Comcast Apologizes For Customer’s Bad Service But Not For Role In Getting Him Fired

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The story continues for Conal the Comcast customer who lost his job after the cable company called his employer (which happens to make a lot of money off consulting for Comcast) and provided details about his customer service complaints. Comcast’s new Mr. Fix-It has issued an apology for the year-plus of horrendous service and over-billing that Conal experienced, but still maintains that it didn’t mean to get him fired.

The blog post from TV-star handsome Comcast exec Charlie Herrin reads:

What happened with Mr. O’Rourke’s service is completely unacceptable. Despite our attempts to address Mr. O’Rourke’s issues, we simply dropped the ball and did not make things right. Mr. O’Rourke deserves another apology from us and we’re making this one publicly. We also want to clarify that nobody at Comcast asked for him to be fired.

We’re also determined to get to the bottom of exactly what happened with his service, figure out what went wrong at every point along the way, and fix any underlying issues. I’m a few weeks into a new role at Comcast which is entirely focused on what we can do to make the customer experience better. We need to make sure that every interaction is excellent … from the moment a customer orders a new service, to the installation, to the way we communicate with them, to how we respond to any issues.

We’re holding ourselves accountable and we are working hard to make real improvements across the board. While it will take us some time, we can and will do better than this.

It’s all well and good for Comcast to apologize publicly now that it’s been humiliated in the media (again), but what does Herrin really mean when he writes “nobody at Comcast asked for him to be fired”?

What else could Comcast — which has admitted contacting Conal’s employer, accounting giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers, following his complaint to the office of the Comcast Controller — expect would happen when it contacts an executive at a company that relies on Comcast for a nice chunk of its revenue and says “Hey PwC, one of your guys was really rude to our staffers”?

Did Comcast think that PwC would listen to the word of a single employee over the word of the nation’s largest cable provider, who again is a client of PwC’s?

[NOTE: It is generally our policy to not provide the last names of readers who submit stories to Consumerist, which is why Conal's last name was not included in the initial story. However, since he has subsequently spoken to other media outlets giving his full name and the name of his former employer -- and since Comcast refers to him only by his last name in its statement, we are using his last name in this post.]

by Chris Morran via Consumerist