Research – Before you make decisions get both sides of the story.

It pays to do your research thoroughly. I pay a boat load of money to Comcast for my phones, cable and internet and I now have Xfinity phones. I switched us away from Sprint because they were eating me alive with fees and I found the by the gig option that saved us over $100 per month.

Recently, while at a networking luncheon, I met a salesperson for Comcast Business. I spoke with him several times about the service. He told me that he had spoken with a residential person about what the cable would cost if I moved the phones and internet to the business side. It sounded like I would save about $40 per month. He also told me that the Xfinity mobile deal would be fine because everything was all billing to one address.

My Story

WELL, I should have called residential myself!!! I got my Business bill AND my residential bill and noticed that no one told residential to turn off the service. Now silly me, I thought maybe once they ported the numbers over from one to the other, that one hand would know what the other hand was doing. My first mistake.

On a Saturday morning, I make a phone call about why my residential was still active, blah blah blah. After getting the word that my cable bill would actually go up because I was no longer getting the “TriplePlay”, I did some quick math and discovered that I would actually be paying about $20 more a month if I retained the Business service.

I decided right then and there to switch back to the residential side of Comcast. The faster speeds that I was promised were not happening, I wasn’t saving any money, and I wasn’t going to wait around to see if the service response time was faster or not.

After I got switched around to the third person… whom I was able to completely understand, we talked about making the switch. This last person I spoke with on Saturday from Florida claimed they were Customer Solutions. She promised to call me back at 8AM on Monday my time. By this time I had spent 90 minutes on the phone. She wasn’t able to get in touch with Comcast Business.

The UpSide

When Monday at 9:30 rolled around and I felt “stood-up”, I called customer service back. i found out that there were no notes on my account. I got transferred three more times and was up to my eyebrows with rage. The bright spot in this whole story is an operator named Shannon from Mississippi. I was so mad from having to repeat myself, I thought the top of my head was going to explode. When I get really mad, I cry and I was probably unintelligible to Shannon, who listened and kept reassuring me. Shannon was on the phone with me close to 90 minutes. She made calls to Business and got the process started to port the numbers back to residential.  She had another person on the other line to facilitate the transfer. There was a hold-up because it takes up to 24 hours to release the numbers. We finally had to hang-up. But Shannon assured me that she would call me back and talk me through switching everything back to the residential modem that I had not returned.

Anxious to get this going, I called back in the late afternoon and spoke with someone who did some  checking on the numbers and they still weren’t able to port. BUT, Rachel (the second customer solutions person) told me that she checked with Shannon who told her she had been continuing to check on my case.

Lo and behold, on Tuesday morning, I got a phone call (while I was off-site teaching a class) from Comcast Technical Assistance to port my numbers over. I couldn’t talk but this kind tech called me back in the afternoon when I was back in the office. Over about 45 minutes, we got everything switched over and back to residential service.

While I was driving to return the business equipment to an Xfinity store, I got a phone call on my mobile. It was Shannon!!! She had been thinking about and following-up on my case since Monday. We chatted a bit about how frustrated she and her supervisor were. If they were frustrated, imagine how bad it was for me! I feel that even though the name is Comcast, one side of the business doesn’t know and can’t help you with the other aspects.

My Advice

This is a long story and if you got this far, take this advice from me: Do your own research! Check on what things will cost you if you move your service. If you are moving it all, find out installation, taxes etc. If you are leaving partial, find out the associated costs. If you tell a company you are leaving their service they might offer you a better deal to stay. Do your research. Do your due diligence.

Shannon from Mississippi, you deserve a gold star, a medal, an extra day of vacation or something. You remained calm during my stress and helped me solve my problem. God Bless you!