Graves On SOHO Technology

I was incensed as a result of the past weeks trouble with the cable card swap that Comcast imposed. After considerable time spent on the phone in the afternoon I detailed the situation in a blog post early last evening. At the point when I wrote that post we had no clear path to solution, just the promise that someone would call us back.

Shortly after the blog post went live a twitter message was automatically sent to highlight that post. This caught the attention of @comcastcares, which is Frank Eliason, Director Of Digital Care at Comcast.

Frank & his staff are based in Philadelphia PA. The fact that Comcast has been using Twitter to stay on top of customer service has been known for some time. I had some cursory interaction with them during the long service outage in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike.

Frank requested our contact details and promised to look into the matter. A short while later he responded that the matter was escalated to “leaders in Houston.”

A short while later there was another response indicating that “they will be working to resolve the matter ASAP.”

Then started the calls from Comcast, beginning with “Melissa.”

Unlike the folks we had spoken to when we had called them this person sounded like she was local, or at least in this region. The accent was similar. She was able to walk us through the new menus that the Scientific Atlanta cable card had brought to exist in the TivoHD. We were able to confirm that the basic settings they had in their systems were correct.

We went through a fairly lengthy process of documenting which channels were working and which were not. After this she then said that she’d escalate the trouble with all these new notes.

About another hour had passed when we got another call, this time asking us to check to see if the missing services were working. Happily it appeared that they had resolved the trouble.

When I inquired as to the nature of the matter they responded that it was a simple matter of re-initializing the cable card, which takes about 10 seconds from their end.

About 10 minutes later someone else called to ask if the matter had been resolved. She told us that her boss wanted a status report ASAP!

All of this transpired in just over three hours.

It’s a great a wonderful thing that our service has been restored. It makes my life a lot better that the cable TV is fully functional as I leave for a week in Burlington VT. My wife, a veteran TV Producer/Director, truly needs it all working for her world to be fully functional. I am grateful to Frank and his staff for what push they might have applied to get the matter resolved.

The entire experience has raised in me questions about corporate culture, staffing and the influence of social media. These I will ponder a while, to be considered in depth at a future time.