Whether we wish to admit it or not the communications carriers are in simple terms a monopoly in most service areas. Yes, there is perceived competition. In our area we have Comcast as the primary cable and broadband provider, AT&T as the primary telephone provider and of course the satellite providers. Each of these providers offer various services in an effort to spur competition, but none ever rises to the levels of the incumbent carriers.
This past week we had an issue with our cable TV. We thought through some basic troubleshooting that it was our cable box. We made numerous calls to the regular toll free support line with no help. We had a second level on demand support representative actually completely disable our cable box. No one at comcast cared that they completely bricked the box and we're not going to fix it.
We finally contacted comcast corporate offices complaint department. They were not much better than the regular customer service lines with one exception; they at least made follow up calls when they had committed to.
Finally on Wednesday they had to have a technician at our house to replace the cable box. When I arrived home for lunch, prior to the commitment time, there were three cable trucks at our neighbors house. After they were done at the neighbors, one of the technicians showed up at our house. After talking to him for a couple of minutes we figured out he was a brand new technician. As he was doing his work, he ended up completely disabling the second cable box. Additionally, we were told that there were a number of houses in our community who had not had cable and Internet service since Saturday.
Additionally they had found that one of the amplifiers had suffered some storm damage on Saturday afternoon. They had to dispatch a repair tech from another county to repair the service and the techs decided to go to lunch while they waited for him to finish his work.
He stopped by our house after he was done and we still didn't have service. He started working to find the problem. He was very customer focused and was trying to do the other techs job. We had to leave for a short time to go to an appointment and he volunteered to wait for our return in about twenty minutes.
Once we returned, he finished his work and found a couple of problems created by the new tech. He got our service restored and everything has been fine since.
All in all we ended up with four techs in our house and the only one who wanted to fix the problem was the outside plant tech and that wasn't even his job.
The techs all tried to their best but they are really limited by corporate policies and procedures and inconsistent call center and support staff.
In all honesty the technicians are the only part of the company worth anything when it comes to customer service.
The bad news through all of this is that Comcast is not going to do a thing about resolving any of the customer service issues that exist within their organization and it is quite probable that the field techs will have even more restrictions placed on them as time goes by.
How do we, as consumers battle these huge giants? I am not sure we can. Our city and state governments rely too much on the franchise fees so they aren't going to do anything about it. In reality Better Busunes Bureau complaints are worthless and at a federal level, the lobiests for these companies have way more power and influence on our representatives than we, the people that elect them to office. The FCC is only a figure head group of appointed officials who expend more energy looking like they are protecting the consumers while basically rubber stamping everything the legislators and corporate lobbiests want done.
For the foreseeable future, I don't feel that we have a hope in receiving any better service.
The cord cutters are attempting to take a stand against these behemoths but in reality they are still tied to them for the internet service which are required to provide the services they get through the alternate service providers.
Only time will tell how things will end up, but in my opinion I don't see any hope for us as consumers.
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