inept or intentional? The vicious cycle of Xfinity customer service
Face concealed to protect the guilty. In full disclosure, the Angry Birds have a better disposition than this humanoid did.
I used to have Comcast for my cable TV. I fired them. Partly because they priced themselves out of the market, but mostly because of their terrible customer service.
Fast forward a couple decades and not much has changed. Sure, they now call themselves Xfinity. And they’ve fully embraced AI. So now you can get the same shitty service from a human or an AI agent. Well done. Brilliant!
Your first stop features AI-supported phone trees that weave you through hallucinogenic loops like Meowolf with a bad hangover. Any button you tap sends you back to the beginning, or to the beginning of a new path that leads—you guessed it—back to the beginning of the first path.
Let me interject here that I’m not blaming AI for this. I really like interacting with AI chat bots if they’re trained well. The problem, in my opinion, is when they’re trained for sinister service. As they seem to be at Xfinity.
Anywhoodles, if you manage to make a support appointment, you’ll wind up waiting at your house while you get plenty of automated updates. But what you won’t get is someone coming to your home to take care of your problem. At least not the first two laps around the Xfinity customer support track.
Should you have the resilience to get to take a third lap, you’ll get a robotic technical support contractor who refuses to speak with you while they run the same tests the AI agent could have run over the phone (if you were lucky enough to tap the magical sequence of numbers that unlocked that particular support path). At least I think they were running tests. They may have been watching tech porn. That’s if they were human at all. I’m really not sure.
If they do talk to you, they’ll lay the blame for your problem squarely at the feet of their phone team. And that’s if they actually listen to you when you try to tell them what’s going on. Our person-like being said “I’m only responsible for my own work.” and refused to give us their name or supervisor’s name. It got so bad, we had to ask them to leave our home. I took photos of them and their truck in case I’d need them later, and they got in my face when I tried to take down their license plate.
The whole experience makes me wonder. Can Xfinity possibly be this inept? Or are they doing it on purpose? Do they have a team of consultants designing a system that intentionally keeps customers from speaking to a real person? Are they like the insurance company in John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, who repeatedly denied service knowing a high percentage of people would just give up? Have they partnered with Elon Musk to create tech support robots that look like humans and threaten customers? Am I just living in an episode of Black Mirror?
I’m not sure I can answer any of these questions, but I think I finally get the joke. Comcast, now Xfinity, changed their name to warn you. Because X is the new Z (remember back in the 80s when it was cool to use a Z instead of an S?). In this case, the company is sending you a message: “Sign up with us and we promise you an X-crutiating X-perience.”
Cheers.
