My fucking god, man. This shit didn't even happen to ME PERSONALLY, and it still makes me fuming fucking mad just to hear it.http://finance.yahoo.com/news/a-guy-recorded-his-phone-call-when-he-tried-to-cancel-cable--and-it-s-a-total-nightmare-143731521.html
When you call in to disconnect, you get routed to the Retention department, their job is to try to keep you. The guy on the phone is a Retention Specialist (which is just a Customer Account Executive who takes primarily calls from people disconnecting their service.)If I was reviewing this guys calls I'd agree that this is an example of going a little too hard at it, but here's the deal (and this is not saying they're doing the right thing, this is just how it works). First of all these guys have a low hourly rate. In the states I've worked in they start at about 10.50-12$/hr. The actual money that they make comes from their metrics for the month which depends on the department they're in. In sales this is obvious, the more sales you make the better you do.In retention, the more products you save per customer the better you do, and the more products you disconect the worst you do (if a customer with a triple play disconnects, you get hit as losing every one of those lines of business, not just losing one customer.) These guys fight tooth and nail to keep every customer because if they don't meet their numbers they don't get paid.Comcast uses "gates" for their incentive pays, which means that if you fall below a certain threshold (which tend to be stretch goals in the first place) then instead of getting a reduced amount, you get 0$. Let's say that if you retain 85% of your customers or more (this means 85% of the lines of businesses that customers have when they talk to you, they still have after they talk to you), you get 100% of your payout - which might be 5-10$ per line of business. At 80% you might only get 75% of your payout, and at 75% you get nothing.The CAEs (customer service reps) watch these numbers daily, and will fight tooth and nail to stay above the "I get nothing" number. This guy went too far, you're not supposed to flat out argue with them. But comcast literally provides an incentive for this kind of behavior. It's the same reason peoples bills are always fucked up, people stuffing them with things they don't need or in some cases don't even agree to.[...][They get a low hourly rate] and their actual pay that pays their bills comes from incentives. The retention department (who cancels your service) is punished for every line of business they lose. If your metrics for LOBs you've lost falls too low, you get 0$, 1 percentage point can be the difference between getting 3000$ this month and getting 0$. It's not a sliding scale, there are hard cutoffs.
the 300gb cap with a 10$ charge per every 50GB block over that is very much already in effect in a large number of cities, and rolling out to more. You get 3 free passes per year, you'll get a phone call/email if you're approaching or go over your limit.[...]They're going to increase your bill 3-5% twice a year, it's part of the annual budgeting process even though our costs actually go down. The internet business (as in, high speed customers) is almost purely profit, and it's turned down on purpose like everyone here already knows. Comcast has DOCSIS 3 capabilities and the infrastructure to support it in most major areas (this means gigabit speeds, by the way) - it can be activated simply by pushing the proper bootfiles out to the modems. This can be evidenced anywhere they have competition, they can respond overnight.If there's not a serious change in legislation or regulation, I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel.
VaeVictis:i find it funny that you even consider grammar a sign of intelligence, that itself is a very uneducated claim
After an hour on the phone saying that the numbers in the trace done where not possible and all the numbers were made up
I'd be happy to run mtr traces from tastyspleen.net to your brother's IP if you like.Having traces from both sides can tend to pinpoint the problem pretty well.