SPOKANE, WASH. – Lisa Brown contacted consumerist advocate Christopher Elliot on Wednesday, January 28 2015, in regards to a problem she was experiencing with her local cable provider, Comcast.
Lisa, a volunteer for a local missions organization, told Elliot that her family needed to reduce their cable bill after experiencing some financial difficulty, so she called Comcast to cancel the cable portion on her account, which would carry a $60 cancellation fee. The representative escalated her call to a retention specialist , who tried to persuade her to keep the cable service and sign a new two-year contract, which she refused.
In the next billing cycle, she received this in the mail:
The first name on the bill used to be her husband’s name, Ricardo. Lisa was baffled and went immediately to her local Comcast office and phoned higher-ups in the Washington region to try and fix the problem, to no avail. “I was never rude,” she said. “It could have been that person was upset because I didn’t take the offer.” Her next step was to reach out to Christopher Elliot for assistance.
After verifying Lisa’s billing statement, Elliot immediately contacted Comcast to see if their records showed this change in Ricardo Brown’s first name as well, which they did. They were equally baffled as to who may have done such a thing, and a few minutes later, Elliot received a call from Steve Kipp, Comcast’s vice president of communications for the Washington region.
“We have spoken with our customer and apologized for this completely unacceptable and inappropriate name change,” he said. “We have zero tolerance for this type of disrespectful behavior and are conducting a thorough investigation to determine what happened. We are working with our customer to make this right and will take appropriate steps to prevent this from happening again.”
Lisa immediately received a call from Rhonda Weaver, a Comcast senior director of government affairs, promising to waive the $60 cancellation fee and providing assurance that not only was an investigation into the name change being carried out, but that the responsible employee would be terminated.
Then came a call from Ken Watts, a Comcast general manager for Spokane, assuring Lisa the name on her account would immediately be fixed.
Later in the afternoon, Lisa was contacted, yet again, and received a full refund on her prior two year contract with Comcast.
Do you think Comcast has done enough to rectify the insult, or should more be done?
