EVOLUTION OF BPR

Does the customer matter?

Posted on the August 17th, 2008 under Uncategorized by Gregory Yankelovich

I just had an infuriating experience with my ISP - Comcast, but this is not about boring you with yet another rant. It is about Religion. More specifically it is about religious belief that in a “free” market a Customer is a king. The belief that translates into budgets across multiple industries, from advertising to IT, which rivals GDP of some countries in it’s size.

After my Internet service was restored, and I regained my composure and my normal blood pressure level, I decided to “punish” this incompetent company, that does not appreciate value of my loyalty and power of the consumer. Before investing my efforts into sharing with the world my terrible experience, I decided to check how many people already share my opinion. The Google search “I hate Comcast” yielded about 20,000 results with this one on the top:

I’m hoping that my little post about how much I hate Comcast will bubble up high in Google rankings and that SOMEBODY at that company might think about improving their customer experience. It’s all about the power of the customer, baby. Might as well stop spending millions on smiley-face advertising to get new customers, because  the viral nature of the blogosphere is guaranteed to counteract it.

It is educational to note that this post was published in February of 2005, and at the time the author cites 2,100 results for the same search, therefore Comcast succeeded in growing it’s hater’s club at astonishing 6,000% in just over 3 years. The subscriber growth at the same period certainly cannot compare to this number, but it is a lot more tangible, since subscribers pay their monthly bill, but haters …Aha! Unhappy customers, whose opinion doesn’t seem to make the offender change their practices to improve customer satisfaction, cancel their contracts and “reward” worthy competition! Wrong again! There is no broadband ISP competitor available in my area (SF East Bay) to reward.

Based on this experience it would be logical to conclude that ISP does not operate in a “free market” environment, and the regulated market environment diminishes the power of consumer.

Humanity turns to a religion when our ability to be satisfied with a reason fails and we meet with a paradox which cannot be accepted without help from faith.

The alternatives are very inconvenient. I consume, therefore I am.