Clearly Comcast doesn’t want me to pay my bill
After moving from Santa Rosa to San Francisco, I had numerous issues transferring my Comcast cable internet service. The gist of the problem was both technical (it’s apparently a manual process, requiring emails to two system managers, to have a MAC address—for a cable modem I own—moved from one Comcast region to another) and organizational (their outsourced call centers were both unaware of this problem and unable to elevate my problem to Comcast’s in-house technical support).
After sending an email to Comcast’s CEO, Brian L. Roberts, which I addressed to every relevant email address I could find on their corporate website (ESL_corp at cable.comcast.com, corporate_communications at comcast.com, and audit_committee_chairman at comcast.com), I finally got professional support, from real people with names, who gave me their extensions, but most importantly, who were able to solve my problems.
They finally correctly transfered my service, credited my account (as compensation for being double billed for two months), and gave me a reduced rate for a year. They even sent me a card in the mail. This is customer service, and this is primarily why you haven’t read a more detailed diatribe about my experience here. My only qualm, and it’s a big one, is that I had to fight for this customer service. I shouldn’t have to fight.
Today I finally got around to paying my bill. Logged onto the newly redesigned and much simplified comcast.com. Was immediately presented with a very clean, simple, Add Your Account interface. I only have to fill out three fields, and I get stuck on the first one, Account Name. What does that mean? It definitely sounds like some internal database jargon to me. Except I’m not sure if that means my full name, or something innocuous like “home” or “work”. My user name perhaps? Full name makes sense I guess, but why don’t they just have a first name and last name field like EVERY OTHER WEBSITE ON THE PLANET? There are no tooltips. That would have been handy. So I go with full name.
I dug up my bill, so I could fill in my 16! digit account number. 16 digits in four groups of digits (e.g. #### ## ### #######). Should I include the spaces or not? Hmm. I’ll go with not.
Finally I enter my phone number, this field is divided into three separate textboxes. I enter my area code, hit tab, start entering the next three digits only to find that the form automatically switched the focus to the middle text box before I hit tab. So now I’ve got to delete what I typed and manually focus the cursor back in the second box. Sheesh. They’re 0 for 3 here.
I click the big “Add Account” graphic, a spinning graphic pops up. And it spins, and spins, and spins. For close to a minute. Until the form comes back and tells me:
Unable to add account, please try again later. (3)
You have got to be kidding me.
Update: Here’s the best part. I go to check my email and there’s a message from Comcast saying, “Thank you for registering with Comcast.com” What is going on here—could it possibly be that my account was actually added?! Was that “Unable to add account…” message a default error for cross-browser incompatible AJAX code? I jump back to their Manage My Account page, and there’s my outstanding balance. I guess so.
Update 2: Oh great, I can’t even login anymore with Firefox. But somehow IE7 works. It’s late, and I’m tired of debugging websites for monopolies.
Being a monopoly means never having to say sorry….