First reported by consumer advocate Christopher Elliott the cable company changed the name of one of its customers from Ricardo Brown to ‘A-hole’ Brown on his bill. Lisa Brown, Ricardo’s wife, brought the situation to Elliott’s attention after failing to get the local Comcast office to fix it. She even called higher ups in Washington to remedy the problem.
Elliott used his contacts to get to the bottom of the situation, speaking with Steve Kipp, vice president of communications for the Washington region of Comcast.
“We have spoken with our customer and apologized for this completely unacceptable and inappropriate name change,” he said. “We have zero tolerance for this type of disrespectful behavior and are conducting a thorough investigation to determine what happened. We are working with our customer to make this right and will take appropriate steps to prevent this from happening again.”
Comcast made the name change after Brown contacted the company in an effort to cancel the cable portion of her account. The family is going through financial difficulties and Brown needed to cut out expenses. Instead of aiding her with the use of help desk software, the customer service representative connected her to a retention specialist who tried not only tried to keep her at her current billing level, also attempted to get her to sign a two-year contract.
“It could have been that person was upset because I didn’t take the offer,” Brown told Fox News.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that Comcast has changed the name on an account to something rude and offensive. This report from 2005 tells of an Illinois customer who had her name changed on the billing paperwork to “Bitch dog.” In that situation, Comcast offered the customer two months free service.
The ‘A-hole’ Brown incident has gotten Comcast to not only waive the $60 cancellation fee, but also offered her a full refund for the two years of service and fired the customer representative who was responsible for the name change.
