I despise this new trend of customer service on twitter. If a company is able to comprehend that their CS is so bad, that they need a special breed of CS reps online that you must hunt down, something is very wrong.

If the twitter reps are empowered to deviate from arbitrary company policy, why aren't normal CSRs? That's all it would take to fix the majority of customer service issues at ANY company.

Or maybe the normal CSRs just don't give a crap.

Why cant the customer service be taken care of at the first level. Why does the customer have to go through loops to get good help? What if they don't know about Twitter.

@bnelson333: Comcast doesn't "care" about your problems unless they are a potential PR problem for them. That's the difference.

@Yankees368: Moreover, I have no doubt that initially CS reps were just like this; ordinary people doing their jobs and trying to help out.

The problem is that two people responding to support incidents on twitter is never, ever going to scale. The real benchmark of whether this is going to make a difference is whether it's still this good 6 months or a year from now.

I'll be impressed if it scales.

I would venture to guess that they don't allow(enable) first line CSR's to do much of anything. Otherwise, Mr.Chad helpy helperton on his first week at Comcast might give away the bank because a Lil old lady made him feel guilty.

Escalate if the first liners cant fix it. It's not some bizarre concept. If I have to talk to a customer at work, it's because the front desk CSR's couldn't fix the problem and rightfully I don't want them to have the access required to fix anything above basic problems. If they can fix stuff for customers, that means they can also break stuff if they don't like the customers attitude, or hook their friends up... .

@nerdtalker: Here's what I think the goal is: they're trying to give better service to the small group of people who are vocal about their dislike of Comcast's customer service and know how to amplify their opinions and spread them around. Their hope is that by placating that group, they can avoid having to actually do anything to upgrade their "normal" customer service. That limits the PR damage for minimal actual cost.

@gravitus: If they're having that sort of problem, perhaps they should reevaluate their hiring practices and spending priorities.

It's a v sad day when u hav 2 go 2 Twitter 2 get gud CS. Esp cuz u rly cant express ur hole prob correctly in 140 w/o sounding rude or dumb.

@johnva: That's what I have been getting from all the "success" stories about comcast on this blog. It seems to me that they are just doing damage control for the shit storm that will come from the internet savvy when they drop the ball. But I wonder if people that are not regular readers hear about the craptastic service from comcast before they have to deal with it themselves.

@Jessica Haas: At first I thought this was disemvoweled, but upon closer inspection it was not.

I worked in call centers (and chat) for a while and I can tell you that that while there are a lot of people that are technically apt enough to fix problems it gets pretty damn hard to do when you're being told to chat with 4 (or more) customers at the same time about 4 different technical issues.

The other part of the problem here isn't the CSR's fault at all. Lack of organization is a huge problem in large corporations and causes all kinds of inefficiencies. In my company everybody is stretched so thin that entire departments barely communicate with each other because on one side there's no time to educate and on the other side there's no time to comprehend.

Comcast on twitter is as useless as their regular customer support - they just respond immediately. After paying nearly $70 a month for just high speed Internet (cable not needed) their response was that's what we charge and nothing we can do for a customer of 4+ years. Similar experiences for other people who have 'tweeted' with real problems. Comcast deserves its place as second worst company in America.

@MightyDwarf56: At least it's under 140 characters!

@Jessica Haas: at first i was like >:[ but then i was like :D

I agree with the comments here that this should have been cared for the first time. Following the process would have easily had this corrected, and that is all Sherri did. We are looking into why this broke down so we can make sure it does not happen again to another valued Customer.

I personally do believe that communication in spaces like Facebook, Twitter, even the Consumerist will be a more common place for Customer Service. Some people truely prefer the public nature of social media. Our reason for being involved in social media [we are in more places than Twitter ;-)] is really to listen to our Customers, and help when we can. I actually love the space because it is the Customers opinion of an experience in an unedited manner. It is a great way for companies to learn and improve. My team shares stories everyday from blogs, Twitter, or emails to my team. This is done to help Comcast improve the experience no matter what communications channel a Customer chooses. I have always found the Customer story is the best way to improve an organization (I would guess that is part of the goal of the Consumerist). I can tell you in the short time I have been with Comcast I have seen a lot of improvement and I do hope that you begin to take notice.

