Tuesday, May 20, 2008

What has happened to the Country Club Plaza?

When I was living on Brookside, my favorite places to go were the Brooksider, ReVerse and the Granfalloon. Now that I live in Olathe, we don't get down to the Plaza that often but about a month ago we decided to venture down to see what we have been missing. Apparently nothing! The Brooksider has not changed (and we like that) but ReVerse? We were there around 11 PM on a Saturday night and it was empty. I have heard the the P&L District is sucking the business away. I had a problem with ReVerse anyway. You would think that as a good customer, one who continually stops in and tips pretty well, that the manager would be more courteous but not JD. Not only do the employees there talk bad about the guy but one night I tried to get his attention to discuss something and he completely blew me off. When I took my parents there for dinner, and the food was awful, we got the excuse that it was a new chef but no one made any attempt to resolve it. No manager stopped by to see what was wrong and I knew the server felt not only bad but left out there to fend for herself. JD appears to be the type of manager who doesn't actually appreciate his customers but rather want to turn-and-burn the crowd over. Get the old ones out, who are just hanging around and drinking, and move new ones in hoping that the big cash spender will magically walk in. JD...if I managed the nightclub that I once did the way you manage ReVerse I would have put the club out of business.

ComCast - Good Service, Not-So-Good Support

This is my first blog. Even after having been on computers since I was 10 (the TRS-80 from Radio Shack was the hot item) I have never gotten into blogging before. But here I am. I am a big believer in customer service and support. If I don't get it then I will demand it. As the owner of my own business I want to be treated with the same respect that my customers expect from me.

My first blog is going to be about ComCast. My wife had ComCast years ago but dropped them due to both service and support issues. We have been with Dish Network and AT&T for over a year but when recent storms rolled through Olathe, we quickly lost our Dish signal (no TV) and the DSL from AT&T was cutting in and out. I decided to check around and decided to give ComCast another try. I haggled with them for over a week until we got a deal so good we just couldn't turn it down. It include the TV, Internet and telephone for about $100 per month. Included at no additional cost were 2 HDTV DVR's, the cable modem and the installation. A pretty good deal.

The installation was this past Saturday. When the tech left I realized that I was not pulling an Internet signal through my router. I called ComCast and the 1st woman told me that it was normal and to wait 12 hours and it would be fine. Even I knew that if it wasn't working right then it was not going to work later on. I called and got another guy who laughed off the 1st lady's 12-wait period and then tried to walk me through some steps that had nothing to do with restoring the router to work with them modem. He went as far as to say that it would be against federal law (yep...he said that) for him to assist me with the router. I called Belkin right up and 5 minutes later everything was fixed.

So we have these DVR's which, after only 6 hours of recording non-HD channels, showed full. I tried ComCast's online chat and was told that the tech didn't know the reason for the problem and that I should be calling Motorola up since they were the manufacturer. I also asked if the USB ports on the DVR were active so I could maybe plug in an external drive to expand the DVR capacity. Again, call Motorola. I called ComCast tech support and was told straight out that even though ComCast provided me with the DVR the tech support guys have had no hands-on training so none of my questions could be answered.

I am liking the service so far (good signals across the board) but getting any straight answers to tech questions looks to be something I am going to have to contend with until someone steps up to the plate to get some answers.