4 ms·

I canceled my decade old COX account last time that happened. Even asked nicely not to "help" by editing traffic, the runaround was fun. At the end they offered

I canceled my decade old COX account last time that happened. Even asked nicely not to "help" by editing traffic, the runaround was fun. At the end they offered to take my ~$90/mo to ~$70; re-confirming they had no idea what I was unhappy about.

walrus01 9y ago
A $12/hour call center customer retention worker in rural TN has no idea what you're complaining about, their job is simply to meet some retention metrics on a weekly basis. Even if you can actually reach the people who run the ASN of your ISPs, if it something big like Cox, charter, Shaw, etc, they'll be politically unable to confirm or deny anything, and won't want to talk to you. You might get a straight answer if you are in a similarly senior position at an equivalent sized ISP that has mutual settlement free peering, such as between RCN and Charter.
- username223 9y ago
  Such are the joys of modern "customer support" -- human beings don't scale, because they need to sleep and can only talk to one other human at a time. So you hire the cheapest ones you can find, and instruct them to be minimally helpful. Even better, make them all "managers," so "can I please speak to your manager" will just take you to another minimum-wage employee. If you want actual customer support these days, your best bet is to create a PR problem for the company via social media, because PR flacks are paid enough to matter.
  - acdha 9y ago
    In cases without competition. I live in an area with three gigabit-capable ISPs and the difference in support quality is unbelievable, even for the Comcast and Verizon customers – just calling from a competitive neighborhood gets your call processed differently.
    - walrus01 9y ago
      Which city?
      - goldenkey 9y ago
        Sounds like Seattle
      - acdha 9y ago
        Washington DC - my neighborhood has Comcast, RCN, and Verizon. Our neighbors report better service on all three — and when you go a couple blocks south where the FIOS rollout stopped, regression to normal sets in for Comcast. We also have municipal fiber but they’ve chosen not to make that available for residential service which is really disappointing but … politics.
        walrus01 9y ago
        So, channel bonded docsis3.0 and 3.1 on Comcast and rcn, and gpon fiber from Verizon? Or are the cable operators also doing singlemode to the house now?
        acdha 9y ago
        Definitely for RCN. Comcast ads have claimed fiber but I don’t know whether that’s available or just planned since I won’t do business with Comcast.
  - tialaramex 9y ago
    A smarter, and perhaps even more profitable way to approach this problem is "OK, we want almost everything that happens to customers to be a self-serve situation" and then make your (fewer) call centre employees highly trained troubleshooters who can figure out why _this_ customer wasn't able to self-serve and get that sorted for them. The result is a better customer experience (usually everything just works, when you need to talk to a human the human is an _expert_ who helps fix your problem, not a drone working from a fixed script) and it can be much cheaper if done right. Definitely if you think of your product/ service as "premium" this is the correct model to have.
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      Lots of people simply do not like self serve. I get that companies want to cut costs, which is why we got endless telephone menu trees, then support web sites with crappy search, then automated telephone agents, then chat bots, and on and on. And the public has devised all these various tactics to skip that crap. I just want to talk to a damned human being rather than spend 10x the time navigating your poorly thought out Customer Avoidance Systems! Sometimes I need a drone and sometimes I need an expert. I have yet to see an automated system that could successfully determine which tier support I needed.
    - username223 9y ago
      Often I prefer "self-serve," but sometimes I like to talk to a human who knows about the system that has created my problem, and can quickly fix it. That's why there are websites dedicated to showing people how to skip through phone menus and reach actual humans, even if those humans are soundboard operators paid almost nothing to make you go away.
      - jakeogh 9y ago
        link? I refuse to talk to computers.
        username223 9y ago
        The fact that these pages exist tells you all you need to know about the fundamental user-hostility of modern tech companies: https://gethuman.com https://gethuman.com https://www.wikihow.com/Talk-to-a-Human-when-Calling-a-Business https://www.wikihow.com/Talk-to-a-Human-when-Calling-a-Busin...
- hirsin 9y ago
  Impressively (given the rest of the company), Comcast DNS is on twitter [1] and is fairly responsive/tech savvy and unrestrained. It feels like someone in the department got one over on management - "look, if you get in our way things break real fast. Trust we know what we're doing and you won't get calls about state.gov being blackholed". 1. https://twitter.com/ComcastDNS https://twitter.com/ComcastDNS
- deleted 9y ago
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- deleted 9y ago
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walrus01 9y ago

