I'm not sure you could have ever called Comcast support and not been aware of this. It's quite obvious. And I'm not entirely sure it's even all that interesting. Plenty of companies do this sort of thing. I've had a credit card company pressure me to buy some additional protection services when I called to activate my card. Just the other day I was chatting with an Adobe support person because I had a question about licensing, and they were absolutely incessant about getting me to buy something right then and there. I don't think this is really some scandalous thing that they're doing. Don't get me wrong -- Comcast is a pretty horrible company. But I just don't see this as being some outrageously over-the-top thing they are guilty of.
Very much worth reading for the magic phrase that will stop the upselling:<p><i>There are a few things customers can do, per the document, to avoid the sales plays: one of them is to flat-out instruct the agent to not attempt to sell you services. "Customer volunteers a 'Don’t sell to me' statement" is explicitly listed under the section titled "Transition to Offer is Not Applicable in the Following Scenarios."</i>
I'm assuming AT&T has this exact same protocol, because a few weeks ago I called them to get my modem fixed because our internet was down for a day and after talking for 45 minutes and assuring them that yes, I have reset the damn modem, the customer service person tried to sell me more channels on my TV service. Which was hilarious because I don't have TV service with them anymore, only internet.<p>I let him know that it's not appropriate to try and upsell someone on a support call, when the customer's current services aren't even working, much less trying to sell them an upgrade on something the customer doesn't have in the first place.<p>Pretty amazing how well they set their reps up for failure. A little bit of training could go a long way, but I guess what's the incentive if most customers are basically locked into specific service providers depending on their address.
My roommate was recently employed (he quit) at a Comcast branch south of San Francisco. His responsibilities included helping customers with their technical issues, but the only metric of his success was his ratio of sales to customers seen. As a result, he was ranked lower than other employees who saw less clients, solved less problems, but had more sales. I can't think of a better way to discourage customer support and encourage up-selling.
The things most companies fail at when it comes to customer service are:<p>- Effectively training employees to fully understand the product they are supporting.<p>- Enabling communication channels between departments that lead to timely resolutions.<p>Often you're talking to someone who doesn't know how to fix your problem, isn't sure why things are messed up, has to use a bunch of internal tools that only partially work, may have to communicate with other departments who might as well be black holes and then has to halfheartedly sell you products unrelated to your call.<p>Companies should be using metrics to help guide decisions, but all too often companies are working for metrics instead of having the metrics data work for them them. Instead of diving deeper into the overall customer experience to figure out if they're even measuring the right things, companies often focus success on driving a narrow spectrum of metrics ever higher, at the cost of everything else.
I worked tech support at Gateway (computers) for a short time in the 2001 timeframe. I quit when they based our bonuses on selling upgraded equipment to customers.<p>Worst part? Most techs would <i>lie</i> and tell the customer their blue screen/crashing problems were because they didn't have enough memory (or similar). Tech gets bonus for selling, I have to install the memory and troubleshoot and fix <i>the actual problem</i>, and I get dinged...<p>Comments to management of course went into the recycle bin.
I hate services which require a phone call or other work to unsubscribe, beyond other changes. There is some argument for higher level security validation for certain service changes, but it shouldn't be done for revenue protection reasons.<p>(I tend to let American Express cancel services for me if the site makes it very difficult.)