More Crappy Customer "Service"

More crappy customer "service", this time from Comcast.

This time it was my fault, to start with. I accidentally missed a payment one month. And I've been trying to make up for it, but Comcast is not making it easy. There's been some confusion because their "final notice" crossed my check in the mail.

I called during the weekend, but couldn't get through to human. So I called first thing Monday morning. Here's what happened:

• I work through their voice mail system to a human.
• The Human tells me he can't answer my questions and will refer me to a supervisor.
• The Supervisor's phone rings.
• I wait.
• They tell me how important my cal is to them.
• I wait.
• They tell me again how important my call is.
• I wait.
• They tell me, We cannot take your call at this time.
  

No explanation why, at 9:00 on a Monday morning they are not answering their phone. Now, there's a great system.

Not.

Circuit City's Crappy Customer...

...Service.

(I could have included "Service" in the title, but I couldn't resist all the "C's" in "Circuit City's Crappy Customer.")

Circuit City frequently annoys me. Usually, it's just some little crappy thing that builds on another little crappy thing that builds on another... You get the idea. Before you know it, you're drowning in Circuit City's crap.

One frequent problem I've had there is having to wait for service. This week, I thought I'd circumvent my wait time by buying an item (an external hard drive) online and picking it up at a local store in Tuscaloosa -- taking advantage of their "24-minute in-store pickup" guarantee. They proclaim on their Website, "If we don't have your order ready for you within 24 minutes of your confirmation email, a $24 gift card's yours."

Of course, the guarantee's disclaimer is that it "excludes customer wait time in store lines."

See, you can't just walk up to a cashier, show him/her your receipt and an ID and be gone. Nope. You've got to wait in the customer "service" line before you can get your merchandise.

The first time I tired to pick up my drive, there was a single customer "service" representative. The line wasn't too long, but in 10 minutes it did not move at all; and I had a limited amount of time as I needed to pick up my son from day care. So, I had to go.

Came back a few days later, determined to wait it out. This time, there were two reps and only four people ahead of me and still it took 15 minutes to make it to a rep. Now, I know 15 minutes is not that long a wait time in the grand scheme of things, if we were living in Soviet Russia, for instance. But had I bought a drive at, say, Office Depot, I could have parked, walked to the shelf, picked up a drive, gone immediately to a cashier, and gotten out of the store in maybe 10 minutes tops.

So, the "convenience" of Circuit City's in-store pickup is a complete fraud, because one must suffer through a customer "service" experience. Heck, if I had just had it shipped to me I wouldn't have had to spend any time waiting in line.

When I finally did get through to a CC rep, I politely asked her to tell her manager that I was frustrated by the wait time and that I would never use their in-store pickup service again. The clerk was unrepentant. All she said in reply was a snippy and condescending remark: "I'm sorry there were people ahead of you in line." Obviously, she didn't intend to pass my comment along to her manager.

Consequently, I send this complaint out into the ether. Who knows? Maybe a CC customer "service" manager will read it one day and, for a brief instant, feel sorry that they've lost (another) customer.