(forgive me if this is in the wrong place, seemed like the best fit)
Here is a recording of some guy's attempt to cancel his Comcast subscription:
https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service
Absolutely ridiculous. I get that there is probably a lot of pressure on this guy to retain customers, but I doubt there is anyone that would disagree that he has crossed a line.
Some mainstream sites have covered this. Here's NPR's article:
lol, that guy has the wrong job.
wow I would have just hung up and called back to get someone else.
my response to when he was asking about why he was leaving would have been "I'm moving to Kansas city for google fiber. Can you offer me 1Gb/s internet for $70 a month? no I didn't think. so please cancel my service."
I think it is a new policy. Force your customers to be stuck in their contract while you get even slower data capped internet and even less TV channels and you got to order the package again and pay at more high rates.
Bully tactics was funny. That guy was really patience with the comcast employee.
That is why when I contact comcast it is done through the internet. Sometimes they hit the wrong button and send me some weird ass response (probably a macro for their Indian workers) but at least the guys on the internet are polite.
I think someone from tek syndicate retweeted this last night and it caught my eye. Listened to it and wondered if it would become big news, glad it has. Comcast needs to seriously look over how they handle customer relations.
I would of just handed the phone over to my Dad...and recorded the hilarious conversation from there...he isn't a people person, has no shame, doesn't care about feelings, and will say whatever is on his mind. THIS guy has the patience of a saint and I have some serious respect for him. All-in-all though, LOL comcast.
So great.
I have Comcast for many years now and I have never had any problems. Service for me is flawless, I bought my own router and I'm not locked into a contract. I actually called to cancel at one point and they did it for me in about 2 mins on the phone. I pay $150 a month for 100/25 internet service, every channel you could imagine including 50 movie channels, and a home phone, which I get at least 95/20 all the time, no disconnects, lag, or problems. Besides that if I wanted to go to another company, my only choice is Verizon DSL which is horribly slow...we are not going to get fiber optic in my area ever :(.
I would have just said ok, well, I'm walking over right now to my Comcast box, going to unplug it, throw it in the trash, and never expect a dime from me, do whatever you want lol. You wouldn't be able to get Comcast in your name ever again, but who cares at that point!
This was featured on npr and has been articled many times already. I'm waiting for Comcast's response. THAT will be gold.
You beat me to it Knots. Thanks for posting! This is heinous -- and right after I got a letter from a like company Time Warner saying switching services with "no strings attached". Sickening.
I have never had a problem with Comcast, maybe im just lucky. Pretty screwed up story though.
The caller was having way too much fun with that.
Personally, I can empathize with the rep. I've worked a similar job for a company that solely provides a service for revenue, and it is not a fun thing to do. Whats worse, is that in that position you get it from both ends. The sups above you and every call you get is going to be nothing but negativity.
Let's be honest for a moment, when was the last time anyone called an isp to say "thanks for providing me with the service that I pay you for"?
if you're told you're a duck long enough and with enough conditioning, eventually you're going to start quacking.
LOL, I cannot wait for Comcast to respond myself.
Comcast's response:
We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and are contacting him to personally apologize. The way in which our representative communicated with him is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives. We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect.
Read more on the NPR blog http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/07/15/331681041/comcast-embarrassed-by-the-service-call-making-internet-rounds
I have never had a problem with Comcast, maybe im just lucky. Pretty screwed up story though.
You are. I had Comcast when I lived in Chicago and again in the suburbs. The service was ok, decently fast for the time, and relatively cheap when spread across 4 guys... but there were periodic outages that would last an entire day (sometimes more) and whenever we had to deal with customer service for anything, it was a nightmare. Rude and unknowledgeable customer service reps, internal system outages (meaning they couldn't bring up our account or look into any of our problems), and they would routinely just disconnect us while we were on hold.
We also used to get phantom charges for things we didn't do/order, and warnings about legitimate torrents and other downloads (game patches, open source software, etc). Dealing with them was so shitty that when I moved to the boonies, my 1.5mb DSL connection was almost refreshing by comparison.
Sure, it was slow, but I rarely had an outage and never heard a peep from the company. On the rare occasion I had to call customer service (maybe twice), they were polite, knowledgeable and quick to help. Even when I called to cancel it only took 2 minutes (by contrast, my roommate spent 2 hours on the phone canceling Comcast, and then we STILL had to deal with them trying to charge us for service AFTER we canceled and the service was disconnected).
So if you've had a good experience with Comcast to this point, good on ya. You're one of the lucky ones. There's a lot of us out there that weren't so lucky.
This is totally fucking ridiculous, I respect the caller from putting up with it… large isp's everywhere are just getting worse and worse. Funny how the company covers there arse and says
"The way in which our representative communicated with him is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives"