Advice to Comcast/Xfinity: work on your communication skills!

We thought we wanted to upgrade our internet service and put in an installation order for Xfinity service.  Things started out OK.  A friendly technician was dispatched to our house and determined excavation was required.  Now here is where the trouble starts.  Comcast hires subcontractors to do the digging work.  When you rely on subs, you need to do two things.  (1) make sure your sub are competent and (2) make sure that you have a reliable system of communication with them.  Unfortunately, Comcast failed to do this.  The problem started when Miss Utility did a shoddy job at marking the utility before the dig.  Of course, this was neither the excavator's nor Comcast's fault.  But when the first dig crew showed to start digging, I noticed that the buried  electric lines had not been marked and so they had to leave.  One would have expected word of this snafu to get back to Comcast, but it didn't - either because of a failure of (1) or (2).  So then the hook-up guy shows up a few days later - thinking the excavation had been done.  We have to explain to him that it hadn't and why it hadn't.  Then a SECOND dig crew shows up later the day and wants to do the work.  Well the buried electric lines still were not marked, so we refused to let him do it.  (He, quite illegally, wanted to dig in spite of the fact that not all the buried utilities in their path were marked;  unbelievable!).  So then I called Xfinity/Comcast to make sure that they don't send out any more dig crew before the lines get properly marked. 

OMG!  Contacting customer service at Comcast is about as much fun as having your eyes drilled out.  First I talked to an AI which must be about the dumbest AI around. We went in circles for about five minutes before the AI connected me to person #1.  However, that first human agent was not allowed to talk on the phone!  Hilariously, that agent ended our conversation by saying that s/he had "successfully arranged" for another agent to talk on the phone with me -  as if that merited some kind of recognition!  The second human (who had phone privileges) had no idea how to address my issue (even though I had already described it to the AI and human #1).  After explaining my issue for a third time, I was put in contact with human #3.  Human #3, not only had phone privileges, but also actually had access to real information about my case.   

Human #3 suggested that we call Miss Utility ourselves to order a re-marking of the buried utilities.  Seemed reasonable, but by this time I was having serious misgivings about starting a relationship with a company that insists on having you go through 4 layers of customer service before you can even start to talk about a problem. So this morning I called Miss Utility about their mistake and having the lines re-marked.  Of course (and I should have guessed this), they told me that the contractor has to be the one to make the request.  So, by this time, I've had enough. I just wanted to cancel my installation order altogether and you can guess how many layers of customer service I had to go through to get that simple request done.  Once I finally got to the person who had both the authority and access to information to cancel my order, I asked him if would please send me a email confirming that everything had been canceled.  Now here's the kicker.  He doesn't have emailing privileges! So I just have to take his word that this will be communicated to everyone who needs to know. (We'll see!)

So in summary...  There are customer service agents at Comcast that are not allowed to talk on the phone.  There are others that are not allowed to send emails and there are many more who don't have access to all the information they need to deal with customer issues.  And before you are allowed to talk to any of these agents, you have to describe your problem to an AI that makes Chat GPT 1.0 look like a genius.  

I want to emphasize, that all the individual agents I chatted with were themselves very friendly and professional.  But a system that can't efficiently function in spite of have good people is truly a poorly designed system.