Have Comcast, lost 3-4 hours of internet yesterday. Went to their website from my phone and put in my zipcode and they confirmed (once logged in)there was an outage in my zipcode and they were were working on it. They even let me add a phone number for them to text when the outage was cleared. Thought that was pretty darn cool. The internet was fixed after a few hours, never actually got a text(lol).
Called Comcast today, expected to get 1/30th of my bill refunded. In typical Comcast fashion, I had to fight my way through a phone tree designed to prevent them from 1. giving me any money and 2. speaking to a human they have to pay to speak to me. As an aside, my favorite question was the "gotcha" question "what are the last 4 of the card we have on file to authenticate you", a classic way to have people hang up, have the queue time out while they look for the card, etc. Great attrition technique to the call flow design team to minimize #2 above.
Took 5 minutes but finally got through. In typical Comcast fashion a simple request wasn't easy for them to fulfill--the refund would have been "too small" for 1 day, so they refunded me half a month.
I've been in the consumer advocacy game for about 15 years now, and I always relish when incompetence works in your favor with companies. It's like the coldest glass of deserved ice water after a trek through a desert.
TL;DR - Most companies will pro-rate refunds if you call them, and they should since they failed to deliver the service you paid for. Stupid ones will probably give you too much money back.
March 11, 2020 at 12:02AM
