Comcast reviews

First: In regards to the free cable and internet. Because you are an employee of Comcast and no longer considered a customer, any repair requests or changes that you may have, even if it's equipment related, which you are required to pay for can take several weeks to complete. Courtesy Services does not work quickly at all when it comes to employee repair issues. Second: In regards to the job itself. I was hired for video repair. Now, I'm not idiot, so I assumed being a multiple service provider, some upselling and upgrading would probably be required, however, this is not the case. You don't find out until your SECOND day of employment (first day is orientation), which is your first official day of training that your primary goal is sales. It doesn't matter how mad the customer is, how many missed appointments they've had, or how many times they've flat out been lied to by other reps, you're still required to try to get a new line of service on them. An elderly lady calls you because her DTA ($1.99 basic cable box) doesn't work and says there's an interruption in service (more so than not, this means the box is bad and needs to be replaced), and while discussing the situation she happens to state she's on a limited income and can't afford a technician to come out and replace the box (free if it's the equipment, $39.95 if it's ANYTHING else), if you don't want it get scolded by management, you better try to sell her digital voice, or internet. She has a DTA? Better try to get her up to either a Digital set top box so she can get On Demand, or better yet, Just get her into an HD Triple Play package. I feel absolutely mislead about the job I interviewed and was eventually hired for. Had I known it was a driven primarily by sales, I never would have accepted the position in the first place. Third: Career Advance Path (or, how to keep you in one spot until you can be replaced by trainees, because they trainees will be paid $11.00 USD per hour starting and can be easily replaced). This path was setup as a way to "promote" from within based on how hard you want to work and prove your worth to the company. You have 6 months from your hire date to go from CAE: Level 1 Representative to CAE: Level 2 Associate. This comes with a $1.00 USD pay increase. The problem with this are the metrics involved. While you are required to meet four of the metrics for promotion, I will focus on the three that are almost impossible. The first is TSRs, those are your sales, but not just sales. They have to be new lines of service. That means if someone only has cable, you better sell them internet, or phone. If you can sell a triple play, then you get 2 TSRs. You have to meet a percentage of 0.58% (absolute bare minimum) of sales on all of your total calls. On average, you can take 600 or more calls per fiscal month. 0.58% doesn't sound like much at all, especially over the course of 600 or more calls, right? Well that's 34.8 new lines of service. Now 600 is a high number. That would be on a very high call volume month. More accurately, you're probably going to take between 400 and 500 calls, so the number of TSRs required will raise or drop based on the number of calls you take per week, per month. The next metric that really matters is called VOC: Voice of the Customer. Ever call Comcast and while you're waiting for a rep, the recording asks you if they can call you back to take a brief survey about your experience? That's what VOC is to employees. By default, you start at 100% monthly. Now, if you can maintain 100% per month, that pretty much just means that out of all of your calls, everyone opted out of that survey, so there was nothing to bring it down. While this survey is meant to be a way of the customer to give their opinion as to how I the representative helped you, most look at it as a reflection of the company, and oddly enough, we have a running slogan at Comcast, "No one is calling to tell you how happy they are with the service" and that's the truth. Unless during the survey, when given the opportunity, the customer actually records a voice message stating the rep they spoke to did an amazing job, anything negative that they report about Comcast directly reflects on the rep themselves, even if we successfully helped you. The customer is never made aware of this. The final metric I want to discuss is called FCR: First Call Resolution. What this means to the rep is as follows. Say you're a Comcast customer and you're having issues with your video (since I only worked in video) and you call in and select the video option and get me. I have two options at my disposal. First and foremost, I want to troubleshoot the problem, because in most situations, the problem can be resolved by sending a refresh signal to your defective box (unless you have a DTA with a blinking light. If that light is blinking, you need your box replaced 9 times out of 10). After sending the refresh signal, we will ask you to disconnect the power to your faulty box for about 20 to 30 seconds then plug it back in. After a reboot process from the box, in most circumstances, your services will be restored. If these steps do not work, we have on other option, we send a technician out to your house. Now, we will tell you that if the problem is with the equipment, the service call is free, and this is true, however, the technicians have quotas to meet as well and more so than not, a tech will tell you there is a wiring problem and tell you that you either need to add a Service Protection Plan (Insurance for your cable lines that runs between $3.95 USD and $4.95 USD per month based on whatever market you're in) to prevent you from having to pay the $39.95 USD technician fee. If you don't want that option, we can then tell you to return the faulty box to a local service center (expect about a two hour wait) to replace the equipment, but if you bring that box home and it doesn't work, guess what? You now have something called a Failed Self Install, and regardless of your protection plan, it will not cost you $39.95 USD to have the tech come out and fix it. Assume that I did fix your problem though, but you call back in 4 days later over a billing issue, if you either just hit 0 to talk to someone quickly in hopes of not waiting, you will get routed back to a repair department, if you happen to get video (we have a 7 day window before our FCRs are considered good and we're credited for them), but tell me on the phone that you need to get to billing. Through no fault of your own, other than wanting a rep quickly, you just caused me to get a negative mark on my FCR, simply because you came through on the video queue instead of going through the billing queue. Then, as an added bonus, I'm slapped with a negative transfer rate, because we're not supposed to transfer calls. When you combine just these three of the four metrics that we are required to meet for advancement to level 2 (you're terminated after six months if you've not attained three consecutive months of meeting and exceeding the four primary metrics. UNLESS of course, you have good sales and don't really do anything else. Then they're more than happy to break that rule for you and keep you on the phones with the promise of having you restart the Career Advance Path again for another six months. Your shifts are not determined by seniority either. They are determined by sales alone. Those with low sales work the worst shifts, which basically means there is no such thing as ever seeing your family again if you wish to stay employed in a Comcast call center. Also...those metrics have to be met in order for you to even transfer to another department like Com tech, or dispatch. ONE MORE VERY IMPORTANT THING TO NOTE: If you are a Comcast customer reading this and you demand to speak to a supervisor, there are two things you should know. We are required to do our best to prevent that transfer, even if it means telling you that they can't do anything different than we can. We are REQUIRED to de-escalate the call at all costs, even if that means lying to you to do so. Also, if you are one of the lucky ones that gets to a speak to a a supervisor, (this happens generally when someone has had several missed appointments by technicians, which by the way, get cancelled for no reason at all. Sometimes, they're cancelled, strictly because the tech didn't want to do the job that day, or could get something else done more quickly. When they tell you that you will receive a call 30 minutes prior to their arrival, you probably won't, but if they do call and you somehow miss the call, but call them back, they will not answer and they will move on to the next job. Your account will be marked as "Cust Not Home"), you're probably not talking to a supervisor. More than likely you just got transferred to a rep just like me who tells you that he's a supervisor and then repeats the exact same thing that I just told you before the transfer. Supervisors do take calls from time to time, but it's only at designated times and only for a limited amount of time. Normally about an hour to an hour and a half. Just know, that if you're asking for a supervisor, more than likely the rep just put you on hold, leaned over to his neighbor (providing that the neighbor is authorized to take those calls) and says "Hey, can you jump in iChat for a second, they need a supervisor". Then we'll discuss over the partition everything that I just told you, so he knows what to say to you.