Comcast's phone support department is the *worst*, WORST, I've ever
dealt with. I think they are outsourced, they have to go by a script,
and many of them probably hardly know what a computer even is. Once I
called because of a problem on their network, and I told the person on
the phone that there was a problem on their network, and I pinned it
down to a couple of routers where the problem may be, and she
responded, very sternly, "Sir, WE DON'T HAVE ANY ROUTERS"
Same thing here. Last night, I was told that no escalation personnel were
available.
On the couple of occasions where I got escalation, I once had an informal
conversation with a 3rd level. Their phone center is in Halifax, NS --
didn't find out if it is outsourced or not. While the person with whom I
spoke was reasonably clueful, he told me that customer support had no
interactive communication with network operations -- at best, they could
send an email about a routing, SMTP, etc. problem and hope somebody would
respond.
At the time, I was paying for their "Pro" service, intermediate between
regular residential and full business. My contact said that while that was
supposed to get better customer support, an early plan to route it to
business Comcast failed, and there really was NO separate Pro support
organization. I dropped the Pro service after I learned that residential
service no longer insisted you remove any local routers and firewalls before
deigning to troubleshoot. They still ask you to do that, but repeated NO
responses can get them to proceed.
A few NANOGs back (Atlanta), I did a presentation on customer satisfaction,
which, frankly, was in many respects a case study of how I'd reform customer
support at my then ISP/DSL, cais.net. If NANOG ever did formal documents,
I'd like to see a guideline on how to run customer support.
In any case, if you manage to get the call escalated a couple of times
(after lying about rebooting your computer 47 times),
You forgot reinstalling Windows. On a Mac.