Comcast: not quite a Dell turnaround yet.

Dell pulled a pretty big coup by salvaging the image of their service and support all the way from awful back into the acceptable/good range over the last 3-4 years.  Now we’ll see if Comcast can pull a Dell and cut the head off of its own gremlins before it is too late.  That magical day of it really being “too late” for Comcast is finally on the horizon because having a Cable TV connection is no longer the home entertainment lifeline it used to be.  If everything worked well no one would be complaining, but all is not well in the house of Comcast.  

My gripes:  

• Endless mazes of touch tone prompts that don’t seem to affect the timeliness in which my problem gets answered.  Speaking of the Comcast support phonelines, with the exception of Vonage, I’ve never been so frequently “accidentally” disconnected while on hold.
• Phone reps that have little to no awareness of your own product.  How long have you legally been required to offer cablecards?  Years!  There is *no* reason anyone that answers the phone at Comcast should think I’m from Mars when I ask for a cablecard.
• Installing worthless junkware on customer PCs under the guise that it is necessary to establish, maintain, and utilize your services.
• Pricing of service plans that *never* constant month to month.  Unless you want me to leave every six months, you need to stabilize your pricing and ditch the limited promotional offers.  Want to make more current subscribers angry?  Advertise even more promotional offers for new customers only.  You should be morbidly embarrassed that your modis operandi revolves on constant baiting and switching.
• Those awful DVR boxes, what were you thinking!  Did that go out to bid with the specs: “needs to navigate slowly, be as *un*user-friendly as possible, come with remote controls that are neither intuitive nor attractive, and doesn’t need to integrate with any other common home media devices.” So 3 years into the Tivo licensing agreement you finally roll something out, but it still operates in that awful janky Comcast way.  Why not just use real Tivos with cablecards and get the cablecard spec 3.0 pushed out a little faster?  You’re Comcast, you could do that!
• You tried to embrace Web 2.0 support forums like Twitter and GetSatisfaction.com.  You’ve even received a little fanfare about this. . .ok so I tried both of those out, where’s my help?  Still waiting. . .
• Field Techs. . . I don’t know the details, but I think its safe to say that whatever business model you have in paying the tech a flat rate per the job, instead of paying them for the actual time it takes to get something right, isn’t doing you any favors.  In 2005 you came to my house twelve times on the same issue before it was resolved correctly and I’m pretty sure the blame lies in the field tech payment system, not the techs themselves.
• Bandwidth throttling - let’s get real honest about this real fast.  Evasiveness and secrecy isn’t the right attitude.  

That said, maybe hire a new PR firm, stabilize your pricing, and improve your in-house training and you’d be off to a great start.  Heck, I’m getting reliable 15-30 MB downstream speed right now, maybe I shouldn’t be complaining?