I know it seems strange for me to write a post promoting Comcast but I think they might actually be on the right track here. I recently had a short outage (maybe a few hours) when I was unable to access a large group of web sites from my home cable connection. I didn’t think much of it but I was a bit annoyed. An hour or so after noticing, it started to get better. Sites like Gmail, Slashdot and Digg started loading in my browser yet again and I became a sane person.
Two days passed and everything continued to work but to my surprise an email showed up. A section of the email is below:
Dear Valued Comcast Customer:
You may have experienced some Internet issues this past Saturday, and I want to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and your family.
We detected an issue early Saturday morning that resulted in some customers having problems connecting to certain Web sites. We are staffed 24/7 and, as a result, we were able to quickly dispatch our engineering teams who identified and fully corrected the problem by early afternoon.
We know you look to Comcast to deliver high-quality service, and it is our commitment to do so. We have implemented additional preventive measures to help safeguard against a situation like this reoccurring.
Once again, please accept my sincere apology. Thank you for being a Comcast customer. We truly do value your business and appreciate your understanding.
This email was entirely unprovoked (at least by me) and I was genuinely happy that I received this. It meant that somewhere out there in that wide world of ridiculous customer service that I had come to loathe there was a person who had the right idea — Let the customer know when something has been messed up, don’t wait for them to call you. Now they didn’t offer me money back for this outage but hey, one step at a time. After this, I sent out a quick tweet and soon after I received this response from Frank Eliason, someone who works at Comcast who actually cares about what the customer wants.
That’s right, a real live person responded to my post. They may have had their issues in the past but could this be a cable company making a turn around on the customer service front? I sure hope so — It’ll be the only way they’ll be able to keep my business when FiOS comes around.
