Carpentersville-area Comcast customers who prefer in-store interactions have to drive a little farther to get it.
Recently, Comcast closed its customer service center at 300 Carpenter Blvd., according to company officials.
Jack Segal, regional vice president for public relations, said Comcast officials have been closing some customer service centers when they’ve had the ability to put in a retail store nearby.
An Xfinity store opened in Schaumburg last year and in Batavia this month, Segal said, and a Crystal Lake store is expected to open in early 2016.
At those retail stores, along with product and service demos, customers can pay bills, pick up and return equipment, and get assistance from trained sales consultants, according to a news release.
“It’s a really nice environment where you can sit and play with our products and get a sense of what our products are like and what they can do,” Segal said.
An increase in people paying their bills online is decreasing foot traffic in some of the service centers, he added.
“People are going online and doing automatic withdrawals from their accounts, so not a lot of people were coming into those facilities. That’s why we’ve started to close some of them,” Segal said.
The Carpenter Boulevard facility will still house the technical operations office and warehouse, which together have about 40 employees.
“So we’ll still have a huge presence in Carpentersville,” Segal said.
The five people who were employed at the service center can look for other Comcast jobs in the region, Segal said. Those who choose not to will be offered a severance package.
Erin Sauder is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
