Comcast doesn’t get a lot of love for its customer service. Even the cable company’s CEO has admitted it’s an embarrassment.
On Monday, the company unveiled its latest attempt at fixing the problem by saying it will triple the number of people who handle customer complaints via social media. Comcast is hiring 40 new “social care specialists” to join its current 20-person social media customer service staff, the company said in a blog post.
The social team is charged with answering the questions and complaints of Comcast customers via Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. The social care specialists will be hired to help customers solve issues with their Comcast service, or to set up appointments with the company’s technical support staff.
“With a much bigger team, we’ll be able to support customers across more platforms. And we’ll be able to get to them faster,” Comcast’s senior vice president of customer service, Tom Karinshak, said in the blog post.
Comcast (CMCSA) is just starting the search for finding recruits to fill its new social media customer service positions. Of course, even with the new hires, the company will still have just 60 people to cover the roughly 22 million Comcast customers nationwide. And, that customer pool would grow even deeper should the company’s planned $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable earn government approval.
In November, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said he was “embarrassed” and “disappointed” after learning of one of the many high-profile customer service complaints to concern the company in recent years.
Cable companies generally have terrible reputations when it comes to customer service, but Comcast failed to meet even those low expectations last summer when one customer recorded an eight-minute phone call with a company representative who filibustered his attempts to cancel his service. That recording went viral after the customer posted it online, inspiring other Comcast subscribers to share their own tales of poor customer service.
In September, Comcast named Charlie Herrin its senior vice president of the “customer experience,” a move the company promised would “ensure that we are delighting our customers at each touch point.”
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