19 Feb Nationwide Comcast Outage Angers Customers
Comcast outages anger thousands across US
The TV and Internet provider’s customer service account, @comcastcares, was responding to an onslaught of unhappy customers on Monday. “[G]et more employees and offer same day help when there’s a problem. It’s 2016, we aren’t sending snail mail for help,” one Twitter user wrote.
If you’ve ever personally experienced a service outage, you know they aren’t fun. This is 2016 and we rely heavily on our phone, TV and internet services – maybe a little bit more than we all realize. Maybe we all take these services for granted. We’ve come to expect that they will always be there, and that they will always be working, and working fast. And when that’s not the case, well, we get a little upset. Heck, I get a little frustrated when a page takes longer than normal to load…
But for as upset as we get, for as unpleasant as that service outage is for us as the paying customer, the situation is arguable the least fun for the service provider dealing with the outage. Just ask Comcast, who just this week was dealing with service outages across the U.S.
For starters, there’s dealing with massive influx of complaints. Just scrolling through tweets from Monday’s outage and you can see just how upset customers were.
And it’s not just on twitter, customers yesterday took to the phones to voice their displeasure. Unfortunately, Comcast’s phone support team was unable to keep up with the influx of calls as there were numerous reports of their phone lines being down.
And as you scramble to put out the proverbial fire on twitter and the support line, so too does your field engineers scramble to get the service back up and running.
It’s all not fun. But these service outages can have a serious impact on your bottom line as customers cancel service and switch to a competitor.
It’s not all talk. According to Information Week, organizations lose on average $5,600 USD for every minute of system downtime, which extrapolates to $336,000 per hour. What’s harder to calculate, however, is the impact to your company’s reputation, which can make this figure even higher.
Comcast hasn’t yet released the cause of the outage, but regardless of cause, it’s a costly reminder of the critical importance of service uptime.
Service outages are often caused by cable dig-ups, which in return are caused by inaccurate or improperly marked cable locates.
Having accuracy in your cable locates all boils down to having your cable in top condition. Ground faults, if left unaddressed, will affect the accuracy and distance your locate signal is able to travel. Worse yet, ground faults can also impact your brand reputation and loyalty if they deteriorate to the point where your customers experience signal degradation or downtime.
Cable Monitoring systems show you the damage that will impact your locate accuracy. Armed with this intel, you’re able to fix these minor issues when they occur, ensuring that your locates will be accurate, that your network stays up and running, and most importantly: that your customers stay happy.