Comcast Customer Service

Press 1 For Sales, Press 2 For Support
*Presses 1*
How can I help you?
*Presses 2*
Automated response – Your wait time is 26 minutes.

What gives?

The answer is obvious, sales makes a company money and support costs it. My take on this is that businesses don’t handle this concept appropriately. Sales are the brain, but support is a company’s backbone. I honestly don’t find Comcast support that bad. Sorry Evan.

The Case For Caring More About Sales

• Makes a company profitable.
• If you don’t answer a consumer ASAP, you may lose the sale. Live chat when web shopping has become the norm.
• Sales are the most important part of every business.

The Case For Disregarding Support

• They are already a customer
• Support agents have no incentive to do their job well. Not compensation based so who really gives a shit about job performance as long as you do your job well enough to get your salary.
• If the consumer can’t figure it out themselves, that’s what Google is for. Support rarely gets penalized for not solving the problem, it’ll be on the customer for having some problem on their end.

Real World Example

Sage Software is who we use for our business accounting and is a major culprit of this take. If I want to buy an upgrade, no wait. When I need support, 45 minute wait. I’ll will add that they’ve added a call back feature which is better than sitting on hold, but still annoying because if you miss the call back, you’re back in the cycle. The worst support is when dealing with the credit card / fraud department where support excels at keeping you on hold while they “check” on the situation.

Why do companies put their best people in sales and the worst in support? Frustrated customers don’t lead to a profitable business. Usually upset customers write scathing reviews and bad mouth the product. What’s the point of having shitty support?  We recently had an annual support charge for enough money to make me say, “this is ridiculous. We give you 30x that in credit card processing fees and you treat us like a sack of potatoes.” They didn’t budge. They are a soulless company.

My IT Experience

I worked with StableHost in order to get our sites pointed to different servers and exclusive from one another. I had tickets that would have 20 back and forth’s on them. IT doesn’t want to Solve the problem. They want to tell you how to solve the problem. What they don’t understand is that if I knew how to solve the problem myself, I’d do it. They have all my credentials. I tell them what I want to do. They refuse to use the credentials and solve the problem repeatedly coming back to me with what “I have to do”. Extremely frustrating to say the least and I’ll be honest, I still don’t understand where this data is on which server.

I could tell that they didn’t want to do their job well. They have no incentive to do so. What’s the point? I know with our business, we treat our customers like gold. It’s the smallest type of company possible, but we answer every phone call. We call you back. We answer your emails. We solve problems. It’s not that hard. Support needs to be supported by better pay or else it will continue to get a negative reviews and be looked at as unimportant. I would make the case it is more important than sales. Websites can sell products in today’s age. They can’t fix specific issues like my fucking Outlook moving recently sent emails to my draft folder or why it searches through my earliest emails first. Infuriating.