To whom it may concern:
This letter is being written as a result of the incidents that occurred on Monday, July 31st 2000 and Tuesday, August 1st, 2000. I will also reference events, which have transpired in the days since.
On July 1st, 2000, I put in my order to have the @Home service installed at my residence. I scheduled the install for Tuesday, July 25th, 2000. The install came and went, the man who did it was very good and all seemed to be in place. Now, all I needed was for the Comcast Cable employee to come and install the cable outlets. Twenty minutes later, he arrived and everything seemed to be going smooth. That is where the good times ended.
I didn’t have time to check my connection that night to see if everything was indeed up and running. On Thursday, July 27th, I tried for the first time to get connected and was unsuccessful. I simply blamed my network interface card since it was old and I wasn’t sure if it worked. So, Saturday, July 29th, I purchased a new card, installed it and still nothing. I called @Home technical support at 1-877-637-3125. There I talked to Dave who told me for some reason beyond anyone’s knowledge that my modem information was missing. I had previously called on Friday, July 21st and verified my modem information and made sure that everything was inline for my install on Tuesday, July 25th, and indeed it was. Or so, I was told. Dave told me that it would take 24-48 hours to rebuild my account. I was furious that this matter could not be resolved over the phone. He assured me that it would probably be up and running sometime on Monday, July 31st. Of course it was not and I called that same number and talked to a floor supervisor named Chris. Chris told me that the rebuilder had gone home for the day and that nothing could be done until tomorrow. Obviously that was even more frustrating. However, Chris assured me that since I was 4th on the “list”, that I should be up and running first thing on Tuesday, August 1st.
When I came home Tuesday afternoon, I was excited because my service was finally going to be ready. To my surprise, it was not. So, once again I called the same number and talked to another Chris. My question was, “ why is my service not up and running yet?” His answer was, because of the way the list works, it was not my turn yet. So, I’m trying to figure out how I went from 4th on the list, to 14th on the list and still no service. He said it was noted that I was told I was 14th on the list, which I was not. I very clearly verified that I was indeed 4th on the list, wrote it down, asked Chris to verify it as well, and he did. Somehow someone is either lying or blind. Either way they did not do their job properly. Here a week has gone by since I wanted my @Home service installed and working and still it is not. It has been 1 month since I ordered it as well. I purposely called four weeks ahead of time to set up my install so that I would have it the day that I moved in to my new apartment. To not have it running at this point is completely wrong and absolutely inexcusable.
My biggest frustration is that no one at the National Office, which is apparently the number I had been calling, was doing any thing to try and help the situation. To make things worse, I call at 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon and there was not a manager of any kind on duty or in the building that I could talk to. And still yet, Chris refused to give me any other phone numbers, names, or an idea of when someone who could make decisions would become available, because it had become blatantly obvious that he was unable and unwilling to give me the help I needed and deserved.
I myself am in the Customer Service industry, so I know how things could have been handled and they weren’t. They say that only 1 out of 27 people who are dissatisfied with a service or product will voice their opinion. Those same people will tell, on average, 17 people of their bad experience. Those 17 people will tell others and so on. Knowing that, I can’t possible understand why the 3 individuals mentioned above were unable or unwilling to help my situation. I am very disappointed with the way my account has been handled and am currently looking in to ADSL through different local providers. While I do feel that cable modems have certain advantages over ADSL, right now anything is better than what I have, which is nothing. Also,if these employees did indeed follow the documented procedures and did as they were trained, then your policies are what should be looked at very carefully.
On August, 31st, 2000, I began to experience connection problems. To put it specifically, on that day, my connection with Comcast was completely dead, off and on for about 30 minutes at a time. This had happened a few times before in days preceding my initial phone call, but I just overlooked it as a passing phase.
The nature of problem has been this. At any given moment my connection will go dead. It will usually stay out anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes, and then comes back for what seems to be no reason. This will usually happen around 4-5 times an evening. This has been the pattern since around August 25th, 2000, even though my initial call was on the 31st of August. Who knows how often it would happen if I had more time to use it.
I know $50 is not as much as you can pay for an internet connection. However, when you consider that I can get a better connection from a 56k dialup account, most of which you can get for free, $50 seems to be a huge waste.
The last 3 days, my connection has been completely dead. The light on my modem that says “cable” is flashing, continuously blinks, meaning that my connection is dead. Your technical support team told me that someone needed to come and look at my computer and outside lines, to further assist me. However the soonest someone was going to get here was 8 days? How can this be. You are touting this to be such a great service, and frankly it is very much anything but. It is actually very ironic. On my way to work, I seem to keep hearing your commercials on the radio. The main point of the whole commercial is “ how reliable the connection is.” I think it starts out something like, tired of getting a busy signal when you try to log on to the internet…… tired of being knocked off line by traditional dial up ISP’s….. get Comcast @Home the fastest most reliable connection around for your home. Sounds great in theory, however, I have easily had better success with a dial up. Another ironic point, almost humorous to be honest, was my last call to your technical support team. After I told them that my connection had now been dead for 2 days, their answer was, and I quote, you should get a free dial up account from excite . He told me to go to their website and download the software and use the free account so that I would have a connection in the time that it took your people to make their way to my residence. Okay, first of all, the problem with that scenario is that I can’t get online to begin with to download the software I need to make the free dial up work! If I could get online, I wouldn’t need to get the free dial up! Second, that again says to me that your service is unreliable and that I should go back to the apparently more reliable free dial up service.
On, Tuesday, September 19th, 2000, I wanted to simply make a call to Comcast and verify my appointment. A service man was to come and fix my problem with the bad connection, the next day between 2:30 and 5:00pm. However, when I called this number, 317-872-2225, which is my local cable office, I ran into several more problems.
The first lady, who refused to give me her name, told me that the service man was going to come between 1:00pm and 5:00pm. I explained to her my situation and that I was told they would not come until after 2:30. That was simply the soonest I could get home from work. I asked the lady to kindly make a note of my situation again, so that I did not waste their time and mine, making sure that I was able to be home. She refused to do it and told me it was not within their policy to accommodate customers requests (is this what you call customer service?). I understand that I cannot make a request for a specific time for them to be here. However, that was not what I was asking for. All I wanted is to make sure that, within a two and a half hour time frame, I was going to be there, waiting for the service man to show up.
At that time, I asked to speak with a manager who could maybe help me to better understand, or perhaps help my situation. Again the lady refused to cooperate. She asked me what I wanted the manager for in a rude voice. I told her, and she remarked, “He’s just going to tell you the same thing that I just did”. I said that was fine, I just wanted to hear it from him. She still refused and then said goodbye and hung up on me!
I called back a few minutes later and got another woman who again would not give me her name. I simply requested to speak with a manager. This girl also asked rudely, “what for?” I told her I just needed to speak with a manager who might be able to help my situation. She also refused. In fact, her claim was that no manager was on duty. If this was true, it would explain their complete lack of cooperation and rudeness. Everything these ladies did was wrong in so many ways, at this point I don’t have the energy to even go into it.
To the casual observer, this story would be almost comical. The fact of the matter is, I’m not laughing. I would like to hear other peoples opinion on my situation, so therefore, I’m going to send this letter to my Local Franchise Authority, post this letter on my website (once I get my free dial up account), email it to friends, and tell others of my situation and see what their take on it is. It will be interesting to see the response I get.
For the last 2 years I have been anxiously awaiting the Cable modem service. I finally have moved to an area where it is available. I can honestly say that I couldn’t be more disappointed with an internet service.
All I want is service that works, and a friendly voice when there might be a problem, am I being unreasonable? I don’t think that is too much to ask, do you?
Frustrated
Jason Cline