So I didn't give a proper update yesterday to mention what was going on but everyone who talks to me knows that my internet has been cutting on and off for months now for absolutely no reason. I've been treated like a moron by most of them for months so I took matters into my own hands. Thanks to theconsumerist.com having a link to the head honcho of Comcast's email address, I emailed Mr. Brian Roberts himself yesterday. Now don't get me wrong, I had no intentions of getting a reply from one of the wealthiest men in the world but what could it hurt right? My father and other people went on about what a lost cause it was and if nothing else I let off some steam.
At about 10:30 this morning the doorbell rings and there are four Comcast trucks and about ten technicians at my house. They have been summoned to my address by the regional manager of South Florida to run a dedicated business line solely to my internet connection and put a separate wall outlet for just my modem in. It has been windy as hell today and it has yet to disconnect so I feel that they have finally nailed the problem. Thank you Mr. Roberts for pulling through and renewing at least some faith in your company. My download speed is around 16mbps and upload is around 2 mbps on speedtest.net right now as well. Below is the letter that I sent him yesterday.
Dear Mr. Roberts,
My father and I have been loyal customers of yours since 2004, (Account Number 01710XXXXXXXX) however I have been having issues with my service for the past 8-10 months constantly and I feel like your company no longer takes my complaints remotely seriously. I have contacted 1-800-COMCAST no less than 15 times over the past six months and very rarely do I receive any help. I am usually walked through the same exact steps every time which are completely irrelevant to the problem at hand. For months I was having a problem with losing my internet connection indefinitely until I called your support center and they "reset" my modem and magically cured things every time. I was told over and over that because I didn't lease a modem from Comcast that it was a problem on my end until a top notch technician came and found a corroded connection at the house and the problems were solved for about a month. We then began having intermittent issues with HD channels tiling and the internet dropping to a crawl before ultimately dying completely. This is when I began scheduling appointments with your technicians almost weekly. I am a Master Automotive Technician by trade so I understand better than almost anybody how tricky intermittent problems can be, however the charades that I have been put through over these problems have finally gotten the best of my father and I. We are tired of taking three hour windows off of work literally weekly now to open our house up to a technician who will be here for ten to thirty minutes and tell me nothing is wrong. I cannot use the online game play on my Playstation 3, I cannot stream or download files without it dying in the middle of the process and I cannot fix computers on the side from my house anymore unless I download the files that I need elsewhere. When the technician shows up at our house a couple of days later there is usually 'nothing wrong' with our service and they leave without doing anything. Some technicians will climb the pole or search in the house and say that they changed the same connectors over and over again and no resolution is ever made. One technician even went as far as saying that there was nothing wrong with my service because if there were my neighbors would all be complaining about theirs as well. About two weeks ago I was able to determine that aside from random outages with my internet, the internet always disconnects when a hard gust of wind blows. I called support and relayed this message to them and they sent a technician out to tell me that a squirrel had eaten its way through a line and if that didn't solve my problems to call back and schedule a ground technician to look at the local cable box and check some kind of terminals. Upon griping about my internet still going down even after it was just 'fixed' fifteen minutes ago on Twitter, I receive an unsolicited Tweet from a Comcast employee trying to pacify me with how 'these sorts of things happen all of the time.' I don't know the specifics of the diagnostic process obviously since I am not a cable technician, however I do know when the people just can't be bothered anymore. I have been nothing but courteous to all of your employees and generally your technicians have been courteous as well aside from some of your phone support treating me like I am a helpless seven year old with his first computer or something. I contacted support on Sunday evening to report yet another outage with my internet and a technician was scheduled between 2 and 5 today saying that there would be a phone call made before they arrived. I received a phone call yesterday evening from support telling me that if the last technician has already been here then there is no reason to send somebody else out to fix this problem and attempted to cancel my appointment for today. I insisted that a ground technician come and inspect the lines for problems and they kept the appointment for the same time. At 10 am this morning an indoor technician arrives unannounced and tells me that my modem is not registered to the system and that must be the problem. Mind you I have not had any problems with my modem not being registered for the past five years but now all of a sudden I do. So he blows me off by writing down the model number of my modem and leaving and the problems still persist. I have tried to make it as easy as possible for the phone support and technicians and they still listen to absolutely nothing that I say to them and want to tell me that I should just put a new modem in if the wind is knocking out my internet. I am on my last nerve with my service right now and I would have already disconnected my service if Verizon FIOS were available in Vero Beach, Florida. I pay $155.40 faithfully every month for cable and internet service that I am lucky works well a few days a month. I was once given an expired coupon for a free pay per view movie for all of my troubles with your service which was obviously more of an insult than anything else. If your technician shows up late I get a twenty dollar credit but if he comes early and avoids the problem at hand I get a "call us back next time that it's acting up." I feel as though I have exhausted every other option that I have with your service right now and I feel that I am pouring money down the drain and constantly wasting your employee's time and resources due to the collective apathy here. When your service works I enjoy it and I love the new HD lineup you have rolled out here but it seems like a lost cause when I am too busy fighting with technical support for a problem that they want to tell me doesn't exist. I hope to hear back from you regarding this matter. Thank you for your time, I know that you are a busy individual. Have a happy holidays.
Sincerely,
John & William Gehrig
(EDIT: I got a phone call at 4:45 tonight from the district manager who was just forwarded my email that I sent who told me to make it up to me all that I had to do was call him on Friday with a status update of my internet and he is paying next month's bill.)
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