Thursday, June 29, 2006

Comcast technician

“A Comcast technician came over to a man’s house to repair a faulty cable modem (one of two) after missing three appointments. The tech ten spent an hour on hold with Comcast’s central office and then fell asleep on the guy’s couch. Is there any more perfect scenario to highlight the unprofessionalism of both the repair guy and the central office?”

This was what I could read on a website I found after listening to the ‘bits of silicon hell’ podcast. A video of a guy sleeping on a couch is not that interesting however,…. if this happens to be a guy repairing your cable modem you don’t want him to get comfortable on your couch. Luckily the owner of the couch got out his video camera and posted it on the internet. A downside of this story is that the Comcast guy now lost his job after the video came to the attention of Comcast management.

I have been reading some things on Comcast service and other cable internet providers and in most cases the service is terrible. I have a other story… a little side note,… most of the stories I have been reading where from cable internet customers in the US maybe the service in The Netherlands is just better or I have been one lucky guy.

A couple of months ago I moved into my new apartment to be joined by Krista a couple of months later. Being without a internet connection is something I can not stand so I signed up for cable internet, have a television signal and a phone number in a single package with the internet made it all more comfortable. The moment I signed up I received a video signal on my television.

A couple of days later I was notified that a repair guy would come over to my house to install somewhere around noon. A quick call to there customer helpdesk was all it took to make sure the guy would come in the evening instead of somewhere around noon. That evening I received a call from the repair guy on my cell. He happened to be in the area and had a spare half hour and asked me if I was already at home and if it was convenient to me if he came over a hour earlier to install my new cable modem.

The new apartment is in an area where they where still building a lot of new apartment complexes and it just happened to be one of those days. During construction work a contractor had hit the main cable and put an internet and television blackout to the area.

I told this to the repair guy and he answered he already knew and that a repair crew was on his way to solve the problem. A couple of minutes later he arrived and installed the cable modem. He left me his mobile phone number so I could call him if anything turned out to be wrong after the cable was repaired. He happened to be in this area a lot the upcoming days so if I hade some problems all it would take was a call to him directly so he could come by and solve the problem. a hour later the repair crew repaired the cable and I turned on my cable modem for the first time. I was so happily surprised that all worked without any problem, we did not yet test anything but it just happened to work the first time and if this should not have been the case I could have called a repair guy driving around in my area to solve the problem within a hour. And that is what I call service.

No comments: