Former Comcast Employee Says Viral Call Made Rep a 'Scapegoat'

Apparently the now-infamous Comcast customer service call that went viral wasn't that unusual.

Employees were taught to use such "retention" methods on customers, a former Comcast customer account executive told Bloomberg Businessweek. The eight-minute clip of a customer representative refusing to stop AOL Vice President Ryan Block's Comcast service spread throughout the Internet earlier this week. 

"Unless a customer was moving, we were encouraged to use retention techniques," Lauren Bruce, a former Comcast customer account executive, told Businessweek.

In 2005, Bruce began working at Insight Communications, a company that later became part of Comcast. She left in 2009 and declined to say where she is working now.

"If someone is saying, 'screw my service, I hate you,' you would say, 'Hey, do you want phone too?'" Bruce described Comcast techniques when dealing with customers.

Comcast employees are told that the goal is always to keep customers or even to persuade them to purchase a more expensive service. Bruce explained the scenario in the call that went viral.

"In this situation, on the call--when the representative was demanding reasons--what he was trying to do was up-sell," Bruce said. "But you did have to enter reasons why someone was canceling. Sometimes it was better to just make something up and plug it in."

Bruce, who termed the customer representative in the clip a scapegoat for the company's issues, said Comcast didn't give its employees enough support and encouraged "band-aid" fixes for customers instead of finding long-term solutions.

"I always felt really disempowered to do the right thing. ... It was all about the dollar," Bruce remembered. "They didn't care about the hours you had to work or whether or not their policies made sense for you in their job. The system was really outdated and slow, which is always a drag when you're trying to help someone efficiently."