[netruk44]

Years ago I lived in an apartment with intermittent connection issues.

I phoned xfinity support who said they’d send a tech out at no cost to me.

The tech comes, finds bad connections in the shared external apartment box, fixes them, leaves without entering my apartment.

Xfinity sends me a support bill for the tech.

I call xfinity support to complain saying they said the tech would be free. The support agent says there’s nothing they can do and also that I should sign up for their support plan to get a 50% discount on the fee.

I tell them to cancel my internet subscription because I won’t support a company with deceptive billing practices. They give me 3 retention offers (the last one being an additional 25% discount on the tech fee). I decline because they told me it would be free. My internet is scheduled to be cancelled.

I go to twitter (as it was called at the time), and @ xfinity support with this same story.

Someone from that Twitter account DMs me and I told them that if they cancel the technician fee, they can leave my internet subscription active.

They do so with exactly no fuss.

I don’t know why, but apparently publicly @‘ing xfinity on Twitter gets you better support than calling them and actually cancelling your internet.

[op00to]

Twitter support escalation worked in the mid 2010s, but basically now the only effective escalation is to send a letter via overnight mail to the CEO office. This has worked for me for major ISPs, cell phone companies, furniture retailers, hell - even the government after some vital records I asked to get duplicates of came unreadable 5 times in a row.

[qingcharles]

I inherited this trick from my father who had probably used it since the 1950s. It can work wonders. Except Cash App who closed my account for "contacting employees outside of the support chain."

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> via overnight mail

In the USA, what is this, precisely?

[op00to]

Priority or Express mail. FedEx or UPS can also send documents. The idea is to bypass the normal mail room as much as possible and to get the thing on the desk of someone who is not limited by stupid rules.

[thallium205]

FedEx

[PaulHoule]

Which is particularly effective in this day and age when many businesses don’t handle a lot of incoming physics mail —- send a FedEx to a particular individual at a particular location and it is not like they have a ‘mailroom’ that handles this routinely, it is a non-routine event that somebody shows up at the front desk to deliver something and inherently memorable.

[op00to]

Important legal documents are shipped via FedEx every day. Can’t just ignore it like you ignore regular mail.

[vedmed]

How do you get the CEO's office address?

[ghjnut]

I had issues too that they sent a tech support out for while warning me "If they find it's your fault, you will be assessed a charge". The tech came out, climbed my local pole and then went down the street and climbed another one. He said it was a busted port and he moved me to a new one, and put in a service request to upgrade as it was out of ports.

CenturyLink sends me a bill for maintenance. After tons of back and forth I got to the point where I said "So can you state for the record since I'm recording this phone call, that I the customer should have climbed the telephone pole to remedy the issue".

After that he finally decides to get in touch with the fiber contractor they use who emphasized it was no fault of my own and they cleared the charge.