I cancelled my Comcast subscription because their phone support is so horrible and they removed the ability to chat to a live agent on their website. If you call Comcast customer service you have to verify your account/identity to access the phone tree and then once you are actually connected to an agent you have to verify your account/identity again. Then when that person transfers you to the department or agent who can resolve the issue, you have to verify your account/identity again. It's absurd. I actually think it's designed to frustrate you into hanging up. Also, the call transfers tend to drop your call. Imagine verifying your account/identify three times, then your call is dropped so you have to go through the process all over again. You've now had to verify your account/identity 7x for usually what is a simple task. It is the single worst customer service experience I had ever experienced.
What frustrates me most about Comcast is that so many common tasks that one would think would be solved by checking a box on their site requires making a call to customer service. They are not incentivized to provide decent self-help options because they WANT you to have to call, because phone support is another sales channel. I don't think I've ever called Comcast about anything where they didn't make me listen to (recorded or otherwise) pitches about other services you could sign up for.
My few experiences with live chat weren't much better. It was always a 45 minute ordeal, where 90% of the time was spent with me staring at the chat window waiting to move on to the next step of the process, with periodic assurances from the rep (or a bot, who knows!) that they were still there and were just waiting for some request to "make it through the system" or whatever. Meanwhile there was a constant stream of Comcast marketing messages and, uh, "special offers" being presented to me in the chat window.
If they had more useful self-help options, it would reduce phone support calls, which would reduce their ability to leverage support as a sales and marketing tool. If their phone support system was more efficient with fewer transfers, shorter hold times, etc., it would also reduce their captive audience for sales and marketing.
I'm not so cynical as to think it's all a conspiracy, but they do have an incentive to not improve customer service, and when it's been so comically terrible for so long it's hard to not think that some faction within the company has the power and motivation to hobble their support offerings in the interest of generating some teensy amount of additional revenue in exchange for customer frustration.
I can't speak for Comcast, but when I worked at a medium sized ISP back in the day when ISP meant dealing with dial-up modems, all of this was caused by politics, and not by design.
The customer support department was only really concerned with call times. If the number one call type was customers asking to delete a 'stuck' email, then all that mattered was that the reps could handle that call quickly. The devs were only concerned with shiny new features.
There was a feedback channel so the reps could say "a lot of email seems to be 'stuck', can you make it easier for the customer to delete it?". But that'd be a bug like any other, and not prioritized above others just because the reps said it was their number one type of call. And reps wouldn't fight too much for it, since reducing calls wasn't really a concern, just keeping call times short.
I'd think a big org like Comcast could fix some of these stupid issues with cross-department politics, but then again, from what I've seen, fixing that sort of thing in big orgs is even harder.
