I Know The Guy Who Owns This Place

I guess somethings never change at a company. Contrary to all their hold-talking voiceovers, Qwest doesn’t really seem to get customer service as well as Comcast does. I had setup a window from 8am – 12pm on Wednesday for them to come out and install their fiber internet (20mb, whoo!) at the house. I sat here in my office working and waiting until 12:00pm on the dot before calling them. I asked what happened:

• Their tech claimed he came by and I wasn’t home (no answer at knock or doorbell.) Well, I know he couldn’t have knocked because I know I would have heard that; I answered the door when the census guy knocked around 11:30am.
• He said he left a door tag saying he was here. No door tag.
• The customer service rep said he would have called the “phone for access” number which was my home Vonage line. No voice mails. (Although I’m fairly certain I’d given the website my cell number to call for this purpose, but maybe not.)
• She said she’d page the tech and have him call me to see if we could get it done before I had to be in the office for my 1:30pm meeting. I gave her my cell number for him to call me at. No call after 45 minutes.
• I called again to let them know the tech never called me.

At that point, there was no way install was happening for that day. Five hours of my day wasted waiting.

I asked if they could come by Saturday morning to hook it up. Nope. Earliest the second customer service rep could make it happen was a week and a half later and, oh yeah of course, I have to wait again for another four-hour-maybe-they’ll-show-this-time window. When I last had an issue with Comcast, they were all over getting it fixed and had someone out here within 48 hours on a Sunday to get it settled. When you screw up, you need to do extraordinary things to make sure your customer is happy; the ordinary does not cut it. Comcast gets that these days (they didn’t use to back in the day), but Qwest still thinks like a big bell and puts the customer last, contrary to what their voiceover promotes (“We know your time is important to you…”)

I thought I’d push for broke on the customer service end and see if I could at least get the $40 professional installation fee they were charging credited back to me. No dice. CSR: “I am unable to do that.” OK, who do I call? “Call Qwest at (their generic customer service phone number.)”.   

Overall, I’m very happy with Comcast except for our Internet speed. Connecting to our offices via VPN is horribly slow and occasionally the Internet will just grind to a near halt. We think the neighborhood is probably overloaded since it tends to happen on weekends more than weekdays. We’re trying out Qwest’s fiber just to deal with this problem.

Although, I’m already wondering if it’s going to be worth it for the customer service headache. I’m already suspecting it’s not going to be.

[Update: A Qwest customer service manager reached out to me within an hour of this post getting twittered. She's working on getting my install fee credited and getting me an earlier timeslot that works. Will update again once I find out anymore. I have to say I was pretty surprised they monitored Twitter like that; so far Comcast hasn't reached out to keep me.]

~ by bryan on April 11, 2009.