Comcast Support: How Twitter Saved the Day!

This is the story of my experience with Comcast, their support teams, and how Twitter saved the day. Now, unlike many of the people I see complaining online, I have, for the most part, found Comcast to provide very good service.  I did, however, try their new Comcast TiVo DVR box and that was a complete failure…but except for that, for the most part, they have met my expectations in regards to service and support.

So, yesterday, July 1, was the day we launched VendorCity to the public.  So, it was going to be a crazy and stressful day no matter what.  However, it got off to a VERY BAD START when I awoke early to get a jump on my email. I went to send email through my ”old” company’s email server which uses port 25 and does security via IP address.  (I know…I know…it should be over secure connections..let’s just ignore that issue for now and chastise me later).

I started up Outlook and my email arrived without a hitch but I was unable to send out (but had no trouble with my VendorCity account which is hosted by Google Apps).  After a quick investigation, I was able to definitively determine that port 25 was blocked.  Well, you can imagine my surprise and frustration of having to deal with this on the day we are launching VendorCity. 

I called Comcast support and get connected with a standard first-level support person.  I made it very clear that I needed to speak with a networking expert because it appeared that Comcast was blocking port 25 (the smtp port). She asked me what email program I was using (MS Outlook) and she said that Comcast does not support Outlook (only Outlook Express) but that she would work hard to help me anyways. 

Well, that was nice of her but then she proceeded to try and walk me through lots of Outlook and Control Panel settings.  After my, oh, 10th time trying to explain to her that it had NOTHING TO DO WITH APPLICATIONS but it was a problem with my network and specifically sending SMTP email over port 25, she told me that the only way to get someone else to help me would be to hang-up and call in again. Well, you can imagine my surprise and anger when I was told that. 

Eventually, she started entering in a support ticket and gave me that ticket number (after asking again if I was sure my email password was right).  Let me say this…I could not have been more frustrated with Comcast support at this point.  I could not believe there was no way to escalate the request to someone who knows networking and to see if there was indeed a block on my outgoing smtp requests.

(THIS IS WHERE IT GETS INTERESTING…)

I hopped onto Twitter and asked if anyone else was having problems with Comcast and port 25 blocks that morning.  Within 21 minutes, I received a tweet from Frank at comcastcares who provided me with some guidance and asked for my number so that he could get the problem looked into.    Let’s go over that again: I post a tweet and within 21 minutes Frank at Comcast contacts me directly with useful information about the problem.  Compare that to the 20-30 minutes I spent with them on the phone that ended being 100% a waste of my time.  Wow, it is like I was dealing with two entirely different companies.

Very shortly afterwards, I received a call from a George L. who explained the situation to me, said he would look into the block, and that most likely it would be resolved reasonably quickly.  Later that afternoon, I received a call from Jim saying the port 25 block had been removed and that if there were no problems, things should be all set. Not only was Igiven direct numbers to call, they were prompt and courteous.  Frank, George, and Jim turned a very frustrating situation completely around and made me appreciate their efforts in dealing with the problem.

Jim couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell me specifically why the block was put on other than another ISP had complained about SPAM (I had sent one message the day before to a bunch of friends and had BCCed them instead of putting them on the to list and had the day before started up an old laptop that could have a virus I suppose), but they would monitor things and let me know if something odd was going on. 

This goes to show how the same company can have two different groups that are 100% different in their approach to problem solving.  Their first-line support would not and could not provide me with any help whatsoever.  However, their active outreach to the twitter community turned around what would have been an absolute horrible experience into a surprising very good one in the end.  I still don’t know (and may never know) why they disabled port 25 and, in all honesty, that’s not the issue here as I should upgrade the server to support secure connections.  But for me, this highlighted how business participation on Twitter can have a help impact on customer support and relations.