Top of Mind Thursday – March 7, 2024: For Everything, There Is a Season

What happens when the Internet freezes, again and again?

Not much gets done. In fact, everything in your business comes to a screeching halt.

That’s what happened to me this week after a Comcast “upgrade” that seemed to result in endless on-again, off-again service for an entire day.

After figuring out how to get past their chat bot to a live human, I had a number of frustrating interactions with the Xfinity team. They asked me if my coax cable was plugged in, rebooted the router several times, and then scheduled three different times for a technician to visit before we finally got someone out to resolve the problem—nearly a full day later.

Comcast has worked hard to train their customer support people. It’s just not clear they’ve trained them on the right things. They are invariably polite and try to be helpful. Multiple people told me to “rest assured” this would be taken care of promptly. This kind of language is not reassuring at all. I finally told them I would not rest until this was fixed and the “assured” part was not something they should be pushing—given how hard it was to get to the right person who could fix this.

But the worst thing was one well-meaning rep who had been prompted to tell me he had a way to cut my internet costs. . . if I would move my mobile phone service to Comcast. Huh?

The last thing you want to do when a customer is having ongoing problems with an existing product or service is to try to upsell them to buy more of your offerings. All I could think was what a hole I would have been in had my mobile service been subject to the same issues I was having with internet connectivity!

A friendly and helpful technician came out the following day and within 20 minutes found the source of the problem and fixed it. The good news is he didn’t try to upsell any additional products. The bad news is he then pleaded with me to give him a great rating in the survey I was about to receive—or he might get suspended for 5 days. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it was at least a novel excuse.

Meanwhile, I pointed out to him that my street was at that very moment being dug up by one of his competitors to install fiber and offer us an alternative to Xfinity. Maybe now would be a good time to work on improving existing services, not pushing new ones or rigged rating systems. I doubt that this will happen. Rest assured.

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