Spastic Comcastic

For the past 4 years I have purchased Major League Baseball’s premium cable TV package. It costs around $160 for the seasons and I’m sure my cable company Comcast and MLB are making a tidy profit. While it has been on my radar to order it again this season I just haven’t had a moment over the past month.

So finally I go to order MLB extra innings spurred because earlier in the day I picked up Chicago White Sox pitcher Freddy Garcia in a trade for Radhames Liz and a 2nd round draft choice. (My uber-fantasty league has a 36 player minor league system for each team and Liz looks like one of the top pitchers in the minors).

This should have been easy. I grabbed the remote and found channel 753 that the game was on. I selected the game and I’m greeted with a pop-up that says, “for ordering information press info.” Another click on info (actually the OK button on my remote) and a new page appears on the screen that has a link to “buy”. Of course, the buy button is an undistinguishable icon. Hoping I’m finished with this checkout process at last, I click on “buy” and instead of seeing the game I get another pop-up with a toll free number. for ordering.

As of now I have been on hold 7 minutes and 26 seconds. It’s 8:45 EST.

Comcast is a digital company. Their backbone is bandwidth but their focus has been on expanded service offerings for consumers. The funny thing is they are trying to market these products based on user experience. We are being told that using Comcast is “Comcastic”

With my kind of “Comcastic” customer experience why would I ever want to sign up for the Comcast digital phone service that’s being promoted while I’m on hold. I even am getting a bad feeling about getting the DeLa Hoya-Maorga fight on PPV.

This is nothing new for Comcast. I stopped using their email app for my personal email because the web based functionality was awful. And let’s not even get into their homepage and their web page builder tools. What a lost opportunity that was for them to grow their online business. Isn’t extending relationships and touch-points with customers their business model???

2.0 Marketing will be more reliant then ever on user experience. How difficult is it for Comcast to put a button on the first screen that let’s me buy the package and charge it to my bill? And let’s not even discuss their CRM failure.

10 minutes and 42, seconds still on hold….