Customer Service at Comcast

Today’s consumers have higher expectations than ever before. They want us to communicate using the latest technology. They want instant service and lower costs. And at the very basic level, they want products and services that work as promised and they demand to be treated with respect by the companies they do business with. Over the last 12 months, we’ve been listening to our customers and our employees and taking action to fundamentally change the way we do business to improve customer satisfaction. We do have room for improvement. It will take time; but we are absolutely committed to providing a superior customer experience.

When I started this job I embarked on a listening tour that’s taken me to a dozen cities across the country where I’ve met with customers and employees. Our customers from every part of the country are unanimous in their passion and love of our products. But, when there’s a problem, they want us to respond faster and fix it the first time around. And, our employees share that sentiment – they’re frustrated when they can’t help our customers the first time. They want more training and tools to help them improve the consistency of our service.

The good news is we’ve heard this and are investing in training and new technology more than any other time in our 45-year history to ensure our employees have the most effective tools at their fingertips. We’re also working behind the scenes to make sure the critical network building blocks that make up our network are working properly so customers get the performance from our services that they expect.

Some of the specific steps we’re taking to improve our customers’ experiences with us include:

• Developing a new automated diagnostic/troubleshooting portal, called “Grand Slam,” to help reduce repeat customer calls and foster first-time resolution by letting us perform a “health check” and either fix customer’s service issues remotely or give the technician better information to fix the problem;
• Giving more than 15,000 smart mobile devices to our field technicians that enable real-time communication and are helping to address a critical issue for our customers - improved on-time reliability;
• Creating and offering more than 200 new training courses over the last 12 months for Customer Account Executives (CAEs) and technicians so they can better help customers;
• Hiring 15,000 employees in the past two years, primarily customer-facing technicians and CAEs.

We also have employees around the country who monitor our massive fiber rich network and our products 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This gives us a real-time understanding of how our services are working and lets us take immediate action if performance falls below acceptable levels. We’ve also invested $6 billion in the past year alone to support our infrastructure so it has the capacity and reliability to serve our growing number of customers and constantly expanding services.

Our technicians and phone reps interact with our customers over 375 million times a year. We don’t always get it right, but we want to do a great job and are working to get better. This change may take some time, but it is beginning to happen and will continue one customer at a time. We interact with our customers one million times a day. Each one of those interactions is a genuine opportunity to prove we care, we understand and we are committed to getting it right!

The dialog has begun – whether it’s meeting face-to-face with customers on our listening tour or engaging in conversations on various sites like twitter and others. We hope to continue the dialog here on Comcast Voices. I’ll use this space to keep you updated and look forward to hearing your feedback.