Comcast moves to cut losses after 'snooze' video
Comcast moves to cut losses after 'snooze' video
By Miriam Hill
Knight Ridder Newspapers
PHILADELPHIA — Forget about living well. YouTube.com is the best revenge.
A video of a Comcast Corp. employee in Washington sleeping on a customer's couch became a minor sensation on the popular Web site last week and shamed the Philadelphia cable giant into apologizing for poor service. The employee, whom Comcast would not identify, has been fired.
Brian Finkelstein, the Comcast customer who posted the video, told this story on YouTube.com, a site that lets users share videos:
His Comcast Internet connection had worked only intermittently since he moved to a new apartment June 1. A Comcast technician who came to Finkelstein's home June 14 to replace the modem called the company for help. He was put on hold for more than an hour. So he caught some shut-eye while he waited.
Finkelstein, a Georgetown University law student, picked up his video camera, added music with the lyrics "I need some sleep. I can't go on like this," and sent it to YouTube.
After three days on YouTube, his 58-second video had been viewed more than 214,000 times.
An embarrassed Comcast rushed to control the damage.
"Comcast has reached out to the customer to apologize for his unsatisfactory customer experience," Beth Bacha, vice president of communications, said in a statement. Providing a positive customer experience is Comcast's top priority, she said, adding, "I can assure you we are taking all appropriate actions and are investigating thoroughly."
Finkelstein said Friday morning in an e-mail message that his service had been fixed.
In August, Comcast said it had fired two customer-service employees in the Chicago area for changing a woman's name on her bill to an expletive after she repeatedly complained about poor service. A 2005 survey by J.D. Power & Associates showed that Comcast scored below average for cable and satellite companies in customer-service surveys.
Comcast said that each year it interacts with customers more than 225 million times, taking more than 200 million phone calls and sending out trucks 25 million times.
Finkelstein has ridden the Internet to fame before, using Comcast to access the Web. He created a Web site,
www.snakesonablog.com, devoted to the forthcoming movie "Snakes on a Plane." The site generated many news stories in which Finkelstein explained his devotion to the movie's strange, give-away-the-plot title.
Earlier last week, he offered only these words, tacked on to his Comcast video:
"Thank you Comcast for two broken routers, for four-hour appointment blocks, for weeklong Internet outages, for long hold times, for high prices, for three missed appointments, for promising to call back and then not calling."
By the end of the week, he sounded appeased, writing on his Web site, that the crew dispatched to resolve his problem "was extremely professional, efficient and they knew what they were talking about. It was great. If Comcast could provide this level of service for every person experiencing connection issues, they'd be the darling of the industry."