Customer service

Comcast is one of the country's leading cable TV and broadband service providers. So when an anonymous Comcast employee hits the webs, regaling frustrations from the field, people en masse tend to notice.

Just such an employee landed on Reddit's Ask Me Anything platform — a user dubbed "dlenoxx," who ran a session called, "I work for Comcast, and it is ruining my life." The Redditor took questions from the crowd, many of whom inquired about the company's infamously bad customer service, and saw a chorus of past and present staffers join in to add their stories (and complaints) about the company's policy.

dlenoxx wrote:

My hopes have slowly been diminished and crushed as requirements from 'upper management' become more strict, and not on promoting people to work harder but discouraging people from being helpful. The red tape that we drown in over the phone gives us the ability to say "Sorry" and if you talk to a good person they'll actually pray your issue gets fixed as it flows down the rusted, broken down pipe.

Greedy lying manipulative sales people, technicians that blame dispatch and a dispatch that blames technicians, a training department that spends eight weeks on how to setup an account and two weeks on how to fix issues, outsourcing agents (OSRs) that DO read from scripts for out of date billing/repair systems and still manage to mess things up.

The stress from being one of the few in my office that know how to, and actually want to, fix things is overwhelming [sic] when it seems there are more rules in place to prevent that than help…

Clearly this is an outburst from a frustrated employee who feels stymied by his company policy. And it obviously resonates with customers. The topic was so popular, the comments section was filled to the brim with upwards of 2,500 comments (as of this writing).

Are you a Comcast subscriber? Let us know whether or not this strikes a chord with your own customer service experiences. And if you're hooked up with another provider, tell us if this rings true with your own provider in the comments below.

[Via The Consumerist, Reddit]