Re: Finding clue at comcast.net

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Howard C. Berkowitz" <hcb@gettcomm.com>
To: <nanog@merit.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2003 11:20 AM
Subject: RE: Finding clue at comcast.net


>
> At 9:29 AM -0500 10/9/03, Austad, Jay wrote:
> >Comcast's phone support department is the *worst*, WORST, I've ever dealt
> >with.  I think they are outsourced, they have to go by a script, and many
of
> >them probably hardly know what a computer even is.  Once I called because
of
> >a problem on their network, and I told the person on the phone that there
> >was a problem on their network, and I pinned it down to a couple of
routers
> >where the problem may be, and she responded, very sternly, "Sir, WE DON'T
> >HAVE ANY ROUTERS"
>
> Same thing here. Last night, I was told that no escalation personnel
> were available.
* Depending on how big a company is or how the outsourcing company staffs at
night this can be true. No escalation personnel may be physically present,
but this doesn't mean there isn't someone they can call. An outsourcing
companies call center agents have to first decide (policy?) that the issue
warrants escalation, and then they probably have to call THEIR manager (of
the outsourcing company). This manager then gets to decide if it REALLY
warrants escalation to their client (the cable company). They don't want to
call them after-hours unneccesarily. And cable companies are used to having
24-hours to resolve most outages, and if it doesn't affect a LOT of their
customers it isn't considered an outage worth escalating. A real world
example is: 6 calls in one cable node with the problem persisting for 15 to
30 minutes (calls keep coming in) would be a case for an on-call technician
to be called. Anything less just gets Service Calls placed in CableMaster on
AS/400. These things can wait for a scheduled (all-day) appointment unless
the customer insists on a time-frame.

An outside company calling about something is a lot less likely to get
escalated at all unless it sounds like a real emergency. If the Internet is
not down to their customers ... there isn't much that would be considered an
emergency. As long as Email works and typical Web Surfing works for their
customers, nothing is wrong worth escalating. They get a fair amount of
"Their Hacking my firewall" and "I can't reach my company [or XYZ.COM]
server". These kinds of things are usually escalated by email to someone
able to investigate that level of problems (Network Admin. or Engineer). I'd
bet not to many of them read email after hours. (I did and responded to a
lot of them, wether I got appreciated for it or not...)

>
> On the couple of occasions where I got escalation, I once had an
> informal conversation with a 3rd level. Their phone center is in
> Halifax, NS -- didn't find out if it is outsourced or not. While the
> person with whom I spoke was reasonably clueful, he told me that
> customer support had no interactive communication with network
> operations -- at best, they could send an email about a routing,
> SMTP, etc. problem and hope somebody would respond.
* Exactly what I described above. But I wouldn't accept "hopefully somebody
would respond". That is NOT acceptable. Someone should respond within 1
business day at most. Again your not going to find many on-call or
higher-level support reading email after-hours and responding to things.
Even I couldn't do it ALL of the time. And I was the only one doing that in
a local cable company (not a national company) with 2 cities.

>
> At the time, I was paying for their "Pro" service, intermediate
> between regular residential and full business. My contact said that
> while that was supposed to get better customer support, an early plan
> to route it to business Comcast failed, and there really was NO
> separate Pro support organization. I dropped the Pro service after I
> learned that residential service no longer insisted you remove any
> local routers and firewalls before deigning to troubleshoot. They
> still ask you to do that, but repeated NO responses can get them to
> proceed.
* Pro services, where I was working, gets escalated like the above
description I wrote. If you are not completely down you're probably not
going to see something done about it until the next business day (assuming
after-hours).

>
> A few NANOGs back (Atlanta), I did a presentation on customer
> satisfaction, which, frankly, was in many respects a case study of
> how I'd reform customer support at my then ISP/DSL, cais.net. If
> NANOG ever did formal documents, I'd like to see a guideline on how
> to run customer support.
* I saw you powerpoint and I liked it.

>
> >
> >In any case, if you manage to get the call escalated a couple of times
> >(after lying about rebooting your computer 47 times),
>
> You forgot reinstalling Windows. On a Mac.
>
* Typicall front line support (should) be able to figure out if you are
reporting a problem with your connection, e.g. your cable modem is not
"acquired" or you have no IP connectivity or DNS resolution, or if you are
reporting something else that needs escalation to a higher level of support
(or to the cable company on-call). Again the rules of engagement I described
above about number of calls on one cable node and how long it has been down
(need 15-30 minutes). [Some things in outside plant reset themselves
automatically].

A lot of cable companies are likely new to providing PRO services. Also
remember a lot of cable companies just recently took the ISP infrastructure
in-house after having outsourced for many years to companies like
Excite@Home and ISPChannel. Also some of these outsourced call centers
surely don't have the ISP support background they need. The one I was at,
wether they'd admit it or not, learned a lot from me. I came from small ISP
dial-up support where I was everything as well as working at a Latin
American Countries ISP aggregator. So I wasn't made from the same mold as
many of these newer personnel you will come across. Things may have to
escalate to a pretty high level to find someone with the kind of clue to
have dealt with knowledgeable customers ... especially Internet Core NSP
persons.

---
Alan Spicer (a_spicerNOSPAM@bellsouth.net)
http://aspicer.homelinux.net/
Systems and Network Administration,
and Telecommunications
(954) 977-5245