Comcast Will Now Allow You to Track Technicicans

Comcast is consistently rated as one of America’s least favorite companies. This is no secret. But the company is at least trying to make things better and, as Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin reports, the first step is to make visits from technicians a less painful headache for customers.

“In a Thursday blog post titled ‘Your time is valuable; we don’t want to waste it,’ Comcast customer service chief Charlie Herrin detailed a new service that will give customers alerts 30 minutes before a technician shows up.”

First, I can’t think of a more challenging job title than “Comcast customer service chief.” Second, this new service, which will eventually let you track your technician in real-time, begins testing this week in Boston.

Comcast, the largest broadcasting and cable company in the world, has a major uphill battle ahead of it in order to regain what little customer trust it once had.

As Brad Reed at BGR noted back in March, the American Customer Satisfaction Index has once again rated Comcast and its competitor/prospective-purchase Time Warner Cable as the lowest ranked companies on its consumer satisfaction survey. Reed makes sure to mention that both Comcast and Time Warner got blown out of the water by Bank of America and United Airlines of all companies. When folks would rather fly United than deal with your terrible customer support, you know things are bad.

But why exactly is Comcast so hated? The reasons for this are bountiful.

Controlling a virtual monopoly? Check.

Shoddy service? Check.

Being operated by a marauding band of mustache-twirling villains? Well, the jury’s still out on that one but let’s just assume a check.

Really, one of the main reasons is because Comcast’s technical support is notoriously awful. You can probably remember that recorded phone call that went viral in August. Dealing with Comcast’s customer service is like visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles every single day for six weeks straight. At the very least, this new feature that will allow customers to track their technician will keep them from having to sit in their homes all morning wondering when Jim Carrey from The Cable Guy is expected to arrive.

As for what we can expect from Comcast moving forward, it’s safe to say they’re going to want to be on their best behavior if they want the feds to approve their purchase of Time Warner. While the impetus for this change likely has a lot to do with how recent bad press has painted the company as straight up evil, we can at least take one bit of solace from this announcement:

decade of complaining pays off-> MT @arstechnica: Comcast to stop wasting your time, offers technician tracking tool http://t.co/qPwLejyam6

— Eric Budd (@ericmbudd) November 20, 2014

We did it, folks.