Sure They Are…

This isn’t really a follow-up to yesterday’s post, or to the post on July 23, which detailed the confessions of a former Comcast representative, confirming that the company’s incentive system makes all of their retention employees fight like starving dogs to prevent anyone from disconnecting. It’s really more about a story posted on The Verge website about the sales culture at Comcast, and how this is impacting the company’s entire customer service system. But one of the issues that keeps being raised when anyone attempts to create an alternative service and fight traditional broadband providers like Comcast is that these companies are too powerful, too entrenched, too difficult to push out of any market segments they might want – too big, in fact, to fail. After reading this piece in The Verge, I’m skeptical…

You can read the original story here if you’d like; it’s an informative and well-written piece that reveals a dreary – but hardly unexpected – reality. People have been complaining for some time now that it isn’t possible to interact with anybody at Comcast without having to fend off a variety of sales offers. You would expect that kind of thing from customer service personnel, since they’re usually the ones who would sign you up for new services anyway. It’s a bad idea will billing personnel, since you’d really rather be sure that they are concentrating on getting your bill ironed out, but most people will just put up with it. After all, offering someone a new service at a discounted rate might actually be a way to resolve certain billing issues…

It’s a really bad idea to have your technical support people doing this, however. If someone has called because of a problem with their service they’re probably already in a disgruntled frame of mind, thinking dark thoughts about your company and trying to figure out if there is anyone else who can provide the same services. It’s a bad time to start trying to sell them on something else that could go wrong without warning; in fact, anything that requires additional time to complete the call and resolve the problem is a mistake under those conditions. But what is really disturbing about this story is that the company doesn’t see things that way. Apparently, they are trying to get more and more sales performance out of every employee who deals directly with the public – and firing anyone who can’t meet a sales quota…

Personally, I don’t agree with such a strategy even for sales personnel, let alone customer service people who are supposed to be helping customers and trying to make them feel better about the company. It can be argued that the sales people signed up for these jobs knowing that’s what they would be asked to do, and even that most sales professionals like things that way. People who like performance targets with bonuses for selling things really do tend to migrate into that field. Technical support personnel, on the other hand, tend to have qualifications in electronics and/or computer programming, and did not spend the time and effort to obtain those chops in order to become salespeople. If you insist on working them this way a lot of them are going to quit right along with billing and customer service personnel who don’t enjoy this role – and the technicians aren’t nearly as easy to replace…

So if this story is correct, Comcast is driving away not only their most technologically oriented customers (e.g. the ones most likely to pay for expensive new services) but also their best technical, billing and customer service personnel, all while blithely assuming that they are too big to fail and some little upstart like Google Fiber can’t possibly be a threat. I could suggest that they might want to ask some of the former Google competitors, most of whom are now long out of business, how that’s working out for them, but it seems as though no one at Comcast is listening, any more than Frontier Communications is…

Too big to fail, eh? Sure they are…