The Mystery of the Missing Blog Entry…

Okay — this is getting ridiculous. I’ve completely underblogged over the past two weeks.  And I’ve already written an apologetic explanation in my last blog — which I wrote six days ago, explaining that my obsession with a specific television show was to blame. Since I’ve been caught up on the show now for at least five days, I can no longer use that as my excuse.

So — what’s been going on? Why haven’t I been blogging?  Have I been too busy with work? (Kind of)  Has my outside-of-work schedule been blog-prohibitive? (Not so much)  Has there been any family in town with whom you’ve been visiting? (My brother, sister-in-law, and nieces this weekend. But that’s beside the point.)

Friends, the reason I haven’t been blogging is because I care too much about you, my readers, to post a blog entry which is sub-par.

I just read the last sentence, and it sounds condescending as hell.  I apologize for that. But let me give you some context:

A week ago Friday I arrived home to find heavy interference on our analog cable television reception. The digital cable’s signal was so deteriorated that we couldn’t get a signal. And the internet had slowed down to a crawl.  I spent too much of the evening contacting Comcast by phone, following their instructions to unplug and plug in my digital cable box several times, and nearly exploding when they mentioned that the earliest they could work on this service problem was in the middle of the day on Tuesday. I was not a happy camper.

And so I vented my frustrations on Twitter — in 140 venemous characters or less.  My profanity-laden message was found by someone called @ComcastCares who, in a proactive manner, initiated a conversation with me asking if he would like me to expidite the issue. I had read about Comcast’s presence on Twitter before, and I provided my phone number so he could look up my account. Long story short — his information was, unlike that which was provided to me from the call center, detailed and technical. The next day I received several statuses from Frank (the man behind @ComcastCares) by phone and, ultimately, a dispatch on Saturday afternoon — three days before what the call center had assured me was the earliest they could come out. Ultimately the problem was a physical equipment issue at the tap (inside those little green pedestals outside my house). I was up and running again by 6pm on Saturday.

Those two paragraphs above amount to just 251 words.  But I’ve been working on a blog post chronicling this entire experience with full detail for all of you who are interested in (a) geeky stuff like cable television/internet maintenances issues; (b) geeky stuff like Twitter being used in a customer service environment; (c) geeky stuff like flexing one’s technical muscle over the phone to inferior call-center types who repeatedly request that I unplug and plug back in the digital cable box; and (d) not-so-geeky but more business-modelly stuff like exploring the state of the customer support industry in general.  Because of this, the drafts that I started writing explaining the events of last weekend were easily going to hit the 2000 word count.

And I wasn’t going to do that to you all.

But I didn’t want to give up on it. I wanted to write a dynamite post about all of this — because since I know that Comcast has its finger on the pulse of the blogosphere (and twittosphere), what I would post would potentially be a policy-shifting stimulus for the company. I didn’t want to let it go. I still don’t actually. But I think I simply need to move past it with the possibility of me not getting back to it.

I suppose I can sum up my feelings about my experiences with Comcast last weekend here:

(a) Like with many call-center experiences — whether in the USA or abroad — the quality of service is dependent on the specific individual with whom you’re talking. Two vastly different customer service experiences could be sitting mere feet from each other.

(b) My experiences convinced me that Comcast’s support system is broken.  Frank (ComcastCares) apparently has tools at his disposal to identify if there is a higher level outage in my vicinity; these tools have not (yet) been made available to technicians fielding phone calls.

(c) The new customer service initiative through Twitter is a pretty amazing marketing tool. You can peruse through the many blogs singing the praises of ComcastCares. However, none of the folks answering the phones at Comcast with whom I spoke were aware that this was also a legitimate channel of communication. The information I was receiving from both sources conflicted. Comcast needs to inform its call center employees so everyone is on the same page.

(d) “ComcastCares” is one employee of Comcast — Frank Eliason.  Great guy. I enjoyed my conversation with him, and I appreciated his ability to expidite my issue. And Frank has a small team that works with him on service and support issues. But he’s just one guy.  Frank called me after receiving a Twitter message on his cel phone while he was taking his dog to the vet.  This type of service needs to be thicker than just one person — as I don’t want to see Frank burn out by answering issues almost 24/7. (Take a look at his Twitter history and you’ll see the volume of issues he answers.)

And that, my friends, is why I never finished my blog entry about my experiences with Comcast. I hope you’ll forgive me for not posting it.

Now I can move forward with my blogging…