A (small) Victory a-la Twitter

So I hope its not too telling that my first blog entry ever on here is one dealing with a consumer complaint. I usually don’t complain much; as a business owner I tend to initially give businesses (specially small ones) the benefit of the doubt but this was just one of those “what the” moments, fortunately it all worked out thanks to power of social media.

The Incident…

I was about 2 seconds away from throwing my Bellsouth (AT&T) router out of my window when I decided to start looking for an new internet service provider. Living in Miami my choices are kind of limited to either Bellsouth (AT&T) or Comcast – so it quickly became an exercise in futility as I looked for a cost-effective and efficient solution amongst the lesser of two evils. Towards the end of my digital excursion, immediately after the seizure inducing homepage and shortly before the asterix littered check out, I found it – Comcast was shafting the Spanish speaking public in Miami! Boy did I want to karate chop someone in the jugular.

For those of you that are visual people I’ve posted a link to a screen cast here.

In a nutshell, changing the language of the Comcast page to Spanish would yield less favorable prices and packages. In other words, Spanish speaking prospects where being quoted more expensive and slower options. Not cool!

Naturally, I tweeted about it. Amongst the responses of outrage and disbelief I received a reply from a Comcast Representative asking for my zip code and hinting at a possible solution (brownie points). So I complied and went above and beyond and made a video (the same one that I posted above) to expedite a solution. More than two days later the prices had not changed (brownie points removed) and when the problem was corrected more than 48 hours later I was never informed about said change (PR fail). Thats a perfect example of companies listening but not caring. A simple follow up tweet with “All Fixed! Thanks” would have been sufficient and I would have been so impressed with Comcast’s proactive business practices that I would have tweeted all day about it. But no, instead I was left feeling used and slow turn-around now makes me wonder how many people might have been tricked into paying more for less.

Nonetheless, the injustice might have lasted for longer if twitter wasn’t around – at least they know we’re  watching.