Frank Eliason
@ComcastCares on Twitter
Comcast
We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com

@Jessica Haas: Very true.

"Valued customer" used to be a slang term we would use in tech support, did that conjure up similar memories for anybody?

I put this to the test myself regarding my internet speed - ComcastSteve responded in under 5 minutes, after having checked out my equipment, and my bandwidth was and continues to remain above average for my area, and is much improved from pre-complaint levels. Color me satisfied.

@Yankees368: What's nice about the Comcast Twitter help is that you're not tracking anyone down. Savvy consumers can send them a direct message, but most of the stories I've seen are just people sending a general Tweet out and Comcast picking it up because they included the word "Comcast" in it.

I've had this happen to me with several companies, including Trader Joe's and iTV.

While yes it would be nice if Comcast would extend this kind of instant help to all their channels, it's at least something that they are doing it in one.

@Jessica Haas: Please tell me that was a parody of twitter.

@comcastcares: Frank, your team are awesome. Keep it up.

@johnva:

Maybe you could send them a new hiring manual and budget plan. Let me know how that works out.

@bnelson333: Pay scale.

You get exactly what you pay for.

My own recent experience with Comcast and Twitter was not as gratifying. We've been having problems with our connection over the past few weeks. It would randomly slow to a crawl or even just disconnect entirely. Each time I tried to call tech support about this, I was redirected to BILLING. Yes, billing. The phone system is broken. I tried calling multiple times from two cell phones on two separate days, so it wasn't just some freak thing. Anyway, I finally got in touch with a CS rep who basically said everything looked fine, even though during the course of the conversation our connection was messed up.

So, they sent out a tech, who spent about an hour checking everything inside and outside our apartment building and reported... no problems. He tightened some cables, but that's all. The problems persisted, of course. I tweeted my frustration. ComcastSteve asked if he could help - I said yes, explained the situation. He told me to message him my info, which I did. He said he would look into it.

It has been four days since his last @message towards me saying he'd look into it and he'd just be "a few". I sent another message asking what happened; no response. Now, so far we haven't experienced the same kind of connection dropouts, but I've still had problems with my FTP (keep getting errors writing to sockets - this happens on any server using any client) which was one of my initial issues. Was something fixed? What was wrong? Is there still something wrong? Why isn't my FTP working? Comcast has failed to answer ANY of these questions. I appreciate Steve's attempt to help, but I can't say my issue has been resolved.

@Jessica Haas: 140 Characters ON THE DOT! I am impressed. Well done.

@gravitus: No need to be condescending. I'm just saying that all the problems you describe are ultimately caused by their unwillingness to pay for competent employees.

@johnmc: Yes, it was. :)

@johnva: I could not agree more. I think that's exactly what's going on here.

@johnmc: Unfortunately, the vast majority of problems that Comcast "deals" with are not done so by Frank's team.

@comcastcares: Frank, you guys were one Live Chat from me dropping the second line and going somewhere else for VOIP. Whomever came up with the idea to follow Twitter deserves a pat on the back (along with Sherri for taking action on the issue). And it's not that the Live Chat wasn't useful, it just seemed that after the second time someone should have noticed that "hey, it didn't work the first time, maybe we ought to take a closer look at this." Again, A for effort, but this was one of those odd situations where following the script doesn't apply.

BTW, those of you commenting that this kind of support via Twitter is unfair or just a way to placate those folks out there who are fed up with a company, the fact is that it works (for now). There was a time where people said that support via email or live chat would never work (OK, maybe this is a bad example, but you get the idea.) The nice thing is that I didn't need to try and get an agent to escalate me to a manager or fire off an EECB to get some help. Imagine if Howard Beale in "Network" sent out a Tweet that said "I'm mad as hell and I'm going to take this anymore!" and actually got a reply back that someone was going to address his problems?

Support via Twitter (like EECB's) should be used wisely. Yes, from a Service Desk standpoint this should have been a straightforward FCR (First Call Resolution) but I've been involved in service desks for a good part of my career and I know that it's not always going to happen like that.

There was another post where Frank said his job wasn't damage control. Was I the only one who got a chuckle out of that?

Yeah, don't trust the chat reps to do anything for you. I haven't had very consistent experiences with them, not just because they care less, but also because they simply aren't trained very well.

Call in if you want something done, and if they can't do it, ask to be transferred to a supervisor.

