“Comcast Must Die”
Companies are not just worried about making their content “go viral,” though. Marketers have also been using the metaphor to make sense of how their customers’ communication about a company now has the potential to circulate widely.
Fifteen years ago, the degree to which audiences had direct access to brands, and vice versa, was limited. Direct mail may have targeted messages at particular customers. Brands with retail outlets had a direct customer touchpoint, but the brand ambassadors in this case—retail employees—were (and remain) among the least respected, trained, and compensated members of the organization. Some companies had sales forces that aggressively contacted potential customers but often only through a one-way message, as during the “telemarketing craze.” The most robust site of contact between customer and company was customer service, a division in most companies that has been marginalized and is often measured by efficiency—how quickly employees can get customers off the phone—rather than any prioritization of customer engagement (Yellin 2009). Thus, most correspondence between brand and company was one-way, providing little room for the customer to shape the experience.
These conditions persist. However, when corporate websites emerged by the mid-1990s, no one fully realized how substantially they would shift a company’s relationship with its audiences. Few of the companies creating brochure-like websites at the time completely considered that brands had the opportunity to tell their stories directly to the audience outside the constraints of advertising spots on television and radio and without going through the third-party voice of journalists. There would be a fundamental shift in how everyone “consumes,” as interested people could seek content from companies when they wanted it—to juxtapose and assess corporate messages directly from the source and to publish what they find online for family, friends, colleagues, and strangers to see.
Brands and entertainment properties cannot return to the one-directional communication flows of the broadcast era, when they had the perception of control, so companies must listen to and learn from their audiences if they want to enjoy long-term success.
This “lack of control” is particularly noticeable when it comes to customer complaints. In a world of spreadable media, what were once considered solely “customer service” issues are increasingly “public relations” issues as well (which is ironic, considering “customer service” was, in the early twentieth century, once called “public relations” [Yellin 2009, 22]), as customers spread their own stories about companies.
Comcast, the largest cable operator in the U.S., has learned this lesson with particular pain. Cable operators have long struggled with customer complaints and dissatisfaction, displeasure well illustrated by a 2006 video of a Comcast technician falling asleep on customer Brian Finkelstein’s couch while on hold with the company’s own help line. Finkelstein’s video spread rapidly and widely and received coverage in a variety of traditional media outlets as well. The drowsy technician was fired, and Comcast received a steady stream of negative publicity online as frustrated customers added their own commentary to the video.
The sleepy Comcast technician was only one of their spreading troubles. For instance, there was the much-recounted tale of LaChania Govan, the Illinois Comcast customer whose repeated attempts to resolve a customer service issue in 2005 led to employees changing her account name—and bill—to “Bitch Dog.” Similar attention was heaped on 75-year-old Virginia Comcast customer Mona Shaw, who became so angered at her customer service treatment in 2007 that she smashed up the office with a hammer (Yellin 2009, 2–8). Journalist Bob Garfield (2007) shared his own “Hell on Earth” story about Comcast customer service, beginning his Advertising Age column with the declaration “Comcast must die.” Garfield started a campaign against the cable operator on the site ComcastMustDie.com. And amid these videos, stories, and campaigns were the myriad individual complaints that Comcast customers increasingly voiced across blogs, microblogging platforms, and discussion forums.
Companies now face building pressure to use their online presence not just to communicate their own messages but to respond to the demands of disgruntled customers as well. Comcast listened to some degree, one could argue out of necessity, over time creating a specific department to respond to issues raised online. In February 2008, Comcast Executive Support Manager Frank Eliason (who had been with the company six months) was named the company’s “Director of Digital Care.” The department Eliason created now reaches out to bloggers, Twitterers, and other online discussants, attempting to proactively resolve their problems. In the process, the “Comcast Cares” initiative has addressed thousands of customers and simultaneously generated significant publicity. BusinessWeek, for instance, named Eliason (who has since gone on to work for financial services company Citi as its head of social media) “the most famous customer service manager in the U.S.” (Reisner 2009). Although in 2009 Bob Garfield still called Comcast “a vast, greedy, blundering, tone-deaf corporate colossus,” he noted that the company “has heard our angry voices and taken concrete steps in the process of putting customers first.” Meanwhile, many people in customer service and communications look to Comcast’s online customer service response as an exemplar that companies should follow to create online communication platforms which respond to customer questions and reach out to those who complain.
Despite the praise, Comcast’s customer service remains far from ideal. Its pioneering work using social media platforms to listen and respond to negative customer experiences still serves as a quick fix to the larger issues that plague service providers. In 2010, for example, Gizmodo published a letter received by a customer who was told his service would be disconnected if he didn’t pay the $0.00 he owed (Golijan 2010), while another customer who praised Comcast’s Twitter communication shared his ongoing frustrations once he was connected to others within the company (Paul 2010). These are only two of a regular stream of customers expressing frustrations with the company’s traditional communication modes.
Further, the “Comcast Cares” initiative, and the general perspective that customer service issues become a higher priority when customers have their own online presence, means that some customers get better treatment than others. See, for instance, this account from Slate:
People with more clout seem to get better service. One Twitterer with fewer than 20 followers told me that though he’s tweeted about Comcast frequently, the company has responded only to tell him its customer-service phone number. Another—with about 300 followers—told a better story: When she complained about a service problem, Comcast made special arrangements for a refund. And Glenn Fleishman, a tech journalist with more than 1,600 followers, got the best deal of all. [He] quickly got a call from an executive in the escalation department, who offered to waive [a $1,300 early-cancellation] fee. (Manjoo 2009)
As long as companies treat customer service issues online with some degree of concern about whether the customer is “an influencer,” customers will receive different levels of response based on their perceived “public relations threat” (not to mention the lack of recourse for those who lack easy access to these communication platforms). And, in devoting significant energy to responding to those customers who complain loudest, without fixing underlying customer service issues companies might, if anything, encourage people to “spread their complaint” as their first course of action, influenced by the horror stories of phone trees and endless hold times awaiting them at a customer call center.
Even though Comcast and all large companies still have miles to go in fairly and fully prioritizing customer service, the spreadable media environment has made listening to audiences a greater priority for many marketers and media companies. Public relations and corporate communication departments are increasingly using their online presence to address the messages customers are circulating, a sign of the power which visible and socially connected audience members have to shape the agendas of companies through the messages they spread (an issue we will return to in greater detail
