What are they thinking?

 

I needed to ask Comcast a question today. I hate talking to them over the phone because after going through a maze of options I always end up with somebody that is either unwilling or unable to help me.

So I visited their website and was pleasantly surprised to see a link to chat with customer support on their home page. That’s awesome, I always prefer to use online chat to resolve my issues and have used it with many companies very successfully in the past. Including last week when I registered an international domain for my new project and I used an on-line chat to ask the customer rep many questions on the mechanics of international domain registration.

Any how, so I clicked to chat, eagerly waiting for the familiar LivePerson, or similar, interface to pop up and for me to ask my questions.

Instead I was taken to a page where I got to select which service I want to ask questions about. Fair enough, they do offer cable, t.v. and phone services. My particular question pertained to my overall service and not specifically to one of those three, but none the less, I picked one.

I was then taken to another page, with about a dozen required fields. I needed my first name, last name, address, phone number, email address, description of my issue, issue type, etc… just so that I can start chatting and asking my questions.

Patiently, I filled in all the fields and clicked submit, only to be told that my phone number was not in a valid format. Didn’t explain what they consider to be a valid format. So I had to play with the formats for a while and finally it let me in.

Only I did not get to chat with anybody. Instead I was dumped on a page that told me there are no matching documents? Whaaaat? What are they talking about? A button on the bottom of the page claimed that it will take me to the chat screen.

I clicked on it, to finally get the image above. Something about the Queue not being available.

I guess i should not have expected Comcast’s online support to be better than their phone support. In fact, this is pretty much par for the course.

My question however is the following: When some mid level Comcast manager is tasked with the job of providing an online chat support mechanism, what is the thought process that results in what they currently have onsite? I mean you really have to get out of your way to fuck up this task, do not you think? There are thousands of sites that use online chat for customer service and they all pretty much follow the same format. You submit a nick name, possibly a topic, and immediately a LivePerson (or similar product) window pops up and you start chatting.

Have these people never done this before? Had they not researched it? Had they thought they were the first ever to implement this functionality and thus decided to pioneer this novel approach?

I mean, which is it? Did they look at the way others implement the service and decide to screw it up instead of following the successful models? or did they not consider what others are doing? simply assuming they were the first to do this?

I cannot decide which answer is worse.

 

“Capitalists” always claim that big government is the problem. Had they actually lived on this planet instead of in their own dreams, they would realize that Big Business is as big a problem, if not bigger, than Big Government.