Comcast/Xfinity quality of service ; Read on for some whining from MailBait

• Call to action, open issues.

  Comcast, this is an open log of recent experiences on this account. You're welcome to contact me via my whois entry for this website and I'll monitor the email address with a greater frequency then you do yours. I look foward to a full resolution that considers my time invested in contacting you and tracking these issues with moderate success (service is currently up) but still yet has unresolved issues (current billing is fluxating between 250% and 500% of the negotiated contract).

• Hardware end of life

  You're recent decision to no longer support my modem without notice that resulted in downtime was disapointing. The $50 credit to the account was not suffecient in replacing the hardware, or covering the down time, but I do appreciate the loaner modem, even if it did take over 24 hours to install. My notes on this issues include:
  Please honor the established contract, notify me of my equipment end of life, resolve an agents 'audit' screw up. To be left with a non-functional network after an agent's on-site visit intended to increase speed has been confusing and unexpected. I'm not even sure this agent knew we didn't have service after they left.
  
  Please contact me via email with an intention for compensation or discount - or other creative solutions in your continuous improvement process. This year has been the worst comcast experience I've had in at least 6 years, particularly late 2019. Not honouring an established 36 month contract for 36 months (which appears to only apply to my signature, nor yours), Expiring and blacklisting my equipment without notification into a walled garden, then slowly resolving the issue with complexity and an estimated 4 days of expected down time (where I spend a day begging to be considered and finally got in - to go down on Thursday and be scheduled for a Monday is maddening ESPECIALLY after the Thursday night tech could not progress after hours), Continued downtime even though we have a highly qualified and responsive comcast tech sent on site after hours with equipment on Day 1 of the event whom is not empowered to resolve the issue because I suddenly have "no equipment on my account", and unexpected out of pocket expense for my primary facility because of outage has not been the experience I have grown to expect. Agents opening tickets but not able to document my instructions or act on them - It taking days to get a new contract - being hung up on when I call in for help ...,goodness. This makes my blood pressure higher just typing it.
  
  Then, to cap it off, when I get my new customer owned equipment and promptly call in to activate it.... well, you can just guess I was told I'd be down for a day and someone would call me back tomorrow - to which I reply, "leave every thing the way it is, at least it's working!" (yup, 5 minutes later, I'm down - which includes the phone I'm on). It's as if I don't have servers or customers expecting up time or anything - where Comcast policy appears to condone flipping a switch and try a few things and if it does not work or leaves me worse off I can magically be on site at a moments notice (or can babysit it) - and 'tomorrow' is good enough.... Is this a business account or residential? It's really starting to feel like residential on the service and contract part of the experience ....
  
  And ... wait for it: I'm instructed to schedule a tech to pick up the comcast owned equipment so I'm not billed for it, but... when I call in to schedule I'm told I cannot and that was old policy. Yup. This is strangely expected at this point. Que another unexpected trip to drive the equipment around... I wonder who's paying for that employee's time?
  
  Each agent I spoke with was understanding, knowledgeable, straight forward, communicated clearly and patiently, and took reasonable steps to confirm and diagnose the issues on my end before escalation, and they had the best of intentions (beyond 1 hang up). The bureaucracy and inner-workings, policy, and comcast procedure has failed them and me. There is a disconnect somewhere, and I'm not talking of just my downtime and calls to support.
  
  If you are serious about customer loyalty, service, and improvement, please call and attempt to understand this situation as I'm highly suspicious I’m not the only customer with this type of story. Downtime and unforeseen increased costs are not just a few hours for a business, it's mop up and mending of my customer relationships and commitments, explanation, re-aligning expectation, and moving my staff to secondary facilities while babysitting the primary facility in case comcast shows up in a window-of-service period - all without a primary phone, servers, and income. This gets frustrating fighting fire on multiple fronts.
  
  At this point you might ask "Why don't you have multiple ISP's if this is so important" - and then ask yourself - is that the comcast business experience you want to offer? Require multiple ISP's so I can handle hardware being blacklisted without notification? We can go that road, but I find it disturbing. I'd rather have two comcast circuits - you guys are rock solid for months and I Iove it! Or, Better yet, let's just ensure the primary circuit works.

• Predatory Billing

  The $xxx bill received late Dec 2019 was not expected, but at this point, I should have anticipated something. Perhaps 'meets expectations' is not a good thing at this juncture. I wish I could say this is resolved, but tier two accounting is still reviewing it. We still have a few days left for 2019, perhaps this entire event can be resolved yet in December, 2019. Any recommendations on what I should expect going forward, or steps to take to re-align expectation? I've had no less then 3 calls into support on this, 2 call backs, 1 web chat, one escellation to call-center manger, 3 CR numbers, 1 change to my online bill in both the xfinity and business account (which oddly enough are the same thing with different colors) - (that currently reflects an improvement, but not a full resolution)- I am facing late fees becasue I've only paid the contract amount, and am... now writing this webpage. Awesome. I've attempted to contact Steve Crom, but have been unsuccessful. Agents I've corrosponded with have only instructed me to contact accounting. SO:

• Please change your practices

  Please notify me if my modem is no longer supported with enough notice to resolve it before you blacklist it or do anything with the concept of a walled garden.
  
  IF you black list my modem, please unblock it while we sort it out.
  
  Please be able to grant me additional comcast hardware efficiently if you screw up mine. (initially you did pretty good on this point, but not being able to activate comcast hardware after hours when that was the point of the visit was confusing to say the least)
  
  Please empower agents to work with the concept of walled garden after hours.
  
  Please empower agents to add equipment after hours (with my verbal consent)
  
  Please honor contracts without increasing costs within the contract period.
  
  Please confirm the customer owned hardware/comcast network supports the speeds you recommend before allowing them to sign a new contract (Note: on my side, my equipment supports twice the speed I signed for, yet received half)
  
  Please notify me as my contract is coming to an end BEFORE it ends and don't just increase the costs as a predatory billing tactic to 'see what you can get' or as a mechanism of notification. This is insulting, and poor business practice.
  
  Please be clear of equipment return procedures and don't set the expectation of an on-sight visit which would minimize costs to me.
  
  It's not expected, but an agent could always call and discuss the account every few years and become the point of contact: Waiting for a catastrophic failure in service and having no point of contact whom I have an established relationship with is always... disappointing. I did reach out to my contact from 2016 - but the email is no longer in service and held no forwarding reply.

• Moving foward

  Comcast, If I take a card from your playbook and respond to your email to indicate that it's resolved, but then follow up with that we're not quite there but it'll be done tonight, to then 3 days later say it takes 10-15 business days - but oh wait, it'll be reflected on your next bill.... well, you're guess is as good as mine as to what that means or if it'll happen. Perhaps I'll call you back and then indicated you've contacted xfinity instead of comcast so I cannot help you. Should I just pay the bill as stated and then hit my Credit Card provider up for a back charge to bring the cost inline with the contract? Perhaps this would be less costly then paying your agents hours of time to talk to me and commiserate with false promises and multiple 'customer resolution' (CR/Ticket) numbers.