Still on Hold? Twitter Can Help
When Tracey Lee Wallace logged on one Monday morning she was venting her frustration because her Comcast service was down — no phone, no cable, no Internet, and she was dead in the water.
Wallace is a single mother who runs a Web design business and often works out of her home so she can tailor her activities around her children’s schedule. When her 11-year-old son needed to stay home from school because he was sick she thought she could work from home.
Alas, her Comcast services were all out. “It was an extremely frustrating day. I called and worked my way through the phone jungle, told my story to three different people, was put on hold, then told they couldn’t get to me before Thursday.”
Frustrated, she logged on to Twitter from her BlackBerry and typed “Damn Internet down in my house. Arrrrrgh. Can’t fix until Thursday. Shoot me.”
Twitter kicked in. Wallace didn’t know that Comcast had a digital detecting unit searching the Internet diligently looking for unhappy customers who needed help. Frank Eliason heads that unit for Comcast and saw her rant. “She clearly needed help. As soon as I saw her post I started tracking her down.”
Eliason went to great lengths to find Wallace. He located her Web site, found who owned her domain name, tracked down her business partner, who then called Wallace and said Comcast was looking for her.
Wallace was astounded. “I didn’t know there was a Frank Eliason. I called him, and he explained to me what he does. He surfs the Internet looking for people complaining just like me, finds out what the problem is, and he does his best to fix it and fix it fast.” Wallace was up and running again by 5 p.m. that day.
So, is this the solution for everyone with a problem? Skip the phone and just log on to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Linkedin and rant and rave? Probably not.
Consider the numbers: Comcast gets more than a million phone calls every day. Eliason and his small team of 10 help just a little more than a hundred people a day.
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