@Jessica Haas: +1! Facebook poster FTW for once

@comcastcares: AAAAAA! Comcast is everywhere! They have camera's in the coffee pots!

Yeah, I wish Comcast Customer Service would have non-Twitter options. I almost signed up for Twitter over a recent Escapade Of Stupid on the part of my local Comcast service (Nobody seems to know who installs Comcast TiVo on the North Shore, but everyone is pretty sure it's not them!) but would really rather reps just know how to do their job in the first place.

@bnelson333: It would cost more to hire & train intelligent people. Apathetic low grade employees content to read from scripts and do as little as possible work cheap. As long as the bulk of their customers put up with this and don't leave or have the intellect to do something like Twitter their problem they will continue their business model as is.

It isn't just Comcast. I have had two other providers refuse to fix issues repeatedly until I started writing letters to management multiple times. When they figured out I knew what I was talking about and was not going to just cave and pay for their billing errors they wrote them off. Same thing with people Twittering problems with Comcast. Once they figure out you are not going to go away or cave they will fix the problem.

@johnva: This is a specific business model that many companies started adopting in the late 90's. Gateway computers used to have really good tech support. They paid a premium to hire people with comp. sci. degrees or that could prove they had a high level of technical knowledge. The reps actually had the ability to do quite a bit for customers. At that point Gateway saw their excellent technical support as a major selling point and a way to retain customers for future purchases. Then someone brought in some former AT&T people to run the support teams. Tech support and customer service suddenly became an expense, a loss and an inconvenience. They started hiring people with no experience, paying them far less and giving them scripts to follow instead of allowing smart people to actually think. They also instituted call times and upselling. Then they started outsourcing to Sykes and eventually to Indian call centers.

In the face of all the massive suck that is buying just about any product or service these days. The old Gateway model could be doing extremely well right now if they had stuck to their old model.

@Pixelantes Anonymous: I'm guessing that Frank and Sherri aren't being paid out of Comnasty's customer service budget but are instead being paid out of their social media/integrated marketing/PR budget, and thus are making decent money.

These two employees are able to quickly resolve issues for very vocal and Internet-savvy consumers, who would otherwise be a liability to Comnasty in terms of marketing, branding, PR, and reputation management. Therefore, having Frank and Sherri on the Twitter front lines is a surprisingly clever move for a company that normally has the IQ of a radish.

@MightyDwarf56: I thought the same thing until I looked again, then I laughed.

Will you guys stop praising this sort of crap. The reason Comcast has this Twitter account is not to solve people's problems. If Comcast wanted to help solve people's problems they would give their phone and chat support workers the authority to solve problems. How hard would that be?!

No, the reason Comcast has the Twitter account is to solve problems that could get widespread attention online. In other words, it's solely to make Comcast look good, not to actually be good.

@blazinrebel: You know, for some reason it never occurred to me that they would be chatting with more than one customer at a time. That explains why it always seems like they're borderline morons - it really took you 3 minutes to respond to my "ok" with "thank you"?

@GMFish: I agree. The people who do not use twitter (like my parents and probably 99% of Comcast customers) are still getting horrible customer service.

Twitter sucks. I don't know why anyone would use Twitter right now. First of all, 60% of users don't come back after the first month. Second, Twitter makes no money. It's staying alive by private investors. Once these private investors realize they won't get a ROI, they will bail and Twitter will die. Stop all this Twitter hype. They probably pay the celebrities on Twitter to tweet. Most of them blab about nonsense anyways which is a waste of your time if you follow them.

Frank/Sheri/Comcast......
It shows what kind of operation Comcast is running when people have to resort to Twitter and message boards for proper customer service. And it's nice to know that you guys feel that way too. I have some more smoke and mirrors in case you run out.

Seriously.

Does Verizon (NOT Wireless) have a Twitter presence? I'm fed up with having to call them every month when I get my FiOS bill, and I'd actually sign up for Twitter just to get a useful response for once.

@johnva: Yep. It'd be great if they could just, you know, have better customer service all around. But nope.

@masterasia: God, you're bitter!

@johnva: Yep the loudest and squeakiest wheel gets the oil first and fastest. Something about all of the anti-comcast websites going viral is what they are trying to limit - like the now disabled but incredibly famous comcastmustdie web blog...