When a Comcast subscriber found he could no longer access his home wifi setup because the installer had given him the wrong password, he was able to get the company to reset the password remotely. Somehow, he also ended up being enrolled in a service plan that charged $5.95/month in addition to a $13 enrollment fee.

As recounted by the Hartford Courant’s Bottom Line column, it all started a few months back when the customer’s wifi network wigged out. He tried to reconnect, but could not because he had an incorrect password. Or rather, the Comcast installer had made a mistake and misspelled the password when he originally set everything up.

A quick call to Comcast and his password was reset. Boom. Done.

Not quite. Shortly after the password reset, he gets a welcome packet in the mail for something called Comcast’s Wireless Networking Plan, the aforementioned tech-support service that was now going to cost him $5.95 every month.

“I called Xfinity and explained my concern and asked that I be discontinued,” the customer tells the Bottom Line. “I spoke with several representatives, none of whom were based in the U.S. Their comprehension of the problem was limited and they all signed me up for new services.”

What follows is the usual script — promised replies from Comcast that never occur; repeated calls to customer service lines staffed by outsourced overseas workers who can’t seem to grasp that the customer did not sign up for the service; getting disconnected after being passed around from CSR to CSR without resolution.

At one point, he was promised a $5 credit and that someone would make a decision on the enrollment fee within 10 days, but his next bill showed he was still being charged for the service, though there was a partial credit for the enrollment fee.

Tired of trying to repeat himself to the outsourced call centers, the customer, a lawyer with a separate commercial account for his business gave the commercial account customer service line a try. He reached a rep in the U.S., but that rep just passed him on to someone in the Philippines.

“She had great difficulty understanding the nature of the problem,” he recalls, “despite the fact she was supposedly briefed before I came on the line I went through the whole problem, again, and she said she had to transfer me to someone else. The call was disconnected after 49 frustrating minutes.”

And so he reached out to the Bottom Line, and just like Comcast often does when contacted by the media, it acted quickly and decisively, getting rid of the fees from the customer’s account.

But the customer felt that he deserved more for being enrolled in a program against his will and for being left with no option but to sic the local media on Comcast just to get a resolution.

“They offered a token for my troubles,” he says. “I told them it was not a token matter.”

He ultimately agreed to a one month credit for his cable and Internet service. Not a bad deal, but he shouldn’t have had to spend months chasing Comcast to remedy the company’s mistake.

It will come as no surprise to the customer in this story — and to many people who have Comcast — that the company recently came in next-to-last in the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index for its cable service and dead last on the ACSI for its Internet service.

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