7 Mistakes Made on Comcast's Customer Service Call from Hell

He was probably being rude. He was probably blaming the business for something that was out of its control. He was probably turning a deaf ear to the agent’s honest and helpful insights.

Whenever a customer complains about a customer service experience, businesses—and occasionally other customers—immediately seek to shift the blame to the customer. Hoping to discredit the allegations, businesses attempt to spotlight the customer’s role in creating the contentious, unproductive call. Customers, not the business or its agents, are the true driver of frustrating service experiences.

And to the extent that there are millions aggressive customers who do address agents from a place of anger rather than one of reason, businesses and support representatives can usually get away with it. Hell, there is an entire "Tales from the Call Center" section on Reddit devoted not to discussion of poor internal management or cultures devoid of customer-centricity but to the disrespectful and unintelligent callers with whom agents deal.

Thanks to an audio file that emerged this week, Comcast does not have the luxury of blaming the customer for an impossibly bad service interaction.

The recording, which documents AOL employee Ryan Block’s effort to cancel his cable and Internet service, leaves no ambiguity about the fact that the agent, not the customer, created the maddening situation.

Presumably because he intended to share the experience, the customer maintains a startling level of calamity throughout the call. Uninterested in yelling or reacting with a reckless quantity of emotion, the customer represents the voice of reason on the call. The agent, who repeatedly ignores the customer’s request, disrespects the customer’s personal preferences and rejects invitations to steer the call on a more productive and helpful path, functions as a being of obliviousness, aggression and disrespect.

In a statement, Comcast’s Tom Karinshak predictably placed the blame on the agent.

"The way in which our representative communicated with him is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives," declared Karinshak. "We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect."

While there is no doubt that both the agent and situation reflect an extreme example of Comcast’s customer service offering, they also suggest fundamental issues within the organization’s contact center. Writing the circumstance off as the work of a rogue agent, while tempting for an organization that wants to protect its reputation, is to disingenuously deny that the company itself played any role in driving the agent behavior.

The truth is that both the agent, by virtue of his personality type and interpretation of his role, and Comcast, by virtue of its conditioning and approach to customer management, are to blame. Their collective failure is embodied by a series of mistakes made on the call.

Mistake One: Forgetting the purpose of the interaction

The core of a successful customer service interaction is the commitment to giving the customer what he wants. No, a business cannot always meet every precise customer demand, but it must always operate with the intention of doing so. When it does, it will either succeed (and satisfy the customer) or at least demonstrate that it tried its best (and still likely satisfy the customer).

From the onset of the call, it was clear Comcast was operating from a different perspective. Instead of focusing on giving the customer what he wanted—a speedy cancellation—it very overtly revealed its objective to be retaining the customer.

While the effort, ironically, produced the exact opposite outcome—the customer left the call with even more ire towards Comcast—it was nonetheless transparent in its focus. The agent to whom the caller had been connected was functioning as a salesperson first and a customer support agent second. That should never be the case.

If a customer support agent transitions into sales mode, it should be because he identifies an opportunity to better deliver what the customer wants (for instance, moving a customer who makes a lot of long distance calls into an unlimited long distance package).

This agent was thinking only about he and the business wanted.

Mistake Two: Not listening to the customer

To an astute, cynical observer, the agent’s motivation for repeatedly asking the customer why he wanted to leave Comcast was obvious: by identifying the customer’s source of frustration, the retention agent could determine what form of compensation or promise would be required to secure the customer’s future business.

And insofar as some customers threaten to cancel for the sole purpose of acquiring that compensation, the approach can lead to a win-win outcome.

If asked to defend the question on the record, however, Comcast would surely say that it was looking for insights on how it could improve the business moving forward.

Ironically, the agent spent the duration of the call not listening to the customer. No matter how many times the customer refused to state his reason for leaving, the agent kept pushing him to do so. No matter how many times the customer failed to attribute his decision to the speed of the Internet or the quality of the television offering, the agent kept stressing Comcast’s excellence in that regard.

If listening to the customer is truly a priority, then it must drive agent behavior – even when the customer is not saying what the agent wants to hear.

Mistake Three: Thinking there is room for argument on a customer service call

When a customer engages a support representative, he is doing so because he has already identified a wrong and is looking for the business to make it right. Right or wrong, he is firm in his belief that he is entitled to some sort of assistance or restitution.

That attitude precludes any opportunity for argument on the call. A customer is not interested in finding out that he is wrong—he is calling because he expects the business to make something right.

Throughout the call, the agent demonstrated a laughable obliviousness to that notion. He spent several minutes not only ignoring the customer’s request to cancel his services but actually arguing about why the customer was wrong.

Somehow failing to realize that the customer has a reason for canceling independent of Comcast’s stated Internet speed or cable offering, the agent repeatedly declared his business’ advertised superiority in those areas.

