After the Sheltering In Place order, a total of four people—three of my children and a significant other—moved back into my house. Because all of those people, and people who were already living here, such as myself, needed to do stuff online for work and/or school, one of my sons suggested upgrading our Comcast internet service to something that was supposed to be way better than what we already had. It seemed like a good idea.
My monthly Comcast bill, which was only for Internet—no cable, no other bells or whistles—had been $59.99 per month for a long time. This more super-duper service upped the bill to $176 a month. Big jump. Still, our internet service had become spotty with our increase in population, so if the higher bill meant everyone could comfortably and successfully do all they needed to do, I was for it. People kicked in, but I was still on the hook to pay more each month than I had been paying.
Except the Magic Comcast Power Juice didn’t make a difference. In fact, my online experience was worse.
So I phoned the people at Comcast to ask them, What the heck? When I called, it was light out, and—I am not making this up—by the time someone responded on the other end of the line, it had been dark for over an hour. More than two hours on hold. The lady who responded said our issue wasn’t a Comcast problem; it was a hardware problem on our end. I was like, Well, why didn’t you ask me if I had the appropriate hardware before you upsold me? And she was like, You’ll need to get some ethernet cables and other things and then you’ll have the enhanced user experience you desire.
I had her talk to My Son The Engineer. She told him what we needed, and I bought cables and adapters and gigabit hubs. And after all that, I still had an online experience that was inferior to the online experience I had when I was paying $59.99 per month.
So I called Comcast again. This time, I wanted them to void the contract (we had signed on for a year at this higher price), and get me back to my old contract with its more agreeable rate. I called in the morning on a day when I had to go to work.
By the time I had to leave, I was still on hold, listening to Comcast’s unfortunate music, so I hung up. At work, though, I thought about the whole thing.
It seems clear that punishingly long hold times are strategically designed to frustrate consumers to the point where they say, “Uncle!” and step away from the phone to resume their lives. Facing hours on hold with no guarantee of anything—no guarantee that your issue will be satisfactorily resolved; no guarantee that you’ll be able to communicate your concerns and that you will be heard; no guarantee that a human will even respond on the other end—that can all leave a person feeling that $176 a month is a small price to pay to sidestep the vexation.
I’ve heard the explanations about why customer service is suboptimal during the pandemic: Now customer service agents are working from home, blah blah blah; I think I’m missing some information, because I don’t see why the transition to home-based work, particularly for an Internet service company that presumably sets its employees up with the finest, fastest internet available, has to result in worse service and painfully long wait times.
So I’m not calling any more. I’ve decided to write Comcast a letter outlining my concerns. I think letter-writing happens much less frequently nowadays, and so I hope my little missive will merit a response.
That way, I’m in control of when the communication happens—or at least the first round of communication—and I’m not at the mercy of the digitized voice on the hold line. A resolution of the issue is important to me, yes, but it’s also important to me to feel that I am heard, and to feel that I am not wasting my finite life on hold. I think I up the odds of that with a letter, though I may be deluding myself.