Comcast Changed A Customer’s First Name To ‘Asshole’ On A Bill After They Canceled Service

Oh Comcast, again? The stories of Comcast’s customer service being one of the worst things ever are pretty legendary, but this latest one about how Lisa Brown, a Comcast customer who just wanted to cancel the cable part of service to save a little cash only to receive their next bill with the first name changed to “Asshole” is a new low.

Brown of Spokane, Washington tells consumer advocate Christopher Elliott that when she tried to cancel her service she was, of course, transferred to a retention specialist who tried to cajole her into keeping her plan and signing up for two more years, but she stuck to her guns and eventually got her service changed. Then she received her next bill and her husband’s name had been changed from Ricardo Brown to “Asshole” Brown.

“I was never rude. It could have been that person was upset because I didn’t take the offer,” she told Elliott.

When she contacted Elliot about the name change on the bill after trying and failing to get it changed herself, he wasn’t even sure whether to believe her story it was so outlandish, even for Comcast.

My first thought was that someone was trying to pull a practical joke on a consumer advocate. So I asked for a copy of the billing statement and the correspondence between her and Comcast. And no kidding, it looked like someone had changed the name. How impolite!

Next, I contacted Comcast to find out what its records said. It’s fairly easy for any customer to doctor a photo of a bill to shame a large company, so I wanted to make sure Comcast was seeing the same thing. It was.

A few minutes later, I received a call from Steve Kipp, Comcast’s vice president of communications for the Washington region.

“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.”

Brown reports that Comcast’s solution to this egregious “error” is that they are going to refund her money for the two years of service that she was with them, waive the $60 cancellation fee and terminate the employee who was responsible.

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