Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

xfinity is absolutely lousy for this. at least with a human representative, i can let them know right out of the gate that, yes, i've power cycled my CPE, and yes, i've bypassed my own network to confirm the problem is not with my equipment. every single time i've had to go through this dance, they acknowledge that the problem is on their end and can fix it right away or put in a work order. every time i've had to interact with a chatbot, it wastes 15 minutes of my time before directing me to call (and deal with an audio chatbot until i convince it to let me talk to a person).

Why should Xfinity make any changes if you still send them money every month?

This is downvoted for some reason and yet it’s absolutely correct. There’s a reason telcos specifically are notorious for the shittiest customer service ever - because major telcos typically have a monopoly and/or long-term contracts the customer can’t easily leave. They could literally bill you and not provide any service, and most people would still pay at least a couple months while fighting to cancel or get it resolved to avoid getting their credit report dinged.

I needed to cancel cable service recently. I lied about moving to another state to minimize the upsell and retention BS in their script but they still tried so desperately. After a human rep hung up on me, I threatened to sue when dealing with their interactive voice responder. That got me back to a human immediately.

i'll try to assume this isn't a snarky response! but it kinda sounds like it.

unfortunately, there are no "good" ISPs in my area. xfinity and the other big ones killed most of the competition via undercutting, lobbying and the legal system (ie, tying up municipal fiber/wifi initiatives in bureaucratic hell).

since i no longer work from home, it's mostly just a convenience to have internet service for personal use. i actually use it very little, and pay for the cheapest option available, so it's not much money.

No snark, I just don’t see why Xfinity would have any motivation to change their process if it doesn’t have an impact on the bottom line.

I moved states, and changed my service to the new address. They started billing me for both addresses for several months.

Several calls and many, many hours later, I was finally able to get the double-billing resolved. But they didn't remove the charges that had accrued. Several calls later I was able to get someone who assured me they could deal with the issue. I demanded a $50 statement credit as compensation for my time.

They flipped the sign on the statement credit, and it was an additional $50 charge.

I got called by their collections department. I patiently explained the issue, and they were very sympathetic. Then they asked why don't I just settle up the outstanding balance now and then we can sort out the billing issue later. For the first time in this ordeal I lost my cool and flatly told them to go fuck themselves.

Several calls later it was finally resolved, but this entire experience was astounding. There was nobody qualified to escalate to. I was completely at the mercy of the random humans the system picked for me to interact with, and there were seemingly zero knobs I could turn or buttons to push to summon someone who could actually assist. To their credit, many of the support staff seemed just as frustrated as I was, but were equally hamstrung by the system they were interacting with.

ah well, we're dealing with economies of scale far greater than individual subscribers. and trust me, i've weighed going offline-only at home (not including mobile data), but for what relatively-little i do pay, i'm not ready to unplug just yet.