A $12/hour call center customer retention worker in rural TN has no idea what you're complaining about, their job is simply to meet some retention metrics on a weekly basis. Even if you can actually reach the people who run the ASN of your ISPs, if it something big like Cox, charter, Shaw, etc, they'll be politically unable to confirm or deny anything, and won't want to talk to you. You might get a straight answer if you are in a similarly senior position at an equivalent sized ISP that has mutual settlement free peering, such as between RCN and Charter.

username223 9y ago
Such are the joys of modern "customer support" -- human beings don't scale, because they need to sleep and can only talk to one other human at a time. So you hire the cheapest ones you can find, and instruct them to be minimally helpful. Even better, make them all "managers," so "can I please speak to your manager" will just take you to another minimum-wage employee. If you want actual customer support these days, your best bet is to create a PR problem for the company via social media, because PR flacks are paid enough to matter.
- acdha 9y ago
  In cases without competition. I live in an area with three gigabit-capable ISPs and the difference in support quality is unbelievable, even for the Comcast and Verizon customers – just calling from a competitive neighborhood gets your call processed differently.
  - walrus01 9y ago
    Which city?
    - goldenkey 9y ago
      Sounds like Seattle
    - acdha 9y ago
      Washington DC - my neighborhood has Comcast, RCN, and Verizon. Our neighbors report better service on all three — and when you go a couple blocks south where the FIOS rollout stopped, regression to normal sets in for Comcast. We also have municipal fiber but they’ve chosen not to make that available for residential service which is really disappointing but … politics.
      - walrus01 9y ago
        So, channel bonded docsis3.0 and 3.1 on Comcast and rcn, and gpon fiber from Verizon? Or are the cable operators also doing singlemode to the house now?
        acdha 9y ago
        Definitely for RCN. Comcast ads have claimed fiber but I don’t know whether that’s available or just planned since I won’t do business with Comcast.
- tialaramex 9y ago
  A smarter, and perhaps even more profitable way to approach this problem is "OK, we want almost everything that happens to customers to be a self-serve situation" and then make your (fewer) call centre employees highly trained troubleshooters who can figure out why _this_ customer wasn't able to self-serve and get that sorted for them. The result is a better customer experience (usually everything just works, when you need to talk to a human the human is an _expert_ who helps fix your problem, not a drone working from a fixed script) and it can be much cheaper if done right. Definitely if you think of your product/ service as "premium" this is the correct model to have.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    Lots of people simply do not like self serve. I get that companies want to cut costs, which is why we got endless telephone menu trees, then support web sites with crappy search, then automated telephone agents, then chat bots, and on and on. And the public has devised all these various tactics to skip that crap. I just want to talk to a damned human being rather than spend 10x the time navigating your poorly thought out Customer Avoidance Systems! Sometimes I need a drone and sometimes I need an expert. I have yet to see an automated system that could successfully determine which tier support I needed.
  - username223 9y ago
    Often I prefer "self-serve," but sometimes I like to talk to a human who knows about the system that has created my problem, and can quickly fix it. That's why there are websites dedicated to showing people how to skip through phone menus and reach actual humans, even if those humans are soundboard operators paid almost nothing to make you go away.
    - jakeogh 9y ago
      link? I refuse to talk to computers.
      - username223 9y ago
        The fact that these pages exist tells you all you need to know about the fundamental user-hostility of modern tech companies: https://gethuman.com https://gethuman.com https://www.wikihow.com/Talk-to-a-Human-when-Calling-a-Business https://www.wikihow.com/Talk-to-a-Human-when-Calling-a-Busin...
hirsin 9y ago
Impressively (given the rest of the company), Comcast DNS is on twitter [1] and is fairly responsive/tech savvy and unrestrained. It feels like someone in the department got one over on management - "look, if you get in our way things break real fast. Trust we know what we're doing and you won't get calls about state.gov being blackholed". 1. https://twitter.com/ComcastDNS https://twitter.com/ComcastDNS
deleted 9y ago
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deleted 9y ago
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