Bad customer service is something I grew up with. Banks shutting down and taking your hard earned savings with them. Home phone service that is far from appropriate and land line installations that take three years to materialize. Price gauging at all levels of the market due to the fluctuation on the price of oil.  Taxes that remain unpaid for several years, in some cases for decades or never paid. Streets that are in really bad shape. Pollution. In Ecuador you have to deal with a lot of bad customer service that derives from the poor state of the economy and the uncontrollable corruption at all levels of the government, starting with the president Rafael Correa.

Of course, all these issues are for the middle class to deal with. Because the poor have no resources and the super rich are immune to the government’s bureaucracy. Taking all of that into consideration I can say that I have built-in tolerance for bad customer service.

I have been amazed for a long time at the level of service of American retail companies. You can return an item to REI any time, no questions asked. Nordstroms has the same type of customer-centric policies. Their sales people are well trained to connect with the customer at a personal level and seem to have been carefully picked for the job. It seems most brand name retailers have figure out how to keep customers coming back. Good service.

Which takes me to m experience with COMCAST and Wallgreens.

I have been experiencing issues with COMCAST. Lately things have gotten better since the introduction of customer support via twitter.  However, I expect more. I expect to have a comfortable experience when I talk to the customer service folks. I expect to get my phone line fixed within a few days and not three months like what happened last year.  But that is just customer service. I have options, right?

I expect that in the most advanced economy in the world these little issues would be taken care of quickly.

But what happens when you fall out of a company’s network?

It seems that one disappears from the face of earth.

Telcos such as COMCAST should take a cue from retailers famous for their unique and legendary customer service. It cannot become acceptable for COMCAST or any other communications company to not live up to their expectations. We need a COMCAST that we can trust and that acts as a service provider not an autocracy that mandates how the service willbe used and consumed by the users.