Ryan Block and his wife Veronica Belmont were moving. They called up Comcast Cable to tell them so and ask to have their service disconnected. The rep asked Veronica if she would like to simply have service moved to the new address. Veronica declined; they already had new service elsewhere.
That’s when things turned ugly. The Comcast rep began to badger Veronica about staying with the company. After ten minutes of his abuse, Veronica handed the phone to Ryan.
We should mention here that Ryan is a co-founder of Engadget, a well-known tech website. Ryan had been hearing one end of the phone conversation and knew things were not going well. Ryan recorded the rest of the conversation with the Comcast rep. The resulting recording hit the Internet, went viral, and made national news.
Here is a bit of the conversation between Ryan and the rep.
Rep: I’m just trying to figure out what it is about Comcast service that you don’t want to keep.
Block: This phone call is actually a really amazing representative example of why I don’t want to stay with Comcast.
Rep: OK, but I’m trying to help you.
Block: The way you can help me is by disconnecting my service.
Rep: But how is that helping you! How is that helping you! Explain to me how that is helping you!
After all the negative press surrounding this outrageous call, Comcast finally found it necessary to make a public apology about the entire mess.
“We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and are contacting him to personally apologize. The way in which our representative communicated with him is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives. 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.”
Hey @comcast , there's no point in apologizing for that service call. Everyone is still going to hate you anyway.
— Pistol Slamfire (@PistolSteph) July 16, 2014
Image via YouTube