He may be out of a job, but at least Conal O’Rourke has an apology.
O’Rourke, an accountant, claimed that he was fired from his job after complaining to Comcast about a series of incorrect charges, triggering an ensuing nightmarish customer service experience that resulted in his professional termination. On Wednesday, Comcast posted an apology to its online Comcast Voices public forum, calling his service experience “completely unacceptable.”
“We also want to clarify that nobody at Comcast asked for him to be fired,” the cable company insisted.
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Charlie Herrin, senior vice president of Customer Experience at Comcast Cable wrote the following post titled “A Public Apology to Conal O’Rourke”:
What happened with Mr. O’Rourke’s service is completely unacceptable. Despite our attempts to address Mr. O’Rourke’s issues, we simply dropped the ball and did not make things right. Mr. O’Rourke deserves another apology from us and we’re making this one publicly. We also want to clarify that nobody at Comcast asked for him to be fired.
We’re also determined to get to the bottom of exactly what happened with his service, figure out what went wrong at every point along the way, and fix any underlying issues. I’m a few weeks into a new role at Comcast which is entirely focused on what we can do to make the customer experience better. We need to make sure that every interaction is excellent … from the moment a customer orders a new service, to the installation, to the way we communicate with them, to how we respond to any issues.
We’re holding ourselves accountable and we are working hard to make real improvements across the board. While it will take us some time, we can and will do better than this.
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As O’Rourke’s account goes, which was originally told via website The Consumerist on Monday, the now-unemployed customer took his complaints to Comcast corporate when he got no help from the company’s customer service team.
Allegedly, a Comcast employee looked O’Rourke up, learning that the customer worked for a big accounting firm that the cable company had a business partnership with. A partner at O’Rourke’s firm was contacted, and the accountant was fired for an apparent ethical violation.
O’Rourke has filed a legal response letter to Comcast, asking for the situation to be rectified. An apology was probably not what he had in mind.