Comcastic Twitter Support

I was listening to Life in the Internet (@LifeITI) and was tweeting my thoughts in real-time. In the middle of the podcast, both Thom @jtrigsby and @VickieRigsby simultaneously mentioned that they did NOT have Comcast as their ISP, at which point I tweeted, .@VickieRigsby and @jtrigsby is NOT Comcastic. Listen to their admission: http://www.jtrigsby.com/2010/04/apples-and-herbs/.

IMMEDIATELY thereafter @ComcastMelissa replied, “Can I help?”

Now, Thom and I have a disagreement over the interpretation of events. Thom thought that it was cool that Comcast was so responsive and pro-active whereas I thought it was very intrusive and overkill on the Big Brother motif; after all, Comcast is the company that got caught deep packet sniffing and throttling bandwidth based on traffic content. So not only are the sniffing my packets when I’m surfing the internet, they’re also scouring my Tweets.

I do see Thom’s point. After all, it’s always good to be proactive and–God forbid–proactive. But here’s the problem: had the context been considered, there would have been no need for Melissa to ping either of us. Furthermore, Comcast seems to be more responsive to Twitter than they do their own toll-free number.

I suppose that the next time my Internet connection goes down, I could tweet to Comcast about it, and perhaps service would be restored faster than if I called tech support to report the incident. Given recent performance, I shouldn’t have to wait too long to put this theory to the test. In fact, in this week’s show, Thom told the story about a friend of his that was on hold for over thirty minutes. This friend tweeted about his wait time in addition to his problem. One of the friendly Comcast tweeters tweeted Thom’s friend and said, “If you will tell me how to get in touch with you, I’ll take care of the issue.” Ten minutes later, the issue was resolved, or so the story goes.

This will not help me, however, because, despite being a tech/gadget guy, I don’t have a smartphone with a data plan. Bad economy, too poor, iPhone’s only on AT&T and not on Verizion. So I would be able to tweet out, but not be able to receive communications without changing my preferences on Twitter, which requires an internet connection or an able app.

When @ComcastMelissa first tweeted me, I thought of a number of snarky things to say to her. I thought about requesting a docsis 3.0 modem, 10Mbps up and 20Mbps down. I thought about referring her to @TheRealDVORAK since he’s so Comcastic. But now that the opportunity has knocked twice, I have no qualms asking for something I’ve wanted out of Comcast for quite sometime: a loyal customer perk.

I’ve been with Comcast for five and-a-half years. When I first signed up to their service, the first two months of service were ridiculously cheap–under $15 for the first two months. So I have an idea: for those of us who have been with Comcast for some time now, what about giving us a customer loyalty appreciation gift: reduced fare on high speed internet connectivity for two months.

This would bolster the economy and help people who are struggling to make ends meet. It would be a great way to say “Thank you” much like a company does on their big anniversary dates and more importantly to Comcast, this would make for great PR and increase their competitiveness.

So @ComcastMelissa, you can help me with three things: a Comcastic thank you, a speed bump and a link to this post.