Taking Service Out of Customer Service

No offense, I have nothing against Comcast who is one of the most dominant ISP’s in the U.S.  Afterall I’m a customer myself and I often recommend them to folks looking for fast broadband Internet access at home. And on the whole Comcast provides reliable service.

But what concerns me is the level of customer service they’ve provided in the recent past.  Specifically I’m hearing how they’ve shut down some of their own customers’ internet service at an alarming rate — without warning.  I’m not talking about shutting down mass spammers either. Frankly I don’t mind Comcast or any other ISP protecting their network from abuse.  I’m talking about legitimate home/office customers being targeted and summarily disconnected from major Internet services particularly SMTP and throttling peer-to-peer traffic.

A client of ours runs a critical business from home.  Just recently, with no heads-up from Comcast, his outgoing mail was shut down.  Just like that.  It took two full days to get it resolved.  In the process this poor client lost alot of time not to mention business. I think Comcast lost too.  Customer credibility.  I can see if this was a rare thing.  But I’m finding it’s more common than we realize.

My point is this: Just let customers know what’s up.  It makes me wonder what we would do if the US Postal Service decided to target customers and stop delivering their mail.  I mean we depend on email as much as (if not more than) snail mail.  I don’t think it would be tolerated if Bobby the Mailman stopped bringing the mail for a few days because Joe Homeowner was having the mailman deliver to omuch mail.  It would be nice if Comcast would either beef up their access pipes or at the least let customers know in advance when they suspect abuse or see high traffic on their network before turning the switch off.

Since I wrote this a few months ago, I’ve learned Comcast has employed a bunch of folks whose job it is to monitor and respond to complaints from customers who sound off via Twitter and Facebook.  Fancy that.  Maybe they do this out of a desire to fill their customer service gaps.  Maybe to listen in on what people are saying about them.  (Proactive spin control?)  Let’s hope it helps cut down on the unnecessary disconnects.