Consumers—equipped with video and audio recording devices and sites to place said media—are putting customer service reps and the companies they work for on notice. Last week we shared the AOL customer service debacle. Now, there’s another sickening display of incompetence at which one may only marvel.
According to the New York Times:
Two weeks ago, a Comcast repairman in Washington fell asleep in a customer’s home. The customer, Brian Finkelstein, a student at Georgetown Law School, took the incident to the Internet. He shot a video of the repairman sacked out in his couch and posted it on www.SnakesonaBlog.com. The video is one of several recent examples of angered customers taping their interactions with customer service, then putting the experience online.
The Comcast video, in particular, struck a nerve. In it, the repairman, in a red golf shirt and short pants, has his head back in full snore and a laptop perched on his knee. Mr. Finkelstein sprinkled in sarcastic barbs at Comcast with slides “thanking” the company for two broken routers, high prices and missed appointments. A drowsy rock ballad by Eels, “I Need Some Sleep,” accompanies the one-minute video.
Not surprisingly, the video, which Mr. Finkelstein says has been viewed by about 200,000 people, is now causing Comcast to lose sleep. A spokeswoman, Beth Bacha, said the repairman no longer worked for the company, which has “reached out to the customer to apologize for his unsatisfactory experience.” Indeed, Mr. Finkelstein said that after he posted the video, he got a call from a regional vice president at Comcast and, a day later, “a team of Comcast guys” worked for five hours to fix his Internet connection.
