What Comcast Can Teach You About Customer Service--Really
April 17, 2008
If customer service at large corporations is a cultural joke, then customer service from a major phone or cable company is an entire subgenre in and of itself. So, it is particularly ironic that a major cable company is in fact on the forefront of customer service.
Comcast’s approach to customer service is to go directly where people complain about them online, rather than reactively waiting for their customers to call and complain. Right now, their digerati customers happen to be complaining on Twitter, the current Web darling that allows people with no internal conversational filter to vent their every thought.
Twitter can be easily searched, and at least one enterprising person at Comcast realized that people were using it to complain about the company’s bad customer service. Comcast started monitoring the complaints and set up their own Twitter account, “ComcastCares.”
How Comcast’s Advanced Customer Service Program Was Discovered
On April 6, 2008, Michael Arrington, editor of the highly-influential TechCrunch blog, finally had it with the customer service he was receiving over the phone from Comcast after 36 hours of downtime on his Internet connection.
He posted three times on Twitter [reprinted verbatim]:
Comcast responded. In fact, Arrington writes, “Within 20 minutes of my first Twitter message, I got a call from a Comcast executive in Philadelphia who wanted to know how he could help. He said he monitors Twitter and blogs to get an understanding of what people are saying about Comcast, and so he saw the discussion break out around my messages.”
How Comcast Got It Right
First, it wasn’t just Comcast “the big faceless organization” that reached out to Arrington. It was Frank Eliason from Comcast Customer Outreach, who manages the @comcastcares Twitter feed. .
Second, Comcast didn’t do this just because Arrington is a famous blogger with a 13,000 followers on Twitter. Kent Zimmerman did the research and found out that Comcast does in fact monitor Twitter and respond. Zimmerman writes, “Yes, they are indeed monitoring Twitter for customer service issues. And yes, they would have taken the same action were it me bitching about them on Twitter and not Michael Arrington. He even went so far as to give me a personal e-mail address to use if I ever did have a problem (not knowing that I wasn't a current customer).”
How Should You Protect Your Brand?
There is no reason at to not monitor Twitter and other channels on the social Web for your company name or brand trademarks. Go to Tweetscan and subscribe to the feed for the words and phrases that you want to monitor. Social Media Firehose is a Yahoo! Pipes application that you can copy and modify; it covers not only Twitter, but also Digg and a number of other channels. There are also a host of services that have opened up in the last year to monitor what people are saying online about you, including Radian6 and Scoutlabs (still in development).
Taking the next step – participating and responding – is more difficult, but as Comcast’s experience shows, can be of immense value.
Conclusion
Consumers want to dictate the terms of their communication with corporations now more than ever. The successful corporations will respond on consumers’ terms and in the channels that consumers use.
For your company or client, it may not be customer service. It may be convincing voters to support a candidate, it may be correcting the record on an important issue, or it may be something else entirely.
The lesson remains: you don’t control all the channels any more. Listen, first, and you might just hear something that is worth responding to. The payoff will be immeasurable.
This article was written by Jason Alcorn and Shabbir Imber Safdar of Virilion, Inc.
August 27, 2008 
