D.F.

Krause

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January 9, 2009

Comcast and the Most Amazing Customer Service Breakthrough Ever

Some businesses improve by leaps and bounds. Some make incremental improvement. Some are like the 35-year-old mallethead who gets a job for the first time and says, “Hey everybody! Look at me!”

It appears Comcast, our friendly neighborhood cable company, is like that.

If you’ve seen the new Comcast commercials, they’re promoting an astounding new customer service feature. It’s riveting! If, when you see it, you’re thinking to yourself, “How can they really give us oh so much?” it only goes to show what truly new ground they are breaking.

Here it is: You know how, when you call Comcast to order something or ask for service, you wait on hold for an incredibly long time, and occasionally you hear a recorded voice telling you they’ll get to you as fast as they can? Well! Now, if you want, you can have them call you back!

Unbelievably amazing!!!!!!!!

That’s right. I can hardly believe it either. It’s almost as if – wait a minute, it’s coming to me . . . it’s almost as if you could call someone, and if they were busy talking to someone else, you could leave . . . what would we call it? . . . a message, yes, a message! . . . it might include your phone number . . . and then they could hear it somehow, and then they could call you back!

Hey! I know! What if we made machines that could actually record these messages? We could call them answering machines! You don’t think that would have the potential to become obsolete technology, do you? But if it did, we could come up with some sort of, I don’t know, digital version of the answering machine! It could be just like e-mail, but with talking! We could call it “voice mail.”

OK. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s the people at Comcast who are the trailblazers, after all – not you and me.

I’m actually not sure which is funnier – the fact that Comcast only just now had the idea to let customers leave messages and be called back, or the fact that they actually thought this was some sort of a customer-service breakthrough worthy of getting its own commercial.

The next thing you know, airlines will fly their planes when they say they were going to fly them, and Starbucks will let their customers use their wi-fi network. Oh wait, that last one has already happened. Starbucks entered the 1990s last year.

I suppose companies who have never had much expected of them in the way of customer service can’t be blamed for producing a load of crap and thinking to themselves, “There must be a pony in here somewhere!”

Next week: The Department of Motor Vehicles announces new offices with air to breathe while you’re waiting in line! Sprint offers assistance from a guy who speaks understandable English!

The advertising industry is going to be sitting pretty rolling out the commercials to announce all this. Maybe they’ll even make a few of them in color! Suddenly it’s as if all things are possible.

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