Xfinity/Comcast
Comcast Headquarters
Comcast Center 1701 JFK Blvd.
Philadelphia, PA
19103
Dr. M. Dave Salisbury
28 January 2022
RE: Xfinity – Retail Outlet, Customer Experiences, Las Cruces, NM.
To whom it may concern:
Denied service ever since May 2021 because I cannot wear a mask. Discriminated against because I cannot wear a mask. Twice I have received partial and biased service, I was forced to wait outside, where the representative did not have a computer on wheels, iPad/Kindle, and the representative worked inside. The representatives could not answer basic questions and ran like scared rabbits inside at the earliest opportunity. The rest of the experiences since May 2021 have been at best, described as passive hostility, discriminatory, and detestable.
As the VA letter discusses, I have a breathing condition that precludes my ability to wear a mask. My documentation was refused the four previous attempts to have service rendered, even though this is a HIPAA violation. As a consultant for helping businesses improve customer relations, customer interactions, and drive profitable solutions in operations, the actions of the retail outlet at 2750 Mall Dr Building 300, Unit 340 Las Cruces, NM ranks as worse than the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). The managers in this location have had to work extra hard to hit this remarkably significant level of customer disservice!
In discussing the Xfinity retail personnel with multiple people, both those working for Xfinity/Comcast and non-employees, the management team is where the problem lies. The employee churn, all management. The customer dissatisfaction, all management. The lack of respect for Xfinity/Comcast in Las Cruces, all the management at this retail location. But don’t take my word for it. I’m merely reporting my observations and experiences.
The bitter cherry on the crap sundae served by this retail location occurred 27 January 2022. After being informed by four different call center representatives that my equipment MUST [emphasis theirs] be returned to the retail location, I arrived at the store and after trying to conduct business was told I am trespassing. All while trying to conduct legal business during business hours, having the police called, and escorted off property. If I treated my customers, as I have been treated by Xfinity at this retail location, I would be out of business, homeless, and unemployable.
When I had to turn in my modem (residential to business transfer of accounts; December 2021), the manager of this location refused to offer any solutions but demand I leave. When trying to return the home security equipment, the manager refused to create a customer centric solution, tried to steal the equipment, and acted like I was trying to make his entire business sick with COVID. Taking my equipment and refusing to provide a receipt, opens me to being liable for the equipment long after I have left the facility. Taking something, refusing to change ownership, is theft.
Discrimination is contemptible and I do not care why or how it is being perpetrated. No where on the mask required signs is a discussion about “the right to refuse service.” No where on the signs, or in the policies effected by management in this location allow for individual circumstances and personal health concerns. This is beyond contemptible and is behavior reserved for the lowest class of bad management practices. When competition comes, I plan to change providers. Feel free to take this letter however you choose, but as a professional, as an organizational psychologist, and as a consultant, the managers at this retail location representing Xfinity/Comcast, make me wonder about how other customers are being treated, and I shudder!
Sincerely,
Dave Salisbury Ph.D./MBA
Disabled Veteran
Please note, I am not the best person to be around when my “cherub-like demeanor” dissipates. I continue to invest time and energy in preparation and in unhooking emotion from knee-jerk responses to provide a better customer experience for those I connect with. I am not perfect; I am not trying to give advice that I am not trying to implement every day, in every situation. I have read story after story about “how to handle difficult customers,” “how to provide excellence in difficult customer situations,” and I have read the nightmarish tales of agents not allowed to control a call.
Back in the 1990s, when I started at a call center on Friday, there were no locks, no badges, no traffic control, and minimal security presence. Monday morning, we had badges, electronic key cards, traffic control security points, and a host of new security measures. Why; because a customer showed up at an agent’s cubicle, he had stalked this employee for months, and the only thing saving this person’s life was that she went into labor that morning. Her stalker showed up with a shotgun and a dozen roses. While not perfect at controlling my responses, I can clarify and support customer service agents against abuse.
While some may add or subtract to this list of agent abuses, I prefer simplicity. Thus, I repeat, only for emphasis, if the behavior is not tolerated in front of a police officer, that is customer agent abuse, and should not be accepted. Is speaking loudly customer agent abuse; probably not. However, the situationality of defining customer agent abuse is such that professionals will need clear and specific directions. Let us clarify a few topics.
A customer agent is anyone able to provide the assistance being sought. Will you be the one today to provide the service needed? Do you realize this is a choice made every time you engage another person?
A business owner once told me that this method of thinking was as valuable as arguing about what came first, the chicken or the egg. Yet, before you can grow into a small business, you must provide a service or good for purchase. Hence the most essential customer is your fellow employees, and failing to understand this simple fact, breeds an Us vs. Them mentality in employee and customer relations. Worse, this aggressive attitude only grows as the business grows and is heard by your customers in every transaction!
