the jury is still out on nocturnal cyclists, waste disposal and double-leaf bascule spans just 30 feet up. But I can tell you from personal experience the conventional wisdom I received around Puget Sound about Comcast is spot on.
In its effort to provide me with cable TV, Internet and telephone under its Xfinity brand name, the company’s cable guys have been out to my house three times. The second visit lasted more than four hours. I still don’t have everything working exactly the way I want. But we’re getting closer.
The world's 104th biggest company, Philadelphia-based Comcast is the U.S.’s largest cable and Internet operation, a major provider of home telephone service and majority owner of NBC Universal. So it’s an extremely easy target for critics. But I came to Seattle as a satisfied former Comcast customer who had found the company’s service very reliable in two other places I’ve lived, New Mexico and California.
That may yet prove to be true in high tech Seattle, which is quite the Comcast stronghold. But for me the jury is still out.
Accompanying the three visits were a lot of phone calls from me spread over several months to the company, and a lot of time spent on hold. In every call, a cheery tape-recorded voice said, “We are currently experiencing a higher than normal call volume and longer than normal wait times.”
Now, you don’t have to be Isaac Newton to know it’s mathematically impossible for every single instance to fall above the stated mean. This Comcast response–often the first impression left with a new customer–is the real life equivalent of Lake Woebegon. That’s the fictional Minnesota town created by humorist Garrison Keillor where it is claimed with false pride that “all the children are above average.”
So the company clearly is fibbing a bit, insulting its customers but nowhere as funny as Keillor’s radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. I am speculating wildly here. But my assumption is that a very high-level decision was made against saying something with a little more candor, like, “You are being put on hold because we don’t spend enough on customer service so we can increase short-term profits for our shareholders and justify the total compensation of our CEO, Brian L. Roberts, who has been paid $146 million over the past five years.”
From what I have seen, a lot of Comcast’s problems in Seattle comes from installing its voice-over-Internet phone service through ancient existing wiring installed by Qwest. That’s the traditional telephone company that sold itself to CenturyLink, based in that noted high tech center of Monroe, La. On Seattle radio I’ve been hearing the Comcast ad campaign urging the locals not to go with a company they know nothing about. It seems to me an effective pitch, even if Comcast is calling itself the devil, as in go-with-the-devil-you-know.
There’s also what strikes me as poor Comcast training of its workers, which I lay squarely at the feet of management. In my Seattle experience, those on the telephone front line haven’t been given enough information, so they often made it up. I frequently received answers that were contradicted by my next contact with a Comcast employee.
I also have been trying to get Comcast’s all-digital platform to fully accommodate my trusty TiVo Series 2 dual-tuner, which, like Charlton Heston and his guns, will have to be pried from my cold dead hands. I have done everything I was told to do by Comcast workers, but so far it still doesn’t work as it should.
Advised that I needed to use a “TiVo card,” I drove across town to a Comcast office to fetch one, only to find upon returning home that my box was so old there was no plug for it. I didn’t know what a TiVo card looked like or what kind of plug it needed–there certainly are a lot of plugs and other holes on the behind of a TiVo box. But you’d think Comcast would know and ask me to take a close look before sending me on what proved to be a wild-goose chase.
In Seattle, sticking it to Comcast seems to be a bit of a local diversion, like watching the fishmongers tossing the salmon at the Pike Place Market. One person I met recounted with glee his revenge. He signed up for Comcast, had its techs expensively install video ports and telephone jacks all over the house, then canceled the service, invoked Comcast’s “30-day, money-back guarantee” and went to Qwest with free infrastructure.
I’m not likely to do that. But I just got my first Comcast bill, which came in nearly three times higher than the much-touted $99 “Xfinity Triple Play.” So maybe it is possible in real life for something always to be above average.
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