July of 2014 – most of us heard the news about the possibly over-enthusiastic Comcast customer service representative who went overboard in trying to retain a departing customer. Some of us probably even subjected ourselves to the amusing 8-minute long audio recording made public by the caller. (On a side note, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the caller disclaimed to the support rep that the call could be recorded for social media sharing purposes! )
There has been enough discussion on the web around this incident. I thought Comcast’s quick reaction to issue an apology on behalf of the employee was well thought of and rapidly executed, though I felt Comcast could have apologized as an organization rather than on behalf of the employee. May be they did that as well. But then asking the employee to personally say sorry was even taking it further and not warranted in my opinion. At the end of the day, the employee was sober, was trying to do his work even if he did not deploy the right approach, and seemingly had best interests of his company in mind. He was likely also acting the way he did to achieve an output that he felt pressurized enough to achieve.
Comcast then went on to fire the employee. That I think was the most disgusting step they could have taken. By doing this did they address the cause of the problem or just the symptom. Was this employee really a problem employee with other warnings issued to him in the past? If so, then the decision to fire him after such an incident would still be understandable. But if not, then is he the only such employee in Comcast’s customer retention department? What about the manager who is supposed to listen into calls and monitor customer feedback for quality assurance purposes? Finally does one bad call made public is all that it takes to fire an employee? I would have preferred a response where Comcast was willing to invest time and effort into training the employee to ensure such mistakes are not repeated in future. And also introspect at department or organization level whether the performance measurement criteria needs to be redefined.
This HBR article is worth reading; it also has the audio clip embedded.