I recently had to contact support and through chat support the person said they were adding notes to my account. Of course when I call support another day they have no record of this. They then proceed to forward my call to 2 other departments each of which has no idea why I'm calling. I talked to each of these people for several minutes.
Same with Comcast, if not worse. For some reason their systems appear to take forever to load a customer account. One could probably find and pull a physical file of a user account faster in the pre-computer days out of a huge room full of wall to wall filing cabinets. I am not sure if it's ineptness or they pretend to take long to make support calls as frustrating as possible.
The trick I've found with Comcast is to go to their offices. The in-person support people have always been able to deal with whatever I was there for quickly and satisfactorily.
This is the only way I could get them to fix a problem I had.
I went on vacation once, never having missed a payment to Comcast nor have we been late in the 7+ years of our account.
I get back from being gone after the week, and no internet. I call Comcast, who says there is no outage, and can send someone out to investigate in a week.
Meanwhile, I look outside, and my cable is disconnected from the utility pole, meaning someone needed a bucket truck to do this.
Going into the Comcast office, they were able to send someone out in 3 days instead of 4.
Also, Comcast has no record of them disconnecting nor can tell me why I was disconnected.
I would LOVE to ditch Comcast, but I have 0 other options in my area for speeds over 25Mb, which is a joke. I will never understand how Comcast is not a monopoly.
I guess this turned more into me hating Comcast...
I don't want to, as a consumer I'd like to get decent customer service in a manner that isn't directly inconveniencing to either me or, even, the company. I don't demand that reps show up at my door, but it is seriously annoying how far Comcast will go out of their way refusing to help you.
I've had pretty excellent support from Comcast via chat on the 3 occasions I've needed to use them in the last 5 years or so. It doesn't seem like it's going to be as fast as a phone call, but it seems like I can easily express what I want/need and the chat agent seems to respond intelligently and effectively.
If you would like to learn a little bit more about the economics and operations of CSR call centers I can refer you to August 5 interview with Emily Guendelsberger on Sam Seder's show entitled "On the Clock: How Low-Wage Work Drives America Insane"[0] This link is timestamped to the relevant segment, but I can't isolate one phrase to demonstrate some of these operations. She employed herself in these locations to learn about how they operate, and the conditions. The TL;DR is that the outsourced companies bill on a per-minute basis, not on any actually useful metrics, in her experience.
EDIT:I forgot to metion that she does discuss how poorly integrated the CSR software is, and the absurdly cumbersome user interfaces which they are forced to operate.
It is curious, because the time you spend talking to staff is directly costing them money, so you would imagine they have a serious incentive to arrange their backend systems to be fast and efficient to resolve your query quicker and save them money.
I suspect the support department of most companies isn't empowered to change processes, have better computer systems, etc.
I recently had to contact support and through chat support the person said they were adding notes to my account. Of course when I call support another day they have no record of this. They then proceed to forward my call to 2 other departments each of which has no idea why I'm calling. I talked to each of these people for several minutes.
How can a company possibly function like this?