Some silver-tongued sales-devil from Comcast convinced landscaping company owners Kelly and her husband to hand over their business phone line, only to claim it never received their payment and cut off their service in short order.

Their story boosts Comcast’s early bid to repeat its iinspiring Cinderella run in last year’s Worst Company In America tourney:

My husband and I have a small landscaping company and a residential design firm in Western Maryland. A remote area, with few choices for things like business service particularly phone, internet etc. We were Verizon customers but after a recent move we were unable to use Verizon for high speed internet and had to switch to Comcast. After a few months Comcast contacts our accountant and asks if we would like to switch our phone service ’cause it will save us a bundle.

So after some number crunching we switch. For both companies. Well today they disconnected our service for the landscaping company. With no prior warning, no courtesy call, no nasty-gram, nothing. The lines for our design business were still active so we contacted Comcast and they said our payment hadn’t posted so they disconnected our service. The payment was mailed over a week ago and even with a posting delay it may have been a few days late, but nothing serious (like 45+ days or more). So now our customers are getting “This number has been disconnected.” And while Comcast said they would reconnect our service “in a little while.” It’s been 5 hours and nothing. Our accounting manager is trying to make something happen, but so far no luck.

If this is the way Comcast is treating business customers I can’t imagine that they will successful in that market. I’m guessing we’ll move on back to Verizon after this — for all of the problems Verizon usually has, they’ve never done anything like this.

I really, really hate Comcast right now.

More than a week has passed, and Kelly has yet to hear back.

Obviously it’s not a good idea to pay your bill even a few days late, but Comcast seems to be behaving unreasonably here. Somewhere that smug, bespectacled “can you hear me now/it’s the network” Verizon guy sports that smug look on his face as he readies to reclaim an old customer.

(Photo: mojojornjorn)

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