opinion

Breaking up with Comcast is hard to do: 6 calls & 4 hours to get rid of their rental modem

At 4:51 p.m. on Friday evening, Jan. 24, I called Comcast (1-800-XFINITY) to complete activation of a self-purchased, self-installed cable modem to replace the rental unit provided by the cable company. For the next four hours, I would make five additional calls to Comcast, endure four chat help sessions and make a call (directed by the first Comcast chat agent) to the modem manufacturer.

The sixth and final call, the only actual voice conversation with a human being, began at 8:38 p.m., lasted 19 minutes and resulted in successful activation of the modem.

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Though not prone to anger, I was angry at the end of this process – flaming angry, and it has taken most of the intervening two days to quell that anger.

This is my story – offered as a public-awareness message because I suspect that many other Comcast (XFINITY) subscribers have suffered or will suffer similar treatment. It is also offered as a public (rather than private) complaint to Comcast because I suspect an endemic corporate culture that is immune to private complaint. Lastly, writing all this down has a therapeutic effect – extracting some justice where none is likely to be offered. That said, I have removed all conjecture that anger tends to produce and merely recited that which can be verified as fact.

My wife and I have been never-miss-a-payment Comcast subscribers for 20 years. Every January, our bill has gone up, and every year for the last three we have had the same conversation – whether we really need cable TV or the associated landline telephone service. This year, following a detailed assessment of our TV habits, we determined that $239 per month no longer made sense.

My wife called Comcast a week before the modem activation calls, reached a customer service agent, and terminated our cable TV service effective Feb. 5. This change still left us with Comcast cable internet charge and a $15 per month rental fee for the cable modem that connects us to the system.

The economics of the cable modem decision (I am somewhat embarrassed to admit) are kindergarten stuff. At $15 per month x 12 months per year x 20 years, we have paid $3,600 in rent for a device that costs about $150 to purchase. We decided to reduce our bill by another $15 by purchasing our own modem, a task that I assumed.

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I studied Comcast designated replacements, and the Comcast procedures for activating the new modem and returning the old; researched cable modems (in general) and then purchased the best choice from the Comcast list of compatible devices – a choice that happened to be from the same company (Arris) as the rental modem. The new modem arrived in a couple of days. The installation instructions were simple. That Friday, I was ready to activate the new modem in well under an hour.

The calls and chat sessions enumerated below were made one after the other without breaks.

All my telephone calls to 1-800-XFINITY that night were answered by the AVRS (automated voice response system). All of these forced me through the inviolable process that are the backbone of such systems. Saying “representative” to the AVRS never produced a human. Each of these initial calls took three to four minutes to get to the point where the AVRS determined that I was having internet connection problems. This is the point, on all but the last call, when I was offered ‘chat’ line help via text message.

Comcast Care Chat sessions

My first chat session with “Marcus” began at 5:17 p.m. and ended almost an hour later with him telling me that the ‘system’ told him that my newly purchased modem’s “device credentials [were] in use.” Marcus suggested that I call Arris (the manufacturer) to see if they could correct this. I called Arris, spoke to a customer service agent in Costa Rica with a heavy accent who, after 23 minutes, told me that my cable modem was, in fact, new according to their data, and its “device credentials” should not be in use in the Comcast system.

After my second call to Comcast, I was connected to “Daniella” through the Comcast Care Chat. Daniella had no awareness of the progress of my case as collected by the previous chat agent. As a result, Daniella presumed that I was having trouble with my rental modem. When she finally understood that I was activating a replacement, she asked for the same data that had been collected by Marcus and the ‘chat session’ was ended automatically before I could type all the data into a reply text message.

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After Marcus and Daniella, there was “Tammy,” then “Irving.” Tammy seemed promising until our chat session was automatically terminated. At Irving, the gig with the Comcast Care Chat was up. Irving did not proceed down the ‘help’ path at all but told me that my “account was unverified” and that the only way to verify it was to call 1-800-XFINITY. This is when I began to suspect that there was fun being had at my expense.

Not willing to give up at this point, I made the fifth call, was directed again to the Comcast Care Chat and no chat agent responded. I hung up and made that sixth call. At the same point in the sixth call, when the ‘chat’ option would have been offered, an emotionless male human answered and 19 minutes later at 8:58 p.m. my new modem had been activated. I heard a lot of voices in the background. These background voices were not the din of helping other customers at a busy call center, but the noises of idle conversation conducted by chat agents on a Friday night.

This is my story about breaking up with Comcast Cable TV.

Chris Burns lives in Hanover, Pa.