Comcast's Curious Display of Showing Its Concern

Editor's note: this post has no connection with today's article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about how Comcast is monitoring blogs now to try and help boost its customer service ratings. I meant to write about this a few days ago but just got around to it now.

Here's my story:

About a month ago, I called up to ask for a Comcast service technician to come out and replace one of our cable boxes because I had various small annoyances with it, which I won't go into detail here. They promptly and amicably took care of it by giving us a new box for free. Good stuff.

A couple weeks after that, Comcast sent a greeting card-sized mailer to me that apologized for the problems I had and gave me a voucher for a free On-Demand movie. Good stuff.

Then this past week I received another greeting card-sized mailer, which again apologized for the inconvenience and this time sent me a coupon for $10 off any purchase of $50 or more at espnshop.com. Huh?

So let me get this straight.. for their technical difficulties, I should go out and spend money just to take advantage of a small discount? Thanks for that generosity... I think I'll go ahead and save my money instead.

Here are other variations I would have strongly considered to be sensible compared to this silly offer:

A. $10 voucher for my purchase of anything on espnshop.com.
B. $10 voucher if I submitted an opinion survey about my experience with Comcast
C. $10 voucher, in some form or another, where I don't HAVE to spend money in order to get value from it

To me, this whole concept of giving an inconvenience customer a $10 voucher for a $50purchase is a good idea gone sadly wrong. Instead of making a positive customer "touch", they're making this into a blatant sales ploy, but with poor timing at that because before I was just mildly irked about the inconvenience, whereas now I'm steadily creeping up to disgruntled.

So my voucher goes in the recycling bin along with every other inadequate marketing junk mail I receive...