Gadgetory

hey guys sitting on a verge I'm here with Adrian Jeffrey's Adrian has been working on a huge series about Comcast called Comcast confessions exploring why customer service is so bad at the company so Adrian you've interviewed like lots of people of Comcast I think over a hundred employees now what have they been saying to you at this point I think it might be close to a hundred and fifty I lost track we keep getting people new people writing in so I'm basically drowning in emails from Comcast employees so thank you guys for that a lot of them are verge commenters which is awesome we wanted to talk about why Comcast customer service is so notoriously bad it's pretty much at the bottom of every customer satisfaction rating and then there was this call with Ryan black a well executive my former boss with his very last former boss which is a funny parallel and he just had this insane conversation with this Comcast rep who tried for 18 minutes to talk him out of canceling his Comcast service and that just kind of sparked this whole conversation about customer service at Comcast which is the largest cable provider in the country and which wants to buy Time Warner Cable and that's the other thing right which wants to buy the second largest cable provider in the company Time Warner Cable after that acquisition it would be a 30 million subscriber company which is massive right and would cover most of the major metro area isn't it right and would be in New York LA Texas every big every enormous market so after all these conversations why do you think what's at the core of why the service is about right so um the big themes were there's an emphasis on sales on pushing existing customers to buy new products to upgrade their products you know they have people who are dedicated to doing sales but they also wanted their customer service reps their tech support reps the people dealing with billing to try to sell stuff - and the problem with that is you call Comcast because you have a problem and then you end up with a service representative who has to meet a quota for a certain number of sales so they're like you know they're kind of thinking more about what to sell you than how to fix your problem so do you think you have to split that out for better serve is that what you're hearing from the employees where's your way to do it right um I mean they're they there is some selling that happens during customer service like if you have some call and say like my Internet's too slow maybe you need to upgrade to a faster tier that makes sense I think where they went wrong is when they started giving people too much incentives to sell that stuff and then they started giving the managers incentives to put up numbers for their groups so people started to feel like they would get fired if they didn't sell right enough so Comcast says and I'm sure they told you that they're trying really hard to improve customer service we ran a memo today from Comcast to its employees after the rhein block incident saying this is what we want to do don't talk about it too much they've reached public statements saying we're going to get better you've talked to Comcast do you what do you think about what they're saying about customer service right now so Comcast has always been and I'm reading the internally published story of Comcast which is called an incredible dream which is really interesting like just wait a mainline company propaganda yeah um well there's a little bit of it I mean it is like a family that started existence it's about you know it's a cool company actually um despite how miserable it is to deal with as a customer and they have been just sort of like constantly changing things and experimenting with things they're always like trying new ways of doing things scrapping that moving on like I think that that is that is a cool thing about Comcast and that they do seem to be doing some things differently with customer service but they you know the sales thing is just one part of why they have these problems the other two big things that jumped out at me were dealing with technicians they they kind of I think they understands their in-house technicians and then they try to fill the gap of contractors what ends up happening is everybody gets over scheduled and technicians are late to appointments missing appointments they're not given enough time to get the job done like they're basically given one in trouble call or one installation an hour and if they don't get it done in time then they're just late for the rest of the day for all their appointments for the rest okay and then besides that Comcast is also grown by acquisition a lot of the time and so it's still kind of fragmented in a lot of ways and I think that's that's a big problem for them to resolve particularly information is not super great they make another huge acquisition right everybody really frags right exactly so last question just what would you if you're running Comcast right now what's the easiest way to fix this problem oh my gosh um so definitely toned down this incentives for sales in customer service hire more in-house technicians tone back you know pull back on the contractors for in call centers and also for field technicians and then like try to as much as possible make the company more uniform so that you don't have like in different packages being sold in different markets and like your customer and you call in to a call center for that inter that serves like the entire south where there are a bunch of different policies so that the the rep on the other end has to look up and see like where you are before they can even start talking to you because their products are so different depending on what city and what area you're in and then you know maybe they could read our stories and take some take some learnings from what people are saying on the front line I think they've got you know they've got one thing they're saying at the top and people at the top of Comcast's love their company they think it's they think it's a really great place and it is in a lot of ways like a pretty good company and has pretty decent benefits among other things but their message is just like getting totally lost in translation on its way down to the front line where people are actually dealing with customers yeah that's great yeah everybody should go read Adrian series called Comcast confessions it's on the roads right now thanks for watching