Monday, September 17, 2007

Power of The Blog... or...Getting Comcast to actually do it's job

Here's a first.

I've been using for years to complain to companies about their service. If you don't use it, you should. It actually works about 30-50% of the time to get a response from a company when nothing else works.

Some companies respond (like Qwest, our local RBOC.. but only if you use 'magic' words like PUC- Public Utility Commission and FTC- Federal Trade Commission in your cc: list).

Some don't. Circuit City, Best Buy and CompUSA, for instance, could care less if I write them to complain. At least in the past.

But... I do believe I just learned a new Magic Word that get's companies to do what they should do without resorting to public humiliation. That word is:


Here's why I think so:

After Comcast turned off my internet access at home for reasons I have yet to determine, going through the usual 5 calls to the support number and getting put on hold for hours, hung up on and transfered to weird nooks within Comcast that couldn't help me... I just gave up and put up a planet feedback posting (

I put in the usual (here's what happened, here's why you suck, I'm telling all my friends family you suck, blah blah..) but then, I put in something new that I haven't done before, on it's own line:

And I will be posting about this in my Blog.

What Planetfeedback does is it emails your complaint to the Company CEO (and posts it on there semi-social networking site where others can read it and comment on it). Pretty simple thing really but it's nicely packaged and works well.

Now, I do not have a popular/powerful blog presence. But, I suspect they don't know that and what they DO know is BLOGS out people and companies when they do bad things. Ton's of press on it.. so it's gotta be true.

Within the day, "Special Assistant to the CEO" had emailed AND called me back. He referred it to an 'executive support' person who had my internet access back on within a few minutes of getting my email with what I wanted fixed.

I've complained to Comcast with no response in the past. The only difference between then and now is that BLOG comment.

BLOG is the new Magic "use this if you want a response" Word!


No comments:

We Can't Let Thousands of Local Newspapers Disappear ... Yang
