How to fight back when you’ve been wronged like man on nightmare Comcast call
Jul 17, 2014, 12:47 PM | Updated: 1:09 pm
Washington state’s Attorney General says the type of service practices heard in the nightmare Comcast call circulating the internet wouldn’t fly here.
“In Washington state, the law is fairly straightforward that you cannot engage in unfair or deceptive business practice,” Attorney General Bob Ferguson tells KIRO Radio’s Morning News. “I think one could make a pretty good case that making someone stay on the line for half an hour trying to cancel their service is unfair.”
In the call, the Comcast worker is heard repeatedly asking the customer, Ryan Block, why he doesn’t want to cancel his service and Block just keeps asking him to disconnect it. Block says he and his wife became extremely frustrated.
Ferguson says this type treatment for a customer trying to cancel service is unfair, and it would really be an issue if that behavior by the employee was reflective of a company policy.
“Certainly, if any business had a policy where someone had to go through that in order to cancel their service, I think you could make a pretty good case that is unfair practice, because folks should be able to cancel their service if they need to.”
Block chose to retaliate by posting his horrible customer service experience online, but that of course is not the only action you can take. Ferguson encourages people to report bad customer service experiences like this to his office.
“If folks call or email our office, we then track those complaints and the way we bring our consumer protection actions is if we see a pattern of behavior, a number of complaints around a certain entity, we then follow up, do an investigation.”
In a case like this, Ferguson says if they observed a pattern of behavior, that would be when they’d bring action against a company.
“Are there policies that require the person working for the company to make you stay on the line for half an hour through this grueling phone conversation just to cancel your service?” asks Ferguson. “There is of course nothing against the law with trying to keep a customer, however there is a point at which it becomes something more than that, and something that does seem to be unfair.”
