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Man contacts Comcast higher-ups about customer service; Comcast gets him fired

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Browny said:
This reads pretty ropey for all involved. PwC will likely have fired him for whatever reasons, so they don't have to worry about losing the Comcast work. They know their shit, so unlikely anything would stand up in court. But if he does take it further, it won't hit the public domain; they'll settle for a small figure and it'll all go away.
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They're filthy rich...it's not about losing Comcast as a client.

It's the fact that reputation is EVERYTHING for big firms like that.


One slipup that gets everyone's attention (see Arthur Andersen LLP and Enron) and that's it...you're finished.

Someone using connections / their position as leverage for a Comcast problem is clearly not even close to that level...but it gives you an idea of how twitchy they are.
 
thelatestmodel said:
I saw this on Reddit but to be honest I kind of dismissed it because something sounds off.

There is no way that a private company could contact your employer and have you fired over dealings you had with them. It's a private matter. It just doesn't add up.

This is like my local library calling my boss and telling him to fire me over unreturned books.
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Well first, you shouldn't think this way. All it takes is one pissed off manager to pull some shit like this. Of course it gets reported as "Comcast" doing whatever but in reality, its some pissed of regional manager.
Not a billiom dollar company.
 
Aquamarine said:
They're filthy rich...it's not about losing Comcast as a client.

It's the fact that reputation is EVERYTHING for big firms like that.


One slipup that gets everyone's attention (see Arthur Andersen LLP and Enron) and that's it...you're finished.

Someone using connections / their position as leverage for a Comcast problem is clearly not even close to that level...but it gives you an idea of how twitchy they are.
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Oh I agree - PwC don't need the money, reputation is everything. Hence why they want to keep Comcast. You lose one client, you can guarantee a few will follow.
 
rambis said:
Well first, you shouldn't think this way. All it takes is one pissed off manager to pull some shit like this. Of course it gets reported as "Comcast" doing whatever but in reality, its some pissed of regional manager.
Not a billiom dollar company.
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Comcast was fucking him over for months before the shit hit the fan. Their customer service is consistently ranked as terrible despite being one of the most used services in the states. So yes, it's a symptom of them being a massive multi-billion dollar company that shamelessly coaches its reps to ignore and obfuscate cancellation requests. There was a thread a while back where a guy recorded his 20 minute conversation where the rep refused to acknowledge his change of service.
 
Stinkles said:
I could imagine a scenario where he used his employment with his financial company as the basis for a threat of some kind. Which would explain why Comcast resorted to calling his employer.

Pure theory and baseless but it smells right.
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Yeah, there's some missing context here for sure.
 
rambis said:
Well first, you shouldn't think this way. All it takes is one pissed off manager to pull some shit like this. Of course it gets reported as "Comcast" doing whatever but in reality, its some pissed of regional manager.
Not a billiom dollar company.
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Willingness to do things like this is often evidence of a corrupt work culture.

With Comcast customer service you can find good people; but in my exoerience there is also certainly a cultire of people being asdholes knowing they'll get away with it.

I've had them hang up the phone on me claiming my service will magically work "in an hour" more than once.. And of course that was a lie. Got someone to admit I was lied to to get me off the phone even; I then tried complaining about that... And the smug "customer loyalty" rep did it to me.,. AGAIN. claiming my service would magically work by the "time I got home from work."

It took me 6-7 phone calls to get them to admit to me they couldn't fix the problem until the date a contractor was coming to my house. Of course that also turned into a cluster fuck.

When your too tier support lies purposefully to customers.. I have no reason to believe anything but that Comcast has a culture of rude incompetence and disdain for their customers.. Likely due to the virtual monopoly they have in many areas.

Oh and get this... They route you to different support depending on where you live... I happen to live where Comcast has a monopoly on Internet above 1.5 megabit.. Not surprising the route me to "fuck you pay me" support line. Found this out calling a number I found online.
 
This story remind me of something that happened a few years ago in France. That was when the HADOPI copyright infrigement law was debated. An abomination of a law, whose core was based on "guilty until proven innocent". That law wanted you to "secure" your PC with some state-sponsored rootkit, one that could give you a proof you weren't the one downloading stuff, if your IP was spotted using a torrent. A law that basically made not proprely securing your wifi an infraction, and could end up with being deprived of ISP for a year, on top of whatever the copyright holders might choose to do.

