Attack of the Chat Bots

Things break.

You might be handy, but at some point, fixing requires another person. Or, in the case of this letter series, engaging with a computer algorithm that's pretending to be a person. Or an approximation of a person.

Or an obstacle in front of actually talking to a person.

Nobody wants to be a Comcast customer. You just end up that way, because the options around you aren't any better. Maybe, like Patrick, you spend the day looking at everyone's favorite racist message board, Nextdoor, for signs AT&T Fiber might be coming one block closer.

You might not like AT&T, but hey, they're not Comcast!

Patrick: We’ll get deeper into this during an upcoming HOA, I’m sure, but I had the most frustrating experience imaginable while trying to troubleshoot an internet issue this past week with Comcast. We had a gnarly storm rip through Illinois overnight, the kind where you’re fully expecting to wake up and discover the branches all over the yard and a good chance the power flickered on and off overnight, requiring, at least, to fumble through resetting appliances clocks.

The internet being off was, also, not shocking. But when I texted my neighbor, his internet—the same creaky Comcast connection that’s the only game in town—was fine. Huh, I thought. I have a recording that kicks off moments after dropping the kids off in the morning, so I went through the typical “turn everything off, turn everything back on” process to see if that fixed everything. 

It did not. 

The modem showed a red light. The router showed a red light. It certainly suggested there was an issue on the Comcast side. I told you and Chia that I was worried about what this meant for streaming Big Walk, and I told one of my podcasting companions that it would probably delay our start time. Once you’ve turned things off and on, once you’ve swapped out old cables for new cables, the next step is one everyone dreads: talking with a customer support chat bot.

(The actual story of what happened next is long and complicated and infuriating, but the tl;dr was a Comcast representative hitting a big “reset” button on their side over and over again.)

Customer support bots have always been a pain in the ass, but it was pretty easy to do the equivalent of hitting “0” on the phone to advance past the bot part and get to a real person. Now, is that person simply an outsourced customer support representative reading through a script? Of course! But there were usually different levels they could pull, different answers they could provide, that even if you didn’t arrive at a resolution, the whole experience was more pleasant. 

Nowadays, trying to reach the scripted human feels like going to war. You have a shovel and need to dig a hidden tunnel to the other side; in the meantime, you’re stuck talking to an LLM and it sucks. I have to imagine the existence of these services has prompted companies like Comcast to cut back even on the outsourced customer support, which means one of the measures of success for these things is how long it can avoid connecting with you a person. 

I did make it there eventually, only to reach an otherwise kind person who had three jobs:

1. Hit a button that reset the connection on Comcast’s side to try and resolve whatever modem/router/Comcast handshake broke down during last night’s thunderstorms
2. Ask me if I wanted a free mobile phone with free unlimited internet for 12 months
3. Drop emojis in the chat every two minutes because the chat window will automatically close if no one says anything, even if both parties want the conversation to continue 

:)  :) :) quickly became :( :( :( 

When’s the last time you got stuck in one of these chat vortexes? 

Rob: I think it was the day we moved last year! Both Comcast and Verizon were nightmares to deal with. Verizon because their signup process kept steering me away from what I wanted to do, which was get some god damn internet and toward getting a Verizon phone line. Comcast… it was the same thing you describe here: you almost have to talk to the text chatbot first because the phone numbers that used to connect you to a call center now just lead you in a circle. It's like when you need to sort something out with your bank and at any moment a trapdoor can open and suddenly a robot is reading your account balance and hanging up on you.

Comcast is one of those companies that's basically a poster-child for nationalization. Comcast employees, when you can actually get one on the phone or to your house, have almost universally been the most capable service workers and technicians I've encountered. And most of them, and this sounds ridiculous to say, have an honest-to-God passion for infrastructure and getting things operating as close as possible to ideal laboratory condition performance numbers.

But the people who own Comcast (but do not actually operate or maintain the services they provide) have made it as hard as possible for their workforce and their customers to interact. Probably because they haven't hired or trained nearly enough people to meet demand and instead just pocket all their business's growth while adding new twists and turns to the maze their customers need to navigate before they can talk to an overworked full-timer. If you decapitated the executive layer of Comcast I think you'd have one of the best utility companies in the US instead of one of the most loathed.