Dear Comcast,

Comcast...Cares?

I am leaving you this note on the fridge because I can’t bear to face you.  I can’t bear seeing the look in your eyes when I tell you that it’s over. This off again, on again blamefest has come to an end. I was always there to support you financially, but you never reciprocated with the kind of love, the kind of consistency I needed in my life.

This isn’t easy for me. As I close this chapter in the book that is yet to be finished, I know I will look back on our times together with some hints of fondness. I am sure we will cross paths again, someday. I hope that we can smile, exchange greetings, show each other a base level of respect and courtesy.

I have taken the liberty of leaving all of your things at your office, so, aside from this note, this is goodbye.

Or is it…

After ten years of intermittent service, five of which were served in exile between Ohio and Orlando, my often tumultuous relationship with Comcast has come to an end. I now enjoy EPB‘s fiber service with 30mb up/down, and I have yet to experience an outage in my first three months of service. It just works, and works well.

When I called today to cancel my Comcast service, I was informed of a vague and unwritten rule that I would have to continue paying for service for another seven days.

Tip of the day for anyone out there in the business world:

The goodbye is your last, great chance to have a happy customer.

This is it. If you don’t make this customer happy at the cancellation, you have failed. EVERY company has an opportunity when a customer requests termination of service to perform this last great act.

1. Always ask what you could have done better to retain the customer, expect to get some angry responses here.
2. Always be appreciative of the feedback you received, it is priceless.
3. Always close the interaction with an open invitation to return, if possible.

Especially in the VoIP world, where margins are thin and customers are picky, there is this urge to “tax” customer’s to death as they go out the door. There are subtle signs this is turning around, and it should. Much like Comcast insisting I keep and pay for an extra seven days of service, unreasonable and excessive termination fees are the last gasps of a dying machine. Losing a customer is free, if it’s producing enough revenue to help the company, your model is dead.

As with every practice in any business, if it doesn’t produce meaningful revenue and doesn’t improve the customer experience, what is the point?

UPDATE 2010/8/27: In fairness to Comcast, prior to this blog ever being posed. the @comcastcares folks from Twitter took care of the nightmare runaround my local person had given me, and they were also the only source of useful technical assistance in the last three years. Comcast’s entire hope for being around ten years from now lies in being able to scale that team, and that model.