Cable office reports on Comcast, RCN complaints

County Council committee report details failures to meet franchise agreement standards

Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2006

Montgomery County’s cable office received complaints about Comcast from 1,156 people in the first nine months of this year, including 506 in the past three months.

Comcast’s own records showed the company failed to meet customer service standards under the Montgomery County franchise agreement in six of the first eight months of this year. Data for the ninth month was not provided to the county.

‘‘I’m getting more and more complaints about this when I go to the grocery store,” said County Councilwoman Marilyn J. Praisner (D-Dist. 4) of Calverton, chairwoman of the Management and Fiscal Policy Committee, which reviewed the cable office’s quarterly report on Monday.

There were 822 complaints about service, 412 complaints about cable reception and 257 complaints about billing problems. That includes multiple complaints about different problems filed by the same customer.

Many of the complaints about reception arise from homeowners causing a loose connection between the cable box and the television sets, Comcast’s regional director for government affairs, Angela L. Lee, told the committee.

Comcast also is hiring more people to improve service, Lee said. It plans to hire 400 more workers in suburban Washington by the end of the year. Comcast has about 3,800 employees in the region.

Janice Cadel, 48, of Gaithersburg recently experienced Comcast’s customer service problems first hand, she told The Gazette.

When she called Comcast to change her billing because she added telephone service to her television and Internet service, ‘‘they literally closed out my Internet account,” Cadel said. ‘‘When I called the customer service line, I got hung up on several times.”

She managed to get through the next day and was told her Internet service would be restored in 24 to 48 hours. When it was not restored, Cadel called again and was told there was no record of her previous call. Her Internet connection was restored the next day, but Cadel said the e-mails the family received during the outage were lost.

‘‘We take customer service very seriously, and we’re always trying to make customer service exceptional for Comcast customers,” said spokeswoman Lisa Altman, who said she could not comment on specific complaints.

Under the franchise agreement with the county, Comcast is required to answer 90 percent of the calls to the customer service line within 30 seconds.

After the first quarter of this year, when Comcast met the requirement in just one out of three months, the county’s cable office sent a warning letter. After that, Comcast met the minimum standard in just one of the next five months. The percentage of calls answered within the required time actually decreased, with 69 percent of calls answered within 30 seconds in August, the most recent month available.

Comcast paid the county $1,228 for not meeting the franchise agreement’s minimum requirements.

Comcast also failed to meet the requirement of completing 95 percent of all repairs within 24 hours in five of eight months.

RCN (formerly Starpower) of Herndon, Va., was out of compliance for two of the past nine months for answering customer calls within 30 seconds and failed every month to meet the requirement of transferring calls to account executives within 60 seconds. The county issued RCN a warning letter and is assessing how much to charge the company.