What is driving business leaders to excuse irrational and detestably unprofessional behavior by customers? Honest question, if we would not tolerate behavior in person, why is it allowed over the phone? Why is the customer agent taking the brunt of the abuse when we all know the problem originates much higher than the agent you are talking to. Customer service, customer appreciation, customer attentiveness, customer relations, customer retention, etc., all circle around the customer culture bred into the business from its days as a small business. Worse, the leader’s approach to customer service is felt and observed by agents all over the company and soon will imitate that leader’s attitude and behaviors.
Some of what I am proposing will be anathema to your organization; I realize this. I understand that some of what I propose will be hard to implement, face tremendous pushback, and might cause some organizational design changes. All of what I am about to suggest is achievable through leadership and customer service.
It does not matter whether your business is a manufacturer or a service provider; it does not matter if you are a non-profit or government agency; what matters is your customer. Be the customer agent they deserve. Admit fault, always understand that you cannot know everything, and asking questions is not an evil act. You customers today are your customer agents tomorrow, and being a better customer is a job!
For a long time, I have deeply respected QuickTrip (QT). Their customer service is of such outstanding quality; even when their fuel is more expensive, I still prefer shopping at QT. The people go out of their way to help you have a fantastic customer experience. I have never had a rude employee, a poor customer interaction, or left with an unresolved problem. I struggle with a cane and neurological issues and have had doors held open for me; cashiers have brought me my change, always a good experience at QT. Thank you!
7-10 days later, I receive a call to reschedule an appointment spending more than 2 hours talking to the representative, who finally schedules me an appointment with another non-LHI provider in Phoenix for 10 May 2021. I received a call from that provider confirming I have an appointment. Yet, a bait and switch occurred, and my appointment was then rescheduled for the same provider, same LHI facility, and I attended this appointment.
destroyed in customer service. Face-to-face providers need to be looking for solutions, not actively looking to inconvenience the customer. 100% of the medical profession IS customer service. How the provider approaches the customer (patient) is the number one factor in how that patient will respond to treatment.
As a 
My local Post Office here in Phoenix was visited yesterday (03 March 2021). The Post Office does not deliver packages to the apartment complex we live in, so the standard procedure is for the USPS delivery person (mailman) to place a card notifying the customer of a package on a 10-day hold in the customer’s mailbox. Since we moved in, we have not gotten these indicators, and Monday, my wife was notified a package she needs was returned by USPS. It was delivered Monday to the Post Office and returned to sender as “customer refused delivery” the same day.
Ask yourself the following question, if you had upwards of 100 customers complaining about your work, how long would you remain employed? Frankly, I am still stunned 24+ hours after the interaction with this supervisor. My visit was the sixth time I had been to the Post Office complaining about not getting package notifications and having trouble with packages sitting around the post office taking up space. One of these visits included speaking to the Post Office’s head, general, whatever, the top person in charge of a local post office is titled. Still, the employee has maintained their job, kept the same route, and the customers continue to be abused.
But hey, the Post Office is only one of the government agencies exhibiting a race to the bottom where customer abuse and customer disservice are concerned. The Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), a state-run agency, is always in this race, and they take hostile customer service to new heights, or depths, depending upon how you look at their performance. The last visit to the DMV ended with screaming for several minutes in my car before possessing the proper mindset to drive away safely. The DMV is comparable to a dentist drilling before anesthesia starts and doing a poor job on an infected tooth; you just know you will have a bad day when a visit to the DMV is scheduled!
The VA is to be congratulated, the colonoscope, which is used on multiple patients for a colonoscopy, is being cleaned properly and to standard, which means that infections from one patient are less likely to occur in another patient transferred from the colonoscope. However, the training program, certification program, and training documentation remain under considerable scrutiny for continual failure, as discovered by a VA-OIG investigation of 10 different clinics! Training, certification of training, and documenting and tracking training are internal customer service actions that the entire VA continues to fail. Whoever is in charge of adult education and training at the VA is not performing their jobs, and this is witnessed every couple of weeks in the VA-OIG investigation results across the entire VA. Designed incompetence leading to customer service failures, absolutely ridiculous!
The VA-OIG conducted a lengthy investigation at the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) Chicago VA Regional Benefits office in Illinois.
Consider the following analogy. A 100% disabled veteran gets paid once a month and budgets those monies very carefully to last the entire month. A claims decision is made, and without any communication for why, the amount the veteran is expecting to live is cut in half. The veteran is then responsible for wading through the various call centers to find why, how the decisions were made, and what to do, which takes time, lots, and lots of time on the phone. While bills go unpaid, food goes unpurchased, financial difficulties mount, and correcting the situation takes more time. Sure, the VA will pay back pay, but that is never sufficient to cover all the accruing costs and losses experienced.
By this time, I had worked with four separate agents who were confused or refused the call by hanging up. I had been sworn at, I had been told I was a liar, and I was told my office could not handle your request. Each call required anywhere between 30 and 50 minutes of hold time waiting for an agent. As the supervisor reviewed the problem, they discovered that their agents could not have handled the situation, and a specialist was required. But, I never got an apology from the supervisor for the waste of my time, the issues experienced with previous agents, nor the loss of my time and resources it took to handle the problem.
