That paragon of virtue Comcast is back in the news again with yet another customer service horror story.

After Americans once again rated Comcast one of the most-hated corporation in America, employees are launching the equivalent of a “right back at you” retaliation campaign aimed at departing and downgrading customers with name-calling we cannot print on Stop the Cap!

It all started with Lisa Brown, a volunteer for a missions organization in Spokane, Wash., who told Elliot.org Comcast retaliated against her husband for daring to downsize his Comcast cable package. Brown said her husband’s name Ricardo was changed to “A**hole” on their bill. She tried in vain to get the unauthorized name change corrected, but nobody made things right in the local cable office or in Comcast’s executive customer relations department.

When a reporter called Comcast to confirm the profane name change, alarm bells rang as Comcast realized it had the latest PR Disaster of the Month on its hands.

Steve Kipp, Comcast’s vice president of communications in the Washington State region was shocked, shocked to discover customer service abuse was going on inside Comcast offices. He must not have worked there back in 2005 when the cable company called one woman a “b*tch dog” on her bill.

“We have spoken with our customer and apologized for this completely unacceptable and inappropriate name change,” Kipp told Elliot.org. “We have zero tolerance for this type of disrespectful behavior and are conducting a thorough investigation to determine what happened. We are working with our customer to make this right and will take appropriate steps to prevent this from happening again.”

Comcast eventually refunded back 24 months of cable service to the Brown family.

Notice Comcast charges a $9.50 “administrative late fee” on all accounts that are past due more than 10-14 days after the billing due date. Customers who do not clear their earlier balance to zero may be subject to this fee indefinitely with each billing statement.

Zero tolerance lasted about five minutes before more complaints began pouring in from other Comcast customers who have also been on the receiving end of Comcast’s wrath:

• One customer said a Comcast employee changed his name to the phonetic spelling of the “f word,” unprintable on this website;
• Julie Swano reported her December 2014 Comcast bill was addressed to “Whore” Julia Swano;
• Carolina Heredia: “They changed my name to ‘dummy’ on my online account, so that the greeting was ‘Hello, dummy,’” she said.

Notice Comcast customers who want a paper bill pay $5 more each month than those who accept eBills. Comcast customers complain “EcoBill” offers illusory savings, because for many the $5 “credit” was applied to bills that were also $5 higher than before. (Click image to read complaints)

Comcast’s Tom Karinshak, senior vice president of customer service, treated the incidents as some type of computer glitch or honest mistake.

“We’re retraining our teams on the importance of making name changes properly,” Karinshak said. “We’re looking for automated solutions to prevent this from happening in the future.”

“What amazed me then was that I had talked with at least 20 people at Comcast between Dec. 16 and Jan. 6 who could see that my name was ‘whore’ and they did nothing about it,” Swano said.

But once the matter went viral and could influence regulators contemplating Comcast’s buyout of Time Warner Cable, Comcast got serious enough to write about the incident on its blog.

“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,” wrote Charlie Herrin, senior vice president of customer experience.

Swano does not believe it is an isolated incident.

“I have no record of any recent contact with Comcast until Dec. 16. So whoever chose to re-name me picked my account out of a hat,” she said. “That says there are probably millions of us out there who Comcast employees have renamed. We need to find all of them.”

The American Customer Satisfaction Index pegged Time Warner Cable as the nation’s most unloved company in 2014, with its Internet service rated 236th out of 236 companies in customer satisfaction, and its TV service rated 235th. Comcast Corp.’s Xfinity Internet service placed 234th out of 236 and its TV service landed at 232 in the list released in May.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CNN Another Comcast customer-service gaffe 2-1-15.flv[/flv]

CNN talks with the customer Comcast called an “a**hole” on their bill after the family dared to downgrade their cable service. (1:53)

Charter Cable customers in Mesa County, Col., experiencing the latest service outage from the cable company were told to “quit whining” and “check your attitude” when they called Charter’s customer service line to ask when the problems would be fixed.

“If Mesa County didn’t whine so much, maybe something would be done,” one Charter representative told a customer in Grand Junction.

“Talking to [Charter] is like trying to put socks on an octopus,” said Dillard Jenkins.

Stop the Cap! reader June Jones found that to be true when she complained to Charter about not being able to reach 911 on her Charter phone during the recent outage.

“I was unhappy after the representative literally told me ‘that’s not our problem, get a cell phone like everyone else’,” Jones said. “I was so shocked being talked to that way I didn’t know what to say. I am 76 years old and in all my life I have never heard a company use that tone with me. The next thing I heard was, ‘is there anything else? I didn’t think so’ and she just hung up.”

Alex Danders waited on hold 35 minutes to speak to a representative about the Charter Internet outage at his business. He later wish he hadn’t.

“All I wanted to know is if they knew when it was going to be fixed and the guy told me ‘to check my attitude’ and later told me to ‘go screw yourself’ and disconnected me,” said Rodriguez.

Charlotte Conboy is a Charter customer who has had trouble with Charter for the last six months. Her two home-based businesses have suffered from no Internet access during frequent outages.

“If […] their company [had] issues [affecting their offices], they would have it fixed right away” said Conboy. “They say that’s beside the point and I get hung up on.”

A county official calling to find out when repairs would be completed was told, “we have excellent service and do not appreciate your complaint for one incident of interruption of service.”

The latest outage took out Internet service for schools across Mesa County for several hours two days in a row. Teachers scrambled to change their lesson plans to work around the outages.

