"Comcast @home story"

Comcast is one of the most customer unfriendly companies I have ever had the displeasure of dealing with. Comcast pulled the plug on my @Home service without warning on a Saturday night. When I called the support number on Sunday, I was told that a network conversion was taking place and I should call back on Monday to setup a service call to have a new compatible modem installed. I called Monday and was told that an appointment could not be made until the following Monday, one week later. I argued that this was totally unacceptable for a service which costs $42/month and after 15 minutes of getting nowhere with the operator, I demanded to speak to a supervisor. After spending an additional 45 minutes on the phone with 2 different supervisors, I was still stuck for an entire week without any service, my email accounts are inaccessible, and they wouldnt even provide a temporary dial-up access for the week. I would expect this rotten service from a freebie ISP but not when one is dishing out $42/month. After spending at least an hour on the phone with Comcast's support team, I understand from its policies that this company really doesnt care a lick about its customers and I am now shopping for alternative broadband solutions.

I feel your pain. I work for AT&T. Starting with the lowly service personnel and increasing exponentially up to the top levels of corporate management, they are right up there as the most incompetent, uninterested, dysfunctional company I've ever encountered. Customer service is a joke. The small number of people within the company who care about their job (and are good at it) are completely overwhemled by the sheer number of double-digit morons they have employed within. It's no wonder AT&T is bleeding red so badly now. And it's not going to get better anytime in the foreseeable future. And I'm trying to be optimistic.

The story with the Comcast is very true. It happened to me. It seems to me that the support staff had no or little computer background. All they do is go through a standard check list from a piece paper. I was on the phone with support staffs for 4 hours. This includes lost connection couple times when they try to transfer me to a "higher level support", got hang up by a support idiot and waiting on the queue.

After a week, my connection is back, but my notebook does not work anymore.

I am a Comcast employee in a call center for their broadband service. They have some policies in effect that are truly not about customer service but how many calls can they get through.

The support person that you get on the phone is told that he/she has 9-12 miniutes to get the customer off the phone and they have a script that they are supposed to go by and say certain things to the customer. If the support person goes over this 12 minute limit it is held againist that person to include their employment.

If you need to be sent to 2nd level support they count that againist the support person as well. Its not that the support person doesn't want to help you the customer or that they don't know what they are doing they have to worry about these stupid rules and trying to keep their jobs.

On the other hand they do pay lousy not even close to industry standard and they do employ alot of people who know nothing about computers.

They only give their employees 2 days of troubleshooting training out of 5 weeks of training that they spend on all the different databases that they have to learn to do the job. Which if you know nothing about computers when you start 2 days is not nearly enough.

Beleive me your story is not unique when it comes to Comcast.

I couldn't agree with you more about the so-called customer service/tech support offered by Comcast for their @home service. It sucks. So does the product itself because it doesn't live up to all that they promise. Ever since the whole Excite@Home bankruptcy the speed of my Internet connection has gotten slower and slower. Most pages take 3 minutes to fully load, some never even make it. When I called last night to get some help they tried to blow me off and tell me that it was the fault of all the servers at all the sites I was visiting, which is a lie because I can access the same sites instantly on my work computer. Finally they said the only thing they could try was to "repush" my modem. Whatever that means it didn't help. However, early this morning I tried the Internet again and it was fast, like it was before Excite went under. I wonder if they got the message?

Has anyone else experienced something similar?

I've never had a problem with contacting Support. And when I've had to contact them they've always been helpful and curteous. Of course, it may be that I'm not in the same region as you, but I'm very happy with Comcast.

I've only experienced one outage in 12 months and that was only for a day. There's been intermittent outages this week, but that's been due to the conversion to thier own network, so I'm not complaining.

I don't think that it is necessarily the customer or the phone tech that makes the problem. The problem is that the tech cannot be in front of the computer that the customer is in front of. The tech is not able to see what is wrong with the service. I, too, have never had any technical issures other than the outages due to the conversion, lately. The speed slowed down for a bit, but after one outage after that, it went back to over 1.5 Mpbs.

i think u should have read your mail comcast have been sending letters out and phoning customers for the last 6 months warning them of the motorola cyber surfer modem change over. no sympathy to people that r ignorant.these people have recieved plenty of notice if u dont read your mail or make sure they have the correct phone number u deserve what u got

like the one guy said, the technicians cannot be infront of your computer that has problems. they are trying to imagine what kind of state your computer is in. sure i HATE comcasts technicians cuz they are not trained, not interested, and not caring, but you should give some of them credit cuz SOME of them are trained, are interested, and are caring. if they dont help you out, i suggest you yell at them and just hang up on them!!!

Comcast SUX big time. I had them (unfortunately) for cable TV in Virginia a few yeqars back, and had them coming out almost on a weekly basis to work on a recurring problem with my reception. After 8 MONTHS, I FINALLY figured out the problem. After emailing a rather heated nasty-gram to them, I ended up with an 8 month credit to my account. (we moved out of state 2 months later and they had to write me a check)

Now, in the Dallas TX area, comcast has taken over the @home service, and we're now having problems with out HS internet. It's been MONTHS, and they STILL HAVEN'T fixed the problem. As for the LONG waits for service calls.......just get used to it. It's comcast......