Comcast’s customer service record isn’t stellar and while you might wonder why the company doesn’t do more to improve its reputation it certainly pulls out all the stops to get some bad press. Ricardo Brown has a Comcast cable subscription and when his wife had a disagreement when trying to cancel the subscription the family started receiving monthly statements in which Ricardo’s full name had been changed to an expletive, “A**hole Brown.”
When Brown’s wife Lisa got on the phone to cancel their subscription she was transferred to one of Comcast’s infamous “retention specialists” and it seems like that person didn’t like taking no for an answer.
Lisa Brown says that she was never rude with the retention specialist, “it could have been that person was upset because I didn’t take the offer.”
Comcast is like countless other companies who make it very hard to cancel a subscription. These retention specialists are tasked with ensuring that customers don’t give up on the company and keep paying for its services.
Journalist Ryan Block recorded an excruciating call with a Comcast retention specialist last year which has to date been listen to over six million times.
Customers have a right to choose and shouldn’t have to jump through so many hoops when they want to cancel a subscription and move on. Renaming a customer to an expletive and then sending it out on a monthly statement crosses all sorts of red lines.
Comcast confirmed to Wired that it has apologized for this “completely unacceptable and inappropriate name change.”
The company says it’s conducting an investigation to find out what happened and promises to take steps to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. Comcast is apparently also offering the Brown family a full refund for all the service payments they’ve made for the past two years.