Riding the customer service merry-go-round

Tom Davis, where were you when the big mega-cable folks first came to Spokane in the 1970s?

Oh, I forgot, you just told me you were staking your territory out here on the West Plains where your tech support is within driving distance. Or on the phone where locals work to solve the problem, and if not, you dispatch someone who can.

If you think you’ve heard this story before about issues pertaining to Comcast, my cable and Internet provider, you have not. In my estimation they do an excellent and amazing job delivering the products.

However, on the rare, rare, rare times when the cable or Internet have problems, trying to get an answer — the same answer that is — can prove to be a challenge that might not have a solution.

The fix is generally a snap, a push of a button or mouse click I suspect. Unless it involves physically fixing damage the squirrels have done to the high-wire highway they use along my fence line.

Language barriers aside, the merry-go-round ride I hopped on starting last Wednesday need not have lasted as long as it did. Problem was I was told something different by almost everyone with whom I spoke.

This episode of exasperation began simply when I recently discovered a secondary email address was not working.

My first call, 55 minutes and counting — and recorded for training purposes as they always remind — resulted in a warning that the account had been compromised and Comcast changed the password.

Sure nice they let me know.

I went into my account, used a special passcode, and changed the password. But somewhere in the process, fixing the access to one account seemed to change my ability to use my primary email address.

Times like these make me think I want to go back in time — before technology ruled so much of our daily lives — until I think how modern innovations like email and texting does make life easier and efficient for me at least, 99.374 percent of the time.

When the second email address had problems, as it did back on May 10 as the next agent reminded me, the story went that Comcast never has access to a customer’s private information, and never makes such changes.

Since changing passwords did not get things fixed, my case was “escalated” and I was provided with a special code that was supposed to let me bypass some of the customer service clutter of endlessly repeating my phone number, address and last four digits of my social security number.

After the better part of two days I was finally back in business. Got an email telling me so. Hmmmm?

But an email telling me supposedly my account had been compromised and the password had been changed never did reach me. It is impossible to alert customers when that happens, I was told by another agent.

That prompted a call on my part to get an explanation as to just what had gone wrong.

Server problems I was told was the excuse du jour. Server problems!@#$%

If that were the case, why wasn’t I told in the beginning? After all, I can call the 1-800-Comcast phone number and they know if there is an outage of some kind in my area.

And I’m more than happy to live with the inconvenience because we all know stuff breaks from time to time.

The blood pressure elevating, swear word tirade that followed was initiated by yet another tall tale of tech from the folks that Clark Howard, a consumer advocate with a popular radio show, calls “customer no-service.”

Deciding to engage in that “live chat” option, I wanted to find out where I send the bill for my time so that my bill can be credited.

After having it explained that the problem that saw nearly five precious hours of my time swirl down the drain was supposedly equipment failure and not a mysterious hacker, their offer to make it all good: $2.86, the prorated amount for two days of lost service. My counter was the $200-plus monthly bill charge.

Needless to say we’re miles and dollars apart in negotiations and I need to determine how much more time, if any, is justified to make a point.

Meanwhile I might see how much it will cost to be Davis Communications’ first customer in the Spokane Valley.

Paul Delaney can be reached at [email protected].