In the past week a recording of a belligerently persistent Comcast Service Rep attempting to dissuade a customer from canceling his internet service went viral. The Comcast Rep did not know that the customer and tech journalist Ryan Block recorded the call after his frustrated wife passed him the phone. As of this writing, the recording has receive over over 3 million hits (see one of the several YouTube versions below).
Comcast was quick to issue and apology, stating in part that, “The way in which our representative communicated with him is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives.”
The aftermath
Under the weight of this very bad publicity, Comcast immediately issued an apology. They company had little choice but to decry the employee’s conduct, and to assure customers that such conduct is an aberrant example of rogue employee behavior. Bad news about the egregious conduct of big companies does not help make Comcast’s public case for its acquisition of Time Warner.
Could Comcast have said anything else? It’s highly unlikely as the only way out was to fall on its sword, take swift and remedial action, and wait for this to blow over and be forgotten.
Will the collective memory of this event fade? That is also a highly unlikely event as, culturally, we retain the exceptional – both good and bad – in the collective social memory. It does not help that a blog from a former Comcast employee explains the behavior of the Customer Rep: retention specialists are compensated for preventing cancellations.
The lesson
As I recently wrote, front line customer service reflects the culture and philosophy of senior management. There is no way around it. The reputation of the brand is formed and cemented by a customer’s experience dealing with the company’s people. The image of the brand speaks to the values held by senior management and the board, and the trickling down to all employees is testament of the commitment to the principles that underlie those values.
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