Well, enough about context. A guy working in the IT departement of the biggest television channel (TF1, heavily biased toward the right-wing political party in power) wrote a polite but detailed private letter to his senator (also part of said party), explaining why this idea was unworkable, unethical, and just a plain Bad Idea.
The following day, that guy was fired. The senator had sent the letter to TF1's executives with the following comment, I quote from memory, "Some of your own like scoring against their own team".
 
A big part of the reason customer service is so bad in places like this is that support call centers have extremely high turnover rates. The money isn't good enough to put up with the constant abuse from customers and always worrying about getting fired over metrics that aren't always under their control, so a very high percentage of the people you're talking to are relatively new.
 
Let's say I had an accounting firm where an employee of mine had issues with Comcast who was our client, and the employee used work resources to find out a person of influence at Comcast to call and bitch about his personal (as in out-of-work) issues then I'd most likely fire the person too.

I'm not saying that's what happened and I'm not suggesting this person wasn't fucked by Comcast with all those mistakes. All I'm saying is that a situation like I described would make more sense than what we're being told now and that sometimes there are more than one side to a story like this, even if the antagonist is a big company everyone wants to hate. I'll continue to believe no one for now and wait till the eventual lawsuit is resolved :-)
 
Stinkles said:
I could imagine a scenario where he used his employment with his financial company as the basis for a threat of some kind. Which would explain why Comcast resorted to calling his employer.

Pure theory and baseless but it smells right.
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This was my thought as well, but FWIW he denies it.

It's hard to know who's telling the truth here. Conal tells Consumerist that he never mentioned his employer and that someone at Comcast must have looked him up to figure out where he worked. Comcast, for its part, has allegedly refused to release any tapes of the phone calls it made on the matter. That's a little strange: If Conal did invoke his company's name in a threatening way, Comcast could easily prove as much by excerpting the relevant portion of his call. So much for monitoring "for quality assurance purposes." If you want it done right, record the call yourself.
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Yea, I don't believe this for an instant. Comcast is dumb, but not dumb enough to do it out of spite.

The guy is asking for nearly no money, which leads me to believe he is looking to settle with out much hassle. If Comcast looked you up and used it's sway as a customer of your company to get you fired for being nothing more then a pest there would be lawyers lined up salivating for multi-million dollar lawsuits.

PWC wouldn't call an ethics investigation and fire him at a customers request with no corraraborating evidence. PWC isn't a small shop and larger HR departments make sure they have mounds of data before firing someone for an ethics violation.

What is easier to believe is he used internal PWC data to find the guy to talk to in Comcast, an account that he isn't on. I'm sure he's pissed because he'll never get another job in a big accounting firm again
 
WTF. We are missing a significant and important part of this story. It's simply can't be right.
 
paskowitz said:
IIRC the customer in question called Comcast while at work. This a big no no, but still pretty hard grounds for termination.
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When the fuck else should we call a company? They typically only have customer service open from 8-5 (most, not all). We're not slaves at our workplace. It's perfectly ethical and understandable to make these calls. Companies are already getting a hell of a deal owning your ass for 8 hours every day.
 
gcubed said:
Yea, I don't believe this for an instant. Comcast is dumb, but not dumb enough to do it out of spite.

The guy is asking for nearly no money, which leads me to believe he is looking to settle with out much hassle. If Comcast looked you up and used it's sway as a customer of your company to get you fired for being nothing more then a pest there would be lawyers lined up salivating for multi-million dollar lawsuits.

PWC wouldn't call an ethics investigation and fire him at a customers request with no corraraborating evidence. PWC isn't a small shop and larger HR departments make sure they have mounds of data before firing someone for an ethics violation.

What is easier to believe is he used internal PWC data to find the guy to talk to in Comcast, an account that he isn't on. I'm sure he's pissed because he'll never get another job in a big accounting firm again
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This sounds about right.
 
He must have used his job to get the contact info for the controller for his own purposes which I guess could be an ethics violation. I'm not too sure.
 
