When Does Bad Customer Service Become Evil?

There’s a story making the rounds the past few days of a customer who had tried for over a year to get Comcast to correct a series of billing mistakes. Eventually he got fed up with ongoing mistakes and incompetence, and called the office of Comcast’s controller to lodge a complaint.

That didn’t work either, and that’s when things got weird and evil. This customer happens to be an accountant, and mentioned in one of his complaints that he thought Comcast’s billing problems should be investigated by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

Which, to me, seems like a reasonable thing to say if you’re an angry customer subjected to over a year’s worth of overcharges and billing mistakes. I’m not an accountant, but persistent billing mistakes sure sound like an accounting problem to me.

But apparently Comcast thought otherwise: Comcast contacted the customer’s employer and apparently said something that got the customer fired. Did I mention that the customer’s employer happens to do a lot of business with Comcast?

Needless to say there’s a lawsuit now, and a lot of he-said-she-said. The Consumerist has a good summary in a pair of articles: one about the customer getting fired, and another about Comcast apologizing for bad service but not getting the customer fired.

So it’s easy to take the angle of tsk-tsking Comcast for another horrific example of bad customer service. No, make that evil customer service, since this has gone beyond the realm of incompetent into malicious.

But what I want to know is what the heck is going on at Comcast? Someone, somewhere inside Comcast at some point thought it was OK to call a customer’s employer and say something that got the customer fired because of a billing complaint.

(A complaint which, by the way, Comcast has acknowledged was legitimate.)

Someone in the company had to have known how this would play in the media, to say nothing of the courts. Yet it happened anyway. I can think of a few explanations:

1. Comcast thinks it’s above the law and public opinion and can act with impunity. This is probably not strictly true, but the company has been persistently successful despite its poor reputation, so maybe people think they can get away with stuff.
2. Someone panicked. Part of me thinks that it’s really plausible that someone in Comcast might panic over the prospect of an accounting review of its billing systems. Just by the company’s reputation for mistakes, it seems fair to assume that Comcast’s systems aren’t really ready for their close-up.
3. Internally, Comcast is just out of control. Media reports over the past few months have painted a picture of a company divided into fiefdoms and disorganized, so it’s possible that there just isn’t enough adult supervision going on.

I don’t know which of these theories, if any, is right. But it’s clear that something weird is going on at Comcast.