 Hey guys, it's Neon with Reverge. I'm here with Adrienne Jeffries. Adrienne has been working on a huge series about Comcast called Comcast Confessions, exploring why customer service is so bad at the company. So Adrienne, you've interviewed lots of people at Comcast, I think over 100 employees now. What have they been saying to you? At this point, I think it might be close to 150. I lost track. We keep getting people, new people writing in, so I'm basically drowning in emails from Comcast employees, so thank you guys for that. A lot of them are Reverge commenters, which is awesome. We wanted to talk about why Comcast customer service is so notoriously bad. It's pretty much at the bottom of every customer satisfaction rating, and then there was this call with Ryan Block, AOL executive. And my former boss, which is very entertaining. And Neil's former boss, which is a funny parallel. And he just had this insane conversation with this Comcast rep, who tried for 18 minutes to talk him out of canceling his Comcast service. And that just kind of sparked this whole conversation about customer service at Comcast, which is the largest cable provider in the country. And which wants to buy Time Warner Cable. And that's the other thing, right. Which wants to buy the second largest cable provider in the company, Time Warner Cable. After that acquisition, it would be a 30 million subscriber company, which is massive. Right, and would cover most of the major metro areas in the country. Right, and would be in New York, LA, Texas, every enormous market. So after all these conversations, why do you think, what's at the core of why the service is so bad? Right, so the big themes were, there's an emphasis on sales, on pushing existing customers to buy new products, to upgrade their products. They have people who are dedicated to doing sales, but they also wanted their customer service reps, their tech support reps, the people dealing with billing, to try to sell stuff too. And the problem with that is you call Comcast because you have a problem, and then you end up with a service representative who has to meet a quota for a certain number of sales. So they're kind of thinking more about what to sell you than how to fix your problem. So do you think you have to split that up for better service? Is that what you're hearing from the employees? Or is there a way to do it right? I mean, there is some selling that happens during customer service. Like if you have someone call and say, like, my internet's too slow, maybe you need to upgrade to a faster tier. That makes sense. I think where they went wrong is when they started giving people too much incentives to sell that stuff, and then they started giving the managers incentives to put up numbers for their groups. So people started to feel like they would get fired if they didn't sell enough. So Comcast says, and I'm sure they told you, that they're trying really hard to improve customer service. We ran a memo today from Comcast to its employees after the Ryan Block incident saying, this is what we want to do, don't talk about it too much. They've released public statements saying we're going to get better. You've talked to Comcast. What do you think about what they're saying about customer service right now? So Comcast has always been, and I'm reading the internally published story of Comcast, which is called An Incredible Dream, which is a really interesting way to mainline company propaganda. Yeah. Well, there's a little bit of, I mean, it is like a family that started this business. It's totally, no, it's a cool company actually, despite how miserable it is to deal with as a customer. And they have been just sort of like constantly changing things and experimenting with things. They're always like trying new ways of doing things, scrapping that, moving on. Like, I think that that is a cool thing about Comcast, and they do seem to be doing some things differently with customer service. But they, you know, the sales thing is just one part of why they have these problems. The other two big things that jumped out at me were dealing with technicians. They kind of, I think they understaff technicians, their in-house technicians, and then they try to fill the gap with contractors. What ends up happening is everybody gets overscheduled and technicians are late to appointments, missing appointments. They're not given enough time to get the job done. Like, they're basically given one trouble call or one installation an hour. And if they don't get it done in time, then they're just late for the rest of the day, for all their appointments for the rest of the day. And then besides that, Comcast has also grown by acquisition a lot of the time. And so it's still kind of fragmented in a lot of ways. And I think that's a big problem for them to resolve. Particularly. And communication is not super great. They're going to make another huge acquisition. Right. I think that's going to be really fragmented. Right. Exactly. So last question. Just what would you, if you're running Comcast right now, what's the easiest way to fix this problem? Oh my gosh. So definitely tone down the incentives for sales in customer service. Hire more in-house technicians. Pull back on the contractors in call centers and also for field technicians. And then try to, as much as possible, make the company more uniform so that you don't have different packages being sold in different markets. And your customer, when you call into a call center that serves the entire south, where there are a bunch of different policies. So that the rep on the other end has to look up and see where you are before they can even start talking to you. Because their products are so different depending on what city and what area you're in. And then maybe they could read our stories and take some learnings from what people are saying on the front line. I think they've got one thing they're saying at the top. And people at the top of Comcast love their company. They think it's a really great place. And it is, in a lot of ways, a pretty good company. It has pretty decent benefits, among other things. But their message is just getting totally lost in translation on its way down to the front line, where people are actually dealing with customers. That's great. Everybody should go read Adrian's series called Comcast Confessions. It's on the verge right now. Thanks for watching.