The customer had, as the agent noted, actually used the service for nine years, yet the agent illogically thought reiterating the marketing copy would make the customer forget about whatever issue was driving his desire to leave.

Not content to simply argue the merits of Comcast, the agent also argued a point of complete irrelevance to the discussion. Insofar as the customer had been with Comcast, presumably without issue, for nearly a decade, the agent declared that the customer must have been satisfied with the service (forgetting that persistence is not synonymous with loyalty) and that a recent, specific issue must have changed his opinion of Comcast.

Even if those points were true, why were they relevant? The agent was engaging a customer in an argument he did not feel was necessary to the discussion. The call was not about determining whether the customer was justified in leaving but instead about helping the customer leave.

Mistake Four: Incentivizing the wrong behavior

In a post on Reddit, a self-identified Comcast employee attributed the agent’s behavior to the company’s incentive program.

"In retention, the more products you save per customer the better you do, and the more products you disconect (sic) the worst (sic) you do" says the representative regarding Comcast’s agent incentive program.

Inherently flawed, the program is rendered even worse by the fact that Comcast apparently applies a "gate" system. According to the employee, if an agent’s stats fall below a certain threshold (for retention rate, in this case), the agent receives no incentive bonus.

"The CAEs (customer service reps) watch these numbers daily, and will fight tooth and nail to stay above the ‘I get nothing’ number," explains the employee.

The Reddit post provides vivid context for the agent’s aggressive demeanor. Performing well is the key to putting food on his table, and in the context of that particular call, performing well is keeping the customer from leaving.

That approach is fundamentally destructive to the customer experience.

Since the priority of the call center is to best deliver for the customer, the priority for call center agents must be to best perform for the customer.

Comcast, however, is incentivizing its agents to ignore what the customer wants. The customer wanted to leave, but if the agent attempted to make that happen, his effort would have been considered a failure. What a backwards approach to customer service!

Mistake five: Burning bridges

Driven by transactional tunnel vision, Comcast clearly sees everything in terms of immediate business. When approaching new customers, its goal is to sell them cable, phone and Internet services. When approaching existing ones, its goal is to retain their business (and possibly garner even more of it).

Neither is the correct approach to the customer experience.

In today’s world, one in which businesses are being asked to "compete on the experience," the ultimate goal is building relationships with customers. It is when a customer places loyalty and trust in a business that he becomes most open to purchasing and most excited about advocating.

To develop that trust, the business has to demonstrate that it is always thinking about what is best for the customer. If it cannot beat a competitor’s pricing or offering, it should be willing to endorse a potential new customer choosing a competitor. If an existing customer believes a switch is what is best, it should be willing to accept that reality. By doing so, it will earn the customer’s trust and thus the customer’s attention when it can offer something of more value than the competition.

So consumed with this particular transaction, the Comcast agent forgot about the long-term implications of his behavior on the call. He forgot that if Comcast demonstrated customer-centricity through this process, it would preserve its relationship when the customer. And when the customer (inevitably, based on what the agent repeatedly said) realized the competitive offering he was selecting could not compare to his service with Comcast, he would not hesitate to return.

This customer, however, now has a new reason to dislike Comcast: its customer experience. And insofar as the business did not rush to do what its customer wanted, he also has a new reason to question whether the business truly has its customers’ best interests in mind. Those factors will significantly decrease the likelihood that the customer returns and thus prove costly in the long run.

Mistake six: Forgetting about social media

Thanks to social media, customer service interactions are no longer restricted to a single call. When a customer experiences frustration, he could share that frustration with the rest of the world.

The virality of the recording proves it.

By now, thousands of existing and potential customers are aware of Comcast’s flawed customer experience. In recklessly burning its bridge with one customer, Comcast might have actually ended up damaging thousands of customer relationships.

Meanwhile, if it had handled the cancellation quest efficiently, effectively and respectfully, it might have parlayed the graceful loss of one customer into the development of trust from thousands.

Mistake seven: Refusing to adapt

Constrained by a misguided company directive and a standard procedure for addressing cancellation calls, the Comcast agent refused to adapt to the customer’s situation. The agent refused to accept that, in this case, the best approach was to let the customer depart Comcast as quickly and painlessly as possible.

For roughly eight minutes, the agent attempted to steer the customer into his preferred chain of dialogue. While the determination was valiant, the execution was insulting.

Organizations are free to develop a process that results in the best possible business outcome. In this case, inquiring about why a customer is leaving enables a retention specialist to tailor a compensation package to the customer’s needs. Agitating a customer with repeated questions and aggression, meanwhile, creates emotional vulnerability that can sometimes be exploited with compensation or a renewed promise.

Unfortunately, no outcome is more important to the business than one deemed satisfying to the customer. Adhering to the call process, therefore, should never come at the expense of the customer.

When an agent senses that his process is encroaching on the customer’s happiness, he must change his course. And to be able to do that successfully, he needs the backing of a business that advocates and empowers agent versatility.