What is easier to believe is he used internal PWC data to find the guy to talk to in Comcast, an account that he isn't on. I'm sure he's pissed because he'll never get another job in a big accounting firm again

What you mean by an account he isn't on?
Thanks .
 
bigmit3737 said:
What is easier to believe is he used internal PWC data to find the guy to talk to in Comcast, an account that he isn't on. I'm sure he's pissed because he'll never get another job in a big accounting firm again

What you mean by an account he isn't on?
Thanks .
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He probably wasn't the accountant for Comcast's account with that firm.
 
Sounds like massive bullshit to me. Did Comcast also tie him to the railroad tracks while twirling its mustache?
 
I feel like the following snippet is key to understanding where the confusion is coming from:

...And so on Feb. 6, 2014, he chose to try going above Comcast’s customer service, which hadn’t been of any help in the year he’d been a subscriber, and instead contacted the office of the company’s Controller. He spoke to someone in that office who promised Conal would receive a call back to address the issues.
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How exactly did he go about contacting their Controller office directly?
 
Shot in the dark- he threatened Comcast higher up with the fact that he had leverage in PWC. Attempting to abuse his position to get what he wanted.
 
AllIsOneIsNone said:
I've had serious problems with Comcast recently as well...I was calling in attempt to figure out a huge growth in data usage with no luck, being bounced around between tech support and billing. The last guy I talked with told me he could raise my data usage for 1 dollar. He said normally it was 70 dollars but since I had double play they could basically do this for free. I told him that this made no sense, but verified over and over that it would only be 1 more dollar. I finally agreed because my data was literally 10 times more than it had been in the past. Got an email with my updated billing info...they added about 80 dollars worth of shit including a phone modem and a bunch of extra services I never asked for....without a data cap increase. It took me 3 calls to get this shit cancelled, and I had to go over my old services like 5 times with the final lady until all the bullshit was cut out. They also shipped me a phone modem.

Basically it came down to me threatening to take legal action to the final person I talked with, asking for employee ID's, saying I was recording the call, etc. This company is evil and the people who work for it incompetent....well, my brother does sales for Comcast business and he's okay.
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As far as I know, their business division is more competently run than their residential service.

I dread the day I have to call Comcast to cancel my service. Just transferring service from one apartment to another led to several days' worth of customer service calls, an unneeded modem and cable box delivered, and $300 worth of charges when they didn't ship a box or give me an address label to return my old equipment.
 
Sho_Nuff82 said:
Comcast was fucking him over for months before the shit hit the fan. Their customer service is consistently ranked as terrible despite being one of the most used services in the states. So yes, it's a symptom of them being a massive multi-billion dollar company that shamelessly coaches its reps to ignore and obfuscate cancellation requests. There was a thread a while back where a guy recorded his 20 minute conversation where the rep refused to acknowledge his change of service.
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Im sorry but can't buy this. Comcast as a company definitely has ran this dude thru the mud. Thats clear. They definitly are a terrible customer service provider. Thats clear. But that doesnt justify false equivalence. Its victimless here cause fuck Comcast but peoples indifference towards finding a root cause for shit is something that plagues society.

riotous said:
Willingness to do things like this is often evidence of a corrupt work culture.

With Comcast customer service you can find good people; but in my exoerience there is also certainly a cultire of people being asdholes knowing they'll get away with it.

I've had them hang up the phone on me claiming my service will magically work "in an hour" more than once.. And of course that was a lie. Got someone to admit I was lied to to get me off the phone even; I then tried complaining about that... And the smug "customer loyalty" rep did it to me.,. AGAIN. claiming my service would magically work by the "time I got home from work."

It took me 6-7 phone calls to get them to admit to me they couldn't fix the problem until the date a contractor was coming to my house. Of course that also turned into a cluster fuck.

When your too tier support lies purposefully to customers.. I have no reason to believe anything but that Comcast has a culture of rude incompetence and disdain for their customers.. Likely due to the virtual monopoly they have in many areas.

