Internet Service providers are interesting. In some areas there will be dozens of
providers of high speed internet in others there will be next to none. Growing up in a rural area we got cable
internet when I was about 13 years old.
In those early days we had @home service through AT&T. After a while @home went away and then ever
since we have had Comcast internet service.
The nice thing about Comcast is that generally they have a stable
connection and they also are able to give you 20MBPS versus 3MBPS with Century
Link in the same rural area. While most
people do not need a connection faster than 3MBPS it is sometimes nice to have especially
when one likes to design websites.
In most urban areas all ISP’s have similar connection speeds
and various packages available however over time I have learned that customer
service makes a drastic difference when choosing an internet service or any
other service for that matter.
I have one experience working with customer service for
Century Link while hooking up a network for a family friend. Their service people are quick, reliable and
were able to solve the connection problems very quickly. I don’t know what they did but in a matter of
minutes all problems were resolved. I
cannot say from ongoing experience how they are however I have had lots of
experience with Comcast.
Comcast is a great dilemma to me, I enjoy the fact that
their internet has higher speeds however, they make it easier to discontinue
service than it is to get it set up. After
my parents left for Guam it was necessary to get their internet and phone
service switched over to our names. We
already had the equipment however, for some reason Comcast would not allow us
to just switch the service over, instead it was necessary to call them, go in
and visit their store, and even get a different phone number than the one my
family had used for the past 14 years.
After visiting the store, it took two days to get service up and running
because for some reason I needed to have and FCC pin which I was not able to receive
online. Through this experience I found
out two things.
1. Comcast service over the phone for creating a
new connection does little good. They
say they are busy and that if you do such and such they will call you back when
are available. They never called back.
2. Comcast
IM service works really well however, throughout the process they will feed you
advertisements and try and get you to buy services you do not really want.
Despite these setbacks my recent experience has been better
than my previous mentioned learning experience.
Moving to Utah, I decided to have one of their service people come and
set up our internet service. Although I
had the same experience as before with the IM service trying to sell me stuff I
really didn’t want (which made it take about twice as long to get through the process)
it was easy set up and worked out quite well.
One the flip side as part of moving we got rid of our phone
service. To do this I called
Comcast. What is interesting is that
unlike setting up a new service it is extremely easy to get rid of
service. Not only is it easy but its
quick and simple.
Overall I am not a fan of Comcast customer service however; they
are reminder to me of why I need to provide good customer service. The other issue is truly deciding what is
important to me meaning a fast internet connection over poor customer service.
