In yet another public relations disaster related to Comcast’s dismal control over customer service representatives, 63-year-old Mary Bauer recently told WGN News that she received a Comcast bill in the mail in which her name was changed to “Super Bitch Bauer.” According to the details of the story, Bauer previously had poor service with her Comcast connection and more than 39 technicians showed up to help her fix the connection over a six month period.
She also had to request her bill from Comcast, which had stopped sending the bill over a four month period. Speaking about that process, Bauer said “I was nice enough to call them to ask how much I owe. I was little hot and a little angry because I never got good service.”
She claims that she didn’t treat the customer service representative with disrespect though, either with expletives or rude name calling. When asked about the name change on her bill, Bauer said “This is a disgrace to me. Why are they doing this to me? I pay my bills. I do not deserve this.”
A Comcast representative told WGN News that the incident was being investigated, but it’s not clear why Comcast didn’t rectify the situation after previous incidents. During late January 2015, Ricardo and Lisa Brown of Washington received a Comcast bill that had the name “Asshole Brown” on it. During the last verbal interaction with Comcast, the Browns had successfully downgraded their service package to Internet-only after speaking with an employee in the retention department.
After this incident, Comcast PR released a statement which read “We have apologized to our customer for this unacceptable situation and addressed it directly with the employee who will no longer be working on behalf of Comcast. We’re also looking at a number of technical solutions that would prevent it from happening moving forward. We are working with our customer to make this right and will take appropriate steps to prevent this from happening again.”
According to consumer advocate Chris Elliot, other customers have also suffered similar indignities. One woman had the name on her bill changed to “Whore Julia” and another customer had her online account renamed to “dummy.” Basically, when she would log into her online account to give Comcast money for service, she would be greeted by “Hello, dummy’ each time.
Of course, this is only another in a string of horrible customer service experiences that have been brought to light over the last few years due to information sharing on YouTube, blogs and other areas of the Internet. During December 2014, a Reddit user recorded calls of Comcast reps pushing him around.
During August 2014, a customer was abandoned on hold for three hours until the store closed. During July 2014, journalist Ryan Block recorded a painful 8-minute call of himself attempting to cancel his service with Comcast while the retention rep refusing to do so without Block providing a reason for cancellation.
