Most of you by now have no heard about the video of the Comcast tech who fell asleep while waiting for the customer service representative. Comcast fired the tech in the video this week.
Did this really cure the root cause of the customer experience problem though?
This morning a Comcast tech came to my residence to fix a problem with my cable. He was actually very nice and knew what he was doing. I asked him about his thoughts about the incident. He said that “Oh, yeah we had a whole long meeting on that one. We were told not to sit, lean or anything.” The tech, not the first one to do so, stated that nothing is ever the fault of the customer service or dispatch area.
This is a really interesting point. If the call center cost center wasn’t understaffed, this whole incident never would have taken place. Perhaps it’s the Comcast SVP of the tech call center who should be on the unemployment line, not the tech. Comcast’s response to fire the tech shows that they just don’t get it. A better response would have been an announcement that Comcast would hire more customer service reps across the board to address the true root cause of the problem (call hold wait time) and would make the call cold wait times publicly transparent.
This whole incident demonstrates the importance of a customer focused culture that places a premium on learning, innovating and improving the client experience.
Prediction: Comcast will have another incident similar to this again because they didn’t address the true issue.
Some of your assumptions are wrong. First, since Comcast is a phone provider they have to comply with phone service levels. Once they drop below a specific service level they are fined by the FCC for each individual call that has a hold time longer than 30 seconds. This is also public information… you just need to know where to find it.
Hiring more employees at an average salary of $45000 + benefits would cost the company nearly $60,000 a year per employee. Do you think any company is going to eat this cost? No, they will in turn raise rates to accomodate these extra employees. What happens then? You piss off even more customers for raising their rates. It’s a vicious cycle that be hard to nail down.
Unless someone has actually ran a Fortune 500 company with more than 3,000,000 employees they do not know the final answer. Having nearly 28,000,000 customers is not an easy task to manage. With more than 26,000,000 truck rolls each year there are bound to be issues… and, this is the first documentation of a tech falling asleep on the job. So, tell me what the probability of this actually happening again would be?
Your post lacks credibility. Let me list the reasons:
1. You didn’t post your name.
2. Your e-mail address is fake (that is reason enough to delete your post but I won’t as it is actually amusing)
3. Your phone provider comment is a) off-topic and b) you don’t provide a link to whatever you are talking about – even if it’s true – does that add cost to the business?
3) Who says you couldn’t outsource the tech call number to a country where that would cost $5,000 per year and you could hire ten of them? If you are looking for resources, you could divert it from the department that mails me 4 postcards a week asking me to switch to Comcast, even though I’m already a customer! You should find significant money there.
4) I don’t know of any Fortune 500 company that has 3,000,000 employees so I don’t know where you’d actually find such an executive. Comcast only has 80,000 employees.
5) By incident, I meant that another incident where the image of the company is damaged due to customer service issues. Until Comcast treats customers as if they matter, this risk is high.
I’m a tech for Comcast and let me tell you. The idiots are the ones behind the phones. We techs go to jobs thinking the customer wants something to find out that they had order something else.