Jun

26

Comcast awakens… after YouTube video

Filed Under Weblogs 

 

CNETnews.com reports:

Two weeks ago, a Comcast repairman in Washington fell asleep in a customer’s home. The customer, Brian Finkelstein, a student at Georgetown Law School, took the incident to the Internet. He shot a video of the repairman sacked out in his couch and posted it on his blog, Snakes on a Blog. The video, which he also posted on YouTube, is one of several recent examples of angered customers taping their interactions with customer service, then putting the experience online.

I love it. These days customers can communicate direct their encounters with companies in multi-media formats and distribute them across the most connected network. Here is where just an ‘online diary’ meets the ‘empowered consumer’. This particular ‘experience sharing’ is Comcast losing sleep over this as the video has been seen by 200,000 people so far. After the video was posted, the blogger got a call from a regional vice president at Comcast and, a day later, "a team of Comcast guys" worked for five hours to fix his Internet connection. Hm, five hours?! So good news for those with cameras, camcorders and a blog, bad news for the rest of the world. Well, not quite as this is a positive development.

The final twist is just as revealing as the video although not surprising:

While that might seem a humble and humane response from a cable company, in fairness, it is worth noting that the former repairman, who is not identified by name in the video, fell asleep as he tried to get through to the cable company’s repair office on the telephone.

Indeed or as Snakes on the blog puts it:

At one point Comcast sent a technician to replace my cable modem/wireless router. This should have taken five minutes. Instead, when he called Comcast to activate my new modem, he was placed on hold for nearly 90 minutes. When I asked him why he was on hold for so long, he told me that phone reps were busy filling out customer service surveys. Then he fell asleep on my couch. I could have made a few suggestions for their survey.

Share This

Comments

Leave a Reply




Close
E-mail It