A post on the Consumerist takes another shot at Comcast. Honestly, this post makes the phone company look good these days.
But its more than Comcast that needs to retool how they deal with their customers. A recent experience with a new defective Blackberry 8700 and RIM had me spending more time in hours to try to “repair” it than it costs. The hurdles I had to go through to get an RMA was such a time suck.
The same occurred recently with AT&T when my TA for CallVantage went through an issue. I was insisting that the firmware updates they were doing broke the TA. Finally they sent two replacement units. The third time the TA flamed out, I went to a friend inside AT&T who got someone senior to address the issue. It seems I was right back in June, August and now again in September. Since the slight change in settings was made, no more outages, and no more need to unplug and plug in the CallVantage Telephone adapter. It works as it always did before the series of firmware updates.
Customer Service is a misnomer. These departments work to the benefit of the company and the efforts are usually geared towards “fixing” what’s broken vs. replacing the broken item. For software I can see that approach, but when it comes to hardware, sometimes just getting a new one is better.