Is there anything at all we can take from that Comcast cancellation call?

Ryan Block called Comcast to cancel his service. An argumentative agent seemingly couldn’t believe this was happening and almost refused to comply.

Here’s the phone call. If you can listen to it all, do so. It feels like a sermon on how not to do customer service.

Plenty of people are writing about this. But is it anything more than a bad agent?

Here’s what I take from it.

By Ben Davis July 16th 2014 10:06

Listen to the community

On Comcast’s own forums you can find posts like this one.

Click through and read the solution to cancelling your service. The expert that replies completely disregards the telephone and encourages cancelling customers to go in-store.

Just look at the red text in this excerpt.

If people that really know your brand recommend face-to-face service as the only way to get a problem fixed, then there’s obviously an issue.

These forums are set up for customers to discuss Comcast’s service. Sky does a great job of these forums. These are places for customers to resolve some problems (saving the company and the customer time) and for the company to learn about what customers need.

If these forums are full of vexed customers with grievance, it’s obvious that something needs to change.

The damage to a brand, however large and infrastructure heavy, of having such a large amount of dirty laundry on show is hard to quantify. Until Google Fiber comes along, that is.

Learn from past mistakes in search

If you really aren’t concerned about your customers and would rather treat them as conduits of incoming dollar, surely you want your marketing to work.

Comcast used to have big search troubles. At one point, Googling Comcast would retrieve a top result of a Comcast engineer asleep on a sofa (there are lots of these videos).

Similarly, with news highlighted in the Google SERPS, if you do a bit of searching now, you’ll find Ryan’s phone call everywhere. When the Washington Post covers a story, perhaps it becomes real to the Comcast board.

If you play in an industry with little competition, whether telecoms or energy, don’t assume that the service itself is all.