Comcast is adding more social media representatives as it tries to work
on its reputation for inefficient, unresponsive or just plain rude
customer service.
It is tripling the size of its social media team to 60, and could add
more. That's just a tiny percentage of the thousands of customer service
people it has. But answering people faster on Twitter and Facebook is part of an overall push to improve customer service.
The country's biggest cable provider is promoting its customer service
efforts as regulators weigh whether to allow Comcast to buy the No. 2
cable company, Time Warner Cable,
in a $45 billion deal that would create an Internet and cable giant.
The combined company would serve nearly 30 percent of cable TV
subscribers and more than half of high-speed Internet subscribers.
That's raised an outcry from consumer advocates who say the combined
company would have too much control over the country's Internet access.
And the company's reputation for treating customers badly — calling them
names, making it difficult to cancel service, requiring multiple
visits, calls and emails to fix problems, tacking on fees, passing
customers from call center employee to employee — hasn't helped it sell
the deal to the public.
The company has a "multiyear road map" to fix its problems, and "still
has a lot of work left to do," said Tom Karinshak, the senior vice
president of customer service for Comcast Cable.
Comcast's spending on customer service has increased in the past few
years, rising about 5 percent in both 2013 and 2014, to $2.21 billion
last year.
Comcast Corp., which is based in Philadelphia, announced its social
media push on Monday. It aims to answer complaints on Facebook, Twitter
and possibly other forums in 30 minutes. It now often takes far longer
than that — more than a week for many recent answers to customer
complaints with its @ComcastCares service account. DirecTV, a satellite
TV competitor, and other big cable companies Charter and Time Warner
Cable have recent replies on Twitter that come within a day or just
hours of a complaint.
As for other improvements, Karinshak said Comcast has added more
appointment hours in evenings and weekends, let customers return
equipment at UPS stores and been able to reduce the number of times
technicians have to make multiple service trips to fix problems.
For customers on the phone, Comcast said a change in its computer systems lets employees spend less time on data entry.
The company is also testing an app that lets people know how far away a
technician is and shows a picture of the technician. It is also working
on redesigning its bills and simplifying promotional packages — the
cheaper prices you pay for a limited time after signing up.
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