I’ve been bitching about Comcast on Twitter this week. My internet connection drops in the middle of day, greatly impacting my productivity. Plus, it’s irritating to pack up and head to my local coffee shop on a regular basis. Coffee shops say “free wifi”, but they want you buy something if you plan to sit at their tables for any length of time.

Anyway, after a few tweets about my situation, I was contacted by @comcastbonnie who offered her help.

She wasn’t specific about how she could help, so after a few public tweets back and forth, she followed me and asked me to DM (direct message) her my phone number.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t give out my phone number to strangers who claim to be customer service representatives for a utility. After all, it wouldn’t take much to create a profile that looked like this:

@comcastbonnie's Twitter profile

At my reluctance, she told me to Google her or contact @comcastcares (another unverified Twitter account) to see if she was legit. Those Google results aren’t all that, @comcastbonnie! If there’s a company page, you should work harder to make sure it comes out on top. I would have felt better about it if she had directed me straight to her profile on Comcast. Would it be too much trouble for the company to give their Twitter team some validation? I’m also irritated that she expects me to work to verify her authenticity.

Fortunately for @comcastbonnie, someone I knew had already trusted her and vouched that she was on the up and up:

@jackvinson vouches for @comcastbonnie

If companies continue to use social media outlets to extend their customer service, then they’ll need to work a little harder to be credible, IMHO. If they require any kind of personal or account information in order to conduct business, then I should have an iron-clad way of checking who they are before continuing to use social media to solve the issue. My two cents.

In the meantime, anyone have a good alternative to Comcast? DSL, perhaps? I’ve run my course with this company. Thanks!