RE: Finding clue at comcast.net
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" In any case, if you manage to get the call escalated a couple of times (after lying about rebooting your computer 47 times), you'll get someone good. Also, there are some good people who read this list. But calling their phone support to get anything useful is like trying to squeeze blood from a rock. -jay
-----Original Message----- From: Howard C. Berkowitz [mailto:hcb@gettcomm.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2003 7:36 PM To: nanog@merit.org Subject: Finding clue at comcast.net
I'm rapidly beginning to believe this is equivalent to finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. When my broadband alternative is Verizon and it's looking better, this is scary.
Sometime today, their SMTP server started bouncing messages with more than 3 addressees. When I called customer support, I was told "we only handle troubleshooting, not mail service." The operator "guessed" they might be doing software updates on the mail service, had no information, and said there was no person to which it could be escalated.
She insisted that I call my local cable office to find out when the "server repair" would be completed, because "they schedule all repairs."
Is this a bad dream?
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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
you'll get someone good. Also, there are some good people who read this list. But calling their phone support to get anything useful is like trying to squeeze blood from a rock.
-jay
-----Original Message----- From: Howard C. Berkowitz [mailto:hcb@gettcomm.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2003 7:36 PM To: nanog@merit.org Subject: Finding clue at comcast.net
I'm rapidly beginning to believe this is equivalent to finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. When my broadband alternative is Verizon and it's looking better, this is scary.
Sometime today, their SMTP server started bouncing messages with more than 3 addressees. When I called customer support, I was told "we only handle troubleshooting, not mail service." The operator "guessed" they might be doing software updates on the mail service, had no information, and said there was no person to which it could be escalated.
She insisted that I call my local cable office to find out when the "server repair" would be completed, because "they schedule all repairs."
Is this a bad dream?
On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Howard C. Berkowitz wrote:
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
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
Anybody know to what extent Comcast and the old MediaOne/ATTBI customer support organizations have been merged? All of this sounds like classic MediaOne/ATTBI. I'm on the local cable board, which gets me a few phone numbers one level up the escalation chain, but still.... I do remember a few months back, on the weekend, hiking in the woods, when I got a callback from a tech. in Candada, who was also calling from his cell phone on his day off. This was part of a 6-month, ongoing problem that turned out to result from a memory leak in the nearest poletop box serving my home - it turns out that this specific box hadn't received the upgrade that fixed a problem that the industry knew about for a year. Sigh... Miles Fidelman
Miles Fidelman writes on 10/9/2003 9:25 PM:
Anybody know to what extent Comcast and the old MediaOne/ATTBI customer support organizations have been merged?
I think all the cable infrastructure from ATTBI has migrated to comcast. And people on attbi got transitioned to comcast email addresses quite some time back. srs -- srs (postmaster|suresh)@outblaze.com // gpg : EDEDEFB9 manager, outblaze.com security and antispam operations
I was informed "legacy" ATTBI setup is still different from the router / infrastructure side. (i.e. Old ATTBI has ping and ports blocked that "native" Comcast does not) Eric
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Suresh Ramasubramanian Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2003 12:20 PM To: Miles Fidelman Cc: nanog@merit.org Subject: Re: Finding clue at comcast.net
Miles Fidelman writes on 10/9/2003 9:25 PM:
Anybody know to what extent Comcast and the old MediaOne/ATTBI customer support organizations have been merged?
I think all the cable infrastructure from ATTBI has migrated to comcast. And people on attbi got transitioned to comcast email addresses quite some time back.
srs
-- srs (postmaster|suresh)@outblaze.com // gpg : EDEDEFB9 manager, outblaze.com security and antispam operations
On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Eric Kagan wrote:
I was informed "legacy" ATTBI setup is still different from the router / infrastructure side. (i.e. Old ATTBI has ping and ports blocked that "native" Comcast does not)
That is true for the moment. We're in the process of rectifying that. -- Brandon Ross AIM: BrandonNR Principal IP Engineer ICQ: 2269442 Comcast IP Services Yahoo: BrandonNRoss
----- 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
participants (7)
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Alan Spicer -
Austad, Jay -
Brandon Ross -
Eric Kagan -
Howard C. Berkowitz -
Miles Fidelman -
Suresh Ramasubramanian