Oh and get this... They route you to different support depending on where you live... I happen to live where Comcast has a monopoly on Internet above 1.5 megabit.. Not surprising the route me to "fuck you pay me" support line. Found this out calling a number I found online.
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It could be culture. Or it could be a result of distributed corporate management. This case doesnt seem like anything that made it anywhere near corporate level. The factoid you just provided corrobates that. Since CS is regionalized, its very likely the call centers are colocated with the management seats. Its probably some pit boss/supervisor, not anybody higher up in Comcast.


This doesnt even go into all the questionable details of the story.
 
gcubed said:
What is easier to believe is he used internal PWC data to find the guy to talk to in Comcast, an account that he isn't on. I'm sure he's pissed because he'll never get another job in a big accounting firm again
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I agree that this sounds right...The fact that he contacted the controller's office in the original story, of all places to go over Customer's Service's head, is pretty telling.
 
exmachina64 said:
I dread the day I have to call Comcast to cancel my service. Just transferring service from one apartment to another led to several days' worth of customer service calls, an unneeded modem and cable box delivered, and $300 worth of charges when they didn't ship a box or give me an address label to return my old equipment.
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I used to have service with Comcast before Verizon FIOS TV became available in my area (about 9 years ago) and I had no issues with their tech/customer support. No issues when canceling my service.
 
In response to a letter from Conal’s lawyer — he has not filed a lawsuit, but it’s not out of the question — Comcast’s Senior Deputy General Counsel admits that the company did contact Conal’s employer but says that Conal “is not in a position to complain that the firm came to learn” about his dispute with Comcast.
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He's obviously made some threat or said something concerning his law firm or what gcubed said.
 
Where are you guys getting that he worked at PWC from?

I read the article but it didn't seem to note out specifically PWC. Just that he worked at one of the prestigious accounting firm in the nation.
 
Something's off. There has to be more to it then someone at Comcast was petty and got a guy fired for making a complaint about his service.
 
Estellex said:
Where are you guys getting that he worked at PWC from?

I read the article but it didn't seem to note out specifically PWC. Just that he worked at one of the prestigious accounting firm in the nation.
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richisawesome said:
I've never used linkedin, and neither has anyone else I know.
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Are you a white-collar worker at a corporation? I'm not intending to be mean, but it's basically Facebook for corporate workers.

paskowitz said:
IIRC the customer in question called Comcast while at work. This a big no no, but still pretty hard grounds for termination.
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Taking a personal call on company time is not really an ethics violation. Using your position as a vendor to influence the people who buy your services to get preferential treatment (even if it's fixing a fuckup) is an ethics violation.

Aquamarine said:
Yeah, I just read the part of the article / comments where he probably used his connections / business relationships / status to try and solve his problem.

That's a HUGE red flag for major firms like PwC. They're really, really touchy about that kind of thing.
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If that's the case, I can see their point. By law, they have to maintain arms-length in order to sign off on SOX compliance and perform other governance compliance activities. Any breach of that relationship means they lose business to another firm, because then they're no longer in the compliance game and are now operating as consultants. Those compliance dollars can be several orders of magnitude higher than consulting dollars, because compliance is a non-discretionary, continuous service whereas consulting is more of a "what have you done for me lately" business that cycles with the health of business and your own relevancy as a consulting firm.

What is strange though is that the guy was from Anderson Consulting/Accenture given his LinkedIn profile... that would be a pretty strange history lesson for him to have missed if he really did do that, given how badly those guys were beat up for that very issue. Either this guy really is a victim or he's one of America's dumbest assurance and compliance trainers, because he doesn't even know what he's training people on.
 
gcubed said:
Yea, I don't believe this for an instant. Comcast is dumb, but not dumb enough to do it out of spite.

The guy is asking for nearly no money, which leads me to believe he is looking to settle with out much hassle. If Comcast looked you up and used it's sway as a customer of your company to get you fired for being nothing more then a pest there would be lawyers lined up salivating for multi-million dollar lawsuits.

PWC wouldn't call an ethics investigation and fire him at a customers request with no corraraborating evidence. PWC isn't a small shop and larger HR departments make sure they have mounds of data before firing someone for an ethics violation.

What is easier to believe is he used internal PWC data to find the guy to talk to in Comcast, an account that he isn't on. I'm sure he's pissed because he'll never get another job in a big accounting firm again
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Pretty much this.
 
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