Trevor Burnham

I had an unpleas­ant expe­ri­ence with Comcast today. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that Comcast offers its cus­tomers a world in which every precious thread in the fabric of reality is as inde­ter­mi­nate as Schrödinger’s Cat. My phone number is and isn’t the number my account is under. My credit card number is and isn’t valid. The Russell set exists.

But here’s the thing that really irks me: Before con­nect­ing me to a human being (after 15 minutes of menu nav­i­ga­tion), the system asked if I’d be willing to give my feedback on my support expe­ri­ence. God yes, I thought, let me tell you how to fix this! 30 minutes later, an auto­mated system called me and asked exactly three questions:

1. Was your issue resolved today? (Yes or no.)
2. How pleasant was your expe­ri­ence with the customer support rep­re­sen­ta­tive? (1–5 scale)
3. How much effort did this support call take? (1–5 scale)

And then: Thank you! *click* But… but… Comcast, you have so much you could learn from me. I vol­un­teered to talk to you! I tweeted @ComcastCares, but receive no response. Do you really care so little? I realize that your monopoly seems cozy now, but once I have a 4G Verizon wi-​​fi box, will I really need to buy cable from a company that evi­dently relishes my suf­fer­ing? And one final question: In that e-​​mail you sent me, asking me to call you about an unspec­i­fied account issue, was it really nec­es­sary to precede your number with So that we may provide you with excep­tional customer service…? The state­ment is tech­ni­cally accurate (excep­tional in the sense of “unusual; not typical,” or—also from the New Oxford American Dic­tio­nary—“mentally or phys­i­cally disabled so as to require special school­ing”), but you need to learn to manage expectations.

I’m not a cynical or anti-​​corporate person. Actually, I had a very pleasant expe­ri­ence with American Express yes­ter­day. (Some fiend had gotten my card number and used it to buy a bunch of songs on iTunes; a friendly customer support person called me to report the fraud.) It’s a cliché to say that Comcast is an evil cor­po­ra­tion, and I don’t even like the phrase “evil cor­po­ra­tion.” But Comcast is the Dark Prince of Corporations.

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