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Another Comcast customer-service gaffe - this one vulgar and viral

Comcast Corp.'s national reputation for shaky customer service was rocked again Thursday, and in a particularly unseemly and profane fashion.

Comcast Corp.'s national reputation for shaky customer service was rocked again Thursday, and in a particularly unseemly and profane fashion.

A customer in Spokane, Wash., said the cable-TV giant changed his first name on his bill and his online account after he canceled his cable service because of financial hardships. A worker substituted his actual first name, Ricardo, with a vulgarity in its billing system.

Charles Herrin, senior vice president for Comcast customer experience, personally apologized to the Browns in a phone call and said Thursday in a blog posting that it was an "unacceptable situation."

The employee responsible, Herrin said in the posting, "will no longer be working on behalf of Comcast."

Lisa Brown, 37, wife of Ricardo and the one who complained to the office that authorizes cable franchising in Spokane, said Thursday that she was "shocked" by the incident.

Comcast agreed to refund two years of her bills, she said. The company said it was working with Brown but would not talk about specifics.

"We were speechless that that would make it out the door," she said of the mailed bill, which identified her husband as "Asshole Brown."

The name change, even if by a rogue employee or contractor, is the latest Comcast customer fiasco to go viral as the cable company faces intense government scrutiny over its proposed deal to acquire Time Warner Cable Inc. for $45 billion.

Deal opponents have complained that Comcast's acquisition of Time Warner Cable would be the merger of two companies with horrific national customer-service ratings.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index pegged Time Warner Cable Inc. as the nation's most unloved company in 2014, with its Internet service rated 236th out of 236 companies in customer satisfaction, and its TV service rated 235th. Comcast Corp.'s Xfinity Internet service placed 234th out of 236 and its TV service landed at 232 in the list released in May.

Comcast executives, including chief executive Brian Roberts and cable division head Neil Smit, have said it is a high priority to improve customer service. They and others point to the huge volume of phone calls to Comcast call centers and say the overwhelming majority are dealt with professionally and satisfactorily.

Tom Karinshak, senior vice president of customer service, said Thursday of the distasteful name change that "it's out there and we have to own it." But he also noted that it was "inappropriate behavior of one employee at one of our partners."

Karinshak said Comcast was making progress on improving its customer service. "We are on a journey and have an end point, and we will get there," he said.

The latest incident, though, seems to raise new questions as to whether the Philadelphia telecommunications giant can get there, at least in the short term, and continues a trend of hugely publicized customer-service gaffes.

Last July, Comcast subscriber Ryan Block posted online a recording of his attempt to cancel his Internet service. A call-center employee boisterously argued that Block shouldn't do it. The recording has been downloaded more than five million times.

Other Comcast subscribers have since copied Block's technique of posting interactions with Comcast customer representatives on social media.

In October, San Francisco accountant Conal O'Rourke sued Comcast in federal court in Northern California, contending that Comcast got him fired after he complained to Comcast headquarters about $312.50 in overcharges on his bills and $2,000 in equipment he had not ordered. He was seeking $1 million in damages in the suit.

In November, an X1 set-top box outage swept the nation, resulting in lost TV service. Also in November, a Comcast billing conversion to new software created additional service outages in the Philadelphia region.

Comcast subscribers complained that they couldn't get their service restored - or a technician to come to their home - for days.

Claire Simmers, chair of the department of management at St. Joseph's University business school, said Thursday that as Comcast has gotten bigger with its NBCUniversal acquisition, it may simply be too difficult for top management to deal with customer service.

"It's all about revenue and cost, and not about the customer," she said. "You have many, many layers [of management] now and a larger geographic region."

Susan Mudambi, associate professor of marketing at the Fox School of Business at Temple University, said she has sympathy for call-center employees who have to interact with unhappy customers.

Where this incident "crossed the line," she said, was when the employee changed the name in the Comcast billing system.

"It's almost like employee hacking," she said. "They did not protect the customer's private data."

Karinshak, the customer-service chief, said Comcast has "the right controls in place to protect credit-card information and other customer information."

Consumer advocate Christopher Elliott, based in Orlando, was the first to report the name-change fiasco on his blog, Boarding Area. Elliott said he had 61,000 unique page views on the story on his blog, a record. But the story really gained legs when national websites such as Gawker and Wired picked it up.

Elliott said Thursday that it seemed so outrageous that he didn't believe it when the Browns first contacted him by e-mail this week. Then Lisa Brown e-mailed him a scanned copy of the bill - which he posted - and Comcast confirmed it.

People had a visceral reaction because they suspected that was the way Comcast thought of its customers, and now they have it in writing, he said.

"An apology," Elliott said, "is meaningless unless they change how they do business."

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