Government employees beware; how you treat customers is a problem, and you need to be held to task for your insolence, depravity, ineptitude, inertia, and uncaring attitudes! When discussing the BS of government, the customer service issue is the most egregious. I will call you out publicly every time you abuse a customer. I am done being abused!
Essentially, the NM Government call centers, at the city and state levels of government are as emasculated as a spring-born calf! Let that sink in for a moment. No tools, no authority, no support, and only their verbal wits to make the customer go away. If you think this problem is only apparent in government call centers; well, you are wrong.
Appreciative inquiry is a growth mechanism that states that what a business organization needs, they already have enough of, provided they listen to their employees. Appreciative inquiry and common sense tells leaders who want to know and change their organization, how, and where to go to begin. Appreciative inquiry-based leadership is 6-continuous steps that start small, and cycle to larger problems as momentum for excellence permeates through an organization. But the first step, just like in defeating a disabling addiction, is admitting there is a problem.
Appreciative inquiry is exactly like the plane, by having a destination, defined according to positive desires, through the process of discovery, dreaming of the possible future, while designing the future, the appreciative inquiry leader can make the small changes today that move the destination from ruination to success.
Finally, the power of Tiger Teams is also manifested to the VA in another way, returning to a situation after the VA-OIG has made recommendations to ensure compliance occurs. Another recent VA-OIG report shows that after a scathing VA-OIG inspection, the Department of Veterans Affairs – Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), was still out of compliance in their internal quality control procedures, systems, and processes. While some improvement had been made to spot errors, the procedures and processes that allowed those errors to occur were receiving zero attention by the internal quality inspectors. Which is akin to noticing the horse is out of the barn, but not shutting and locking the door to keep the horse in the barn. There is no valid excuse for the VBA quality controllers to not have been doing their jobs since the last VA-OIG Inspection.
Never has the axiom, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” been less true. The VA is broken and desperately needs fixing. With the help of those dedicated VA Employees, the proper leadership, and a Tiger Team to aid, the VA can be fixed and fixed quickly!
Thus, the attitude towards employee customer service is exposed to sunshine, and regardless of the games, prizes, food, swag, commissions, etc., the employee-customer service fails to keep highly talented employees. This example is not new, and is not a one-off, unfortunately. The example is regular business for employee treatment, and as the trainer stated, there are always more people for positions than positions open, so why should we change operations? Since January Company A has been working unlimited overtime to fill the gap in open positions.
Myron Tribus used a water spigot to help explain the choices of business leaders where employees are concerned. A business is either a money spigot and customers, employees, vendors, stakeholders, do not matter, so long as the money keeps rolling in to pay off the shareholders. Or business is a spigot with a hose on it to direct the efforts of the business through the relationships with employees, customers, vendors, stakeholders, and shareholders, to a productive and community-building long-term goal of improvement. Either a business is a money spigot or a community building operation, the business cannot do both.
Consider Company A for a moment, the time of class overlap was 1-hour. The number of days the overlap was going to affect that employee, 9. Thus, for the cost of nine hours at $17.00 per hour, or $153.00 USD total, an employee was lost. How much blue and green money was lost getting that employee hired, just to see that employee leave within two days of starting? How much more blue and green money will be lost to replace that lost employee?
Unfortunately, this is the standard, not the exception for the MSA’s in the HAS (Hospital Administration Services) Department, led by Maritza Pittore, at the Albuquerque VA Hospital. I have witnessed multiple MSA’s committing HIPAA violations through record diving, gossiping about veteran patients, acting rudely, ignoring veteran patients and their families to complete conversations, and refusing to do their jobs. As a point of fact, one assistant director one told me, “if what the VA does was replicated by a non-government hospital, they would be closed down and sued.” While employed from June 2018 thru June 2019, I brought this to the attention of the leadership, including multiple emails and voice conversations with Maritza Pittore, Sonja Brown, and several other high-ranking leaders and their assistants, all to no avail. I have had nursing staff tell me confidentially that they cannot do anything where the MSA’s are concerned because “it’s none of their business and outside their job duties.” Yet, the VA continues to proclaim the MSA, the Nurse, and the doctor, along with the patient, are a “healthcare team.” Upon being discharged, without cause, reason, or justification, I brought this information to the OIG, my congressional and senate representatives, among many others, all to no avail. The level of customer service, especially at this VA Hospital, is far below the pale because the leadership refuses to engage and set standards for customer service, with enforced penalties. 
Update to this article, 10 May 2020: By the first week in April 2020, the Advanced MSA in the clinic was moved to a less customer-facing post and a new MSA hired. The quality of that individual was never experienced due to relocating. The supervisor of the MSA was not very interested in correcting the problems and that showed when I visited with them while trying to obtain an appointment that the Advanced MSA refused to schedule. Change must come to the VA!
DNC-Consulting 