Comcast apologizes for calling customer ‘asshole’ on his bill

Comcast is under fire after calling a customer an “asshole” on a bill.

After a Spokane, Wash., customer of the cable giant tried to cancel his family’s Comcast subscription this month, their next bill changed his first name from “Ricardo” to “Asshole.”

{mosads}“I am shocked,” his wife, Lisa Brown, told blogger Christopher Elliott.

The family was “never rude,” she added, but merely tried to get out of their contract with Comcast, which has long struggled with poor customer service.

“It could have been that person was upset because I didn’t take the offer,” she told Elliott, who posted a copy of the bill on his blog.

Comcast has reportedly apologized to Brown, and called the name change “completely unacceptable and inappropriate.”

“We have zero tolerance for this type of disrespectful behavior and are conducting a thorough investigation to determine what happened,” said Comcast spokeswoman Jenni Moyer. “We are working with our customer to make this right and will take appropriate steps to prevent this from happening again.” 

It’s not the first time Comcast has been in trouble for its treatment of subscribers who want to jump ship.

Last summer, an 8-minute customer service call went viral in which a subscriber repeatedly tried — and failed — to cancel his subscription with Comcast. 

Customer service has been a perennial problem for Comcast, which is currently attempting to seek regulatory review for its pending $45 billion merger with Time Warner Cable.  

The company scrambled to contain the damage from the incident on Thursday.

Charlie Herrin, Comcast’s senior vice president for cable customers’ experience, in a blog post said the company has been talking with staffers and is looking at “a number of technical solutions” to prevent the slip-up from happening again.

“We’re working hard to transform the customer experience and all of our employees play an important role in making that happen,” he wrote. “We’ll take every opportunity to learn from our mistakes and fix issues to make their experience better.”

— This story was updated at 11:46 a.m.