Comcast’s customer service problems are numerous—we might even say legendary—but out of all of them the company’s habit of changing customers’ billing account names to insults like “Asshole” and “Super Bitch” really stands out.

A man named Ricardo Brown got a bill addressed to “Asshole Brown” after his family tried to cancel the cable portion of its service because of financial difficulties. Mary Bauer got a Comcast bill addressed to “Super Bitch” after a series of billing and service problems.

These incidents occurred early this year and spurred other customers to report that their billing names had been changed to things like "whore” and “dummy.”

The number of incidents is small in relation to Comcast’s customer base of more than 27 million, but the company needed a way to prevent it from happening at all. Comcast officials talked to Ars about the process in a phone interview this week.

The key strategy was implementing an extensive block list that would prevent employees from changing names to certain rude words. There are many legitimate reasons customers ask to change their account names, such as marriage and divorce, and Comcast didn’t want to make the process unnecessarily difficult by requiring manager approval for every change. Hence the list, which includes the words you'd assume it would include as well as various permutations, combinations, and misspellings, Comcast told Ars. When there are false positives, a manager is called in to approve the change.

The system also needs to differentiate between rude words and real names that contain rude words, such as “Glass,” the Comcast officials noted.

Comcast also went through every previous name change to find out whether there had been other such incidents that weren’t publicized. There were some, and Comcast fired the representatives who were responsible. In one case, Comcast ended its relationship with a third-party call center as a result.

The entire process took months. The effort may have succeeded, as there haven’t been any high-profile incidents recently, though Comcast officials said it would be impossible to declare a complete victory.

“Nothing’s ever impossible,” even with the new safeguards, said Tom Karinshak, the senior VP in charge of Comcast’s customer service. “I feel very comfortable that we have the best resources, the best partnerships and technology to take every step and precaution possible.”

“You can train people and re-train them to make sure that doesn’t happen again, which is a step we took,” said Jennifer Khoury, Comcast’s senior VP of corporate and digital communications. “But if you also want to make sure things don't happen again you can put technology in place that will block certain combinations of names… We had some technology in place before these things happened, but we didn't have every single field, every possible word combination. We basically took a team of people and said, ‘we had three very high-profile instances of this happening, we should take this very seriously, how do we make sure this doesn't happen again.'”

Comcast was trying to get its acquisition of Time Warner Cable approved when the name changes and many other instances of poor customer service were reported by media outlets. (The acquisition was ultimately blocked by federal regulators.) In the midst of all that, Comcast Executive VP David Cohen admitted to a Senate committee that company officials “are deeply disappointed” in their customer service, and Comcast later said “it may take a few years before we can honestly say that a great customer experience is something we’re known for."

"As a company, we haven’t always put the customer first, and we need to do a better job," Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit told employees in a May memo that Comcast provided to us.

Khoury said that a couple of years ago Comcast would have fired the representatives responsible for the name changes, done some re-training, “and we might have stopped there.”

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Comcast worked with a vendor to implement the block list. The company would not tell us just how long it is or what words are on it.

“Use your imagination, I would say,” Khoury said. “I saw some parts of the list. It’s very extensive.”

To find out if there were previously unknown incidents of inappropriate name changes, Comcast said it had to examine hundreds of millions of records. This process was largely automated with software but also involved manual effort to determine whether individual name changes were appropriate.

“We went literally back through inception on all of these just to make sure,” Karinshak said. “That's a lot of data to be able to crunch through. I felt it was well worth the effort to go through and do that exhaustive a review.” The review touched "every single account that we've ever had," he said.

Karinshak said there were “a few” new instances found. Comcast uses a mix of in-house employees and outsourced call centers. While it fired in-house reps, in the case of contractors it simply tells the vendor that the offending employee is no longer allowed to work on the Comcast account.

“If somebody is changing names to something inappropriate, they don't work here anymore,” Khoury said.

Any vendor could have one bad employee, so Comcast didn’t automatically get rid of ones that had name change incidents. But if a vendor has a poor service record and is involved in an inappropriate name change, they’d be cut off entirely.

“We discontinued our relationship with one of the partners because their service records with us were not as good as they should have been,” Khoury said.

Eliminating bad call centers

Speaking of in-house employees and outsourced call centers, Comcast is on a hiring spree of new call center workers and in the long run expects to minimize the amount of outsourcing it uses.

Comcast opened three new call centers and has more in the works. Over the next few years it says it's hiring more than 5,500 new call center employees, including both customer service reps and support staff such as supervisors, trainers, and IT workers.

“We are absolutely moving to more and more internal and new hires,” Khoury said. “We’ll keep the top performing partners, and anyone who is less than top performing will be converted to an in-house call center.” It's possible that Comcast could move entirely to an in-house customer service team in the future, but there's no specific plan to do so, she said.

Calling Comcast customer service can be an excruciating experience, especially if you’re trying to cancel service. Employees at companies like Comcast are pressured to retain customers, and they sometimes react angrily when a customer tries to cancel.

Karinshak said Comcast is trying to eliminate bad experiences like this. For one thing, the company is moving away from the scripts that customer service reps use when talking to employees.

“We have absolutely moved away from the scripting aspect of this and more into the call flow around the key things we want to make sure that folks are covering,” he said.

While Comcast still tries to “retain” customers, Karinshak said that “at the end of the day if they leave us, then it has to be a world-class experience on that piece as well.”

Comcast has made some other improvements, such as automatically crediting customers $20 when a technician is late to an appointment. Comcast also got rid of a requirement that customers who buy their own modem and want to stop renting one from Comcast show a receipt proving that they bought their own.

“If we didn’t have a record that they returned [the Comcast] modem we would want proof that they bought a new modem,” Khoury said. “That was a way to protect our modem inventory.”

Customers hated the requirement and Comcast removed it. “We said, ‘ok we'll just trust them,’” Khoury said. “If they bought their own equipment we're just going to trust that it's theirs. If we lose a couple of modems in the process, fine, the customer overall is going to be happier because we're not making them take this extra step.”

Comcast also says it's reassessing all of its policies and fees "and getting rid of ones that customers find particularly frustrating, like change of service and equipment return charges."

It’ll take some time before Comcast’s changes sway customers. The latest American Customer Satisfaction Index report released last month showed that Comcast’s customer service rating plummeted again, with the company ranking last among big Internet service providers and near the bottom in the pay-TV and telephone service categories.

There’s clearly a lot more work to do for the nation’s largest cable and broadband company. But at the very least, your next bill will almost definitely be addressed to you under your real name and not “Asshole.”