“I’ll tell you the last couple of weeks the last three weeks or so I’ve been out talking to people, they’re furious, people are upset I mean this is our primary communications,” commissioner Scott McInnis told KKCO. “In exchange for using the right of way we expect them to deliver a service that the reasonable person would say ‘hey the quality of this service is good’ and we expect that [they will] deliver that.”

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KKCO Grand Junction County Commissioners get involved with Charter issues 1-15-15.flv[/flv]

KKCO in Grand Junction reports that hundreds of area residents are outraged about ongoing problems with Charter Cable and the rude responses they get when they call Charter’s customer service line. (3:23)

The ongoing problems with Charter Cable and the company’s surly responses to customers prompted a stern letter from the Mesa County Board of Commissioners to Charter Communication’s senior manager of Government Relations. They plan to meet with senior Charter officials today to discuss the matter.

Dear Mr. Rasmussen;

Today we have received multiple complaints from businesses and residents of Mesa County regarding interruption of Charter’s Cable Service. Currently, District 51 Schools are without service and we have been informed that service has been down for several hours.

Please note that this is unacceptable for Charter subscribers who feel that they can go to no one for resolution. When calling the customer service line they are told multiple ‘reasons’ for the outage, including responses such as ‘we have excellent service and do not appreciate your complaint for one incident of interruption of service,’ and ‘If Mesa County didn’t whine so much, maybe something would be done.’

Timely resolution of this issue would be prudent. We are requesting immediate and prompt dispatch of a response team to fix the system post haste; as well as a heightened awareness of the frustration Mesa County subscribers are having with your Customer Service Department. Good faith compliance is implied with the franchise agreement. We have also been informed by the City of Grand Junction that they have also heard from frustrated citizens regarding this issue.

Sincerely,
Mesa County Board of Commissioners
Rose Pugliese, Chair
John Justman
Scott McInnis

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KKCO Grand Junction School district loses phones and internet again 1-16-15.flv[/flv]

The entire Mesa County school district lost Internet access for a second day after another Charter Cable outage. KKCO reports parents and staff are concerned. (3:08)

 Thanks to reader June Jones for tipping us about this story.

Time Warner Cable was named by the Better Business Bureau’s its biggest overall offender in the Charlotte region, generating 187 complaints last year, according to the group’s annual year-end report, noted by the Charlotte Observer.

The cable company did not generate enough complaints to put cable and satellite provider complaints in the top complaint categories, however. Broadband providers in the region came in third in complaints, behind new car dealers and collection agencies. Auto repair shops and used car dealers did better, coming in fourth and fifth, respectively.

Time Warner Cable could not be reached for comment, but complaints registered with the BBB against the cable company almost always were resolved to the customer’s satisfaction. Most companies forward BBB complaints to “executive level” customer service supervisors that are empowered to do almost whatever it takes to settle a complaint. In Charlotte, 91 percent of complaints were quickly resolved once registered with the organization.

Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the telephone operator.

The Federal Communications Commission has mildly beefed up its largely toothless cable complaint hotline with a brand new consumer online complaint center that guarantees to forward submitted angergrams back to your telephone or cable company within one business day.

As Congress largely deregulated cable and competing local telephone exchange carriers and put them out of reach of most federal and state oversight, the FCC has largely been left acting as a concierge – managing and forwarding consumer complaints received on its 1-888-CALL-FCC hotline. Now it has an online complaint center to keep the toll-free number company.

The new FCC website is a one-stop place to file complaints about cable, phone, and other telecom companies and has been simplified to make it easier to understand – a welcome change from the nearly impenetrable Electronic Comment Filing System that dates back to the Clinton Administration.

But in reality, there isn’t much the FCC can actually do to enforce any action in your favor. So if your complaint deals with any of these issues, it is technically outside of the FCC’s jurisdiction:

• Burial of telephone or cable wires
• No dial tone to local phone service
• Stand-alone satellite TV billing, rates and programming
• Installation of non-bundled service
• Stand-alone cable TV service, rates and programming (not including basic tier)
• Internet services, rates, and billing

Despite the limitations, most cable and telephone companies assign executive-level customer service agents and supervisors to manage complaints forwarded from state or federal regulators that could give them headaches later on. That will get you a more empowered representative that can make things happen that “Miss Raisin” in the provider’s Philippines-based call center cannot.

The FCC also gets to track and monitor both the complaints received from consumers and the response from your provider. That can help the FCC identify hot-button issues that need more attention and uncover bad actors that might need special scrutiny, especially if those companies later seek approval for their merger deal or have other business before the FCC.

So far, the largest number of complaints received are about relentless telemarketing robocalls. Since telemarketers have discovered the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Call Registry and accompanying enforcement is more “bark” than actual “bite,” an increasing number are ignoring the law with little or no consequences.

The FCC’s disclaimer on such matters does not exactly leave providers quaking in their boots:

We do not resolve individual complaints on these issues. However, the collective data we receive helps us keep a pulse on what consumers are experiencing, may lead to investigations and serves as a deterrent to the companies we regulate.

Although it is unlikely to rival Starbucks, Comcast has launched a significant number of store openings in eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey to handle customer support, bill payments, and equipment exchanges.

Last week the cable company held a special reception to open its 4,000-square foot Xfinity Store in the Roosevelt Mall in northeastern Philadelphia.

The small format stores will resemble the kinds of small stores wireless companies like AT&T and Verizon run to handle customer issues and put the latest equipment on display.

Comcast now operates more than 500 stores nationwide and in October announced it would accept walk in equipment returns at any of the 4,400 UPS Stores. Customers will be able to return unwrapped/unboxed equipment at no charge just by dropping it off.

Comcast has been notorious for its understaffed customer care centers that often force customers to stand in long lines, sometimes extending out the door.