LAKE BUENA VISTA, Florida — A panel of top small cable company executives said that while improving the overall customer experience is a primary goal for operators — especially as broadband competition heats up — maintaining a strong line of communication with customers is essential.

“I think A-plus-B equals customer experience,” said Buckeye Broadband president Geoff Shook at The Independent Show panel session titled “The Impact of Industry Evolution” and moderated by NCTC president and CEO Lou Borrelli. “I think the A would be customer service, but the B part that we have to zero in on is customer care. We have the opportunity as the more personalized provider to accelerate to accentuate the customer care, the fact that the service doesn't stop at the side of the house.” 

Schurz Communications chief technology officer Tom Williams added that it is essential that operators not only keep the lines of communication open with customers, but that they communicate in the way they want to. 

Also from The Independent Show: Borrelli Says New Name Emphasizes NCTC Strength

“Maybe they don’t want to make a phone call,” Williams said. “Maybe they want to do a text chat over their phone. They want to get the information and talk to us the way that they want to talk to us, not in the way that we want them to talk to us.”

Shook added that while communication is essential, techs and other cable employees should keep the message simple, direct and with as little jargon as possible. Sometimes, he said, too much information can “torpedo” the customer experience. 

“There’s a razor’s edge between too much communication and not enough,” Shook said. “We tend to not saturate but thoroughly communicate.”

Communication also means letting customers know in advance when there is going to be a service disruption due to planned maintenance or other factors, he added.  

“Bad news does not get better with time,” Shook said. “If we know that there is something intrusive getting ready to happen, in the field we like to make absolutely sure that we’ve communicated it thoroughly so it is not a surprise.”

Williams added that operators have to consider what messaging they are sending out to customers and be careful not to flood them with marketing messages that force them to overlook important service information.

“You can throw so many marketing messages out that they're not going to listen to the technology message of an outage,” Williams said. “There's a real balance you have to play there, or else their not going to listen to ‘There’s going to be a 5 minute outage on Tuesday night at 12:30 a.m.,’ and then they're online and it drops anyway, because you’ve sent so many marketing messages that they just delete all the messages coming from us.”

Conway Corp. chief marketing officer Crystal Kemp said it is important for operators to stress that customer experience isn’t just a priority, it is one of their core values.

“Because our priorities can change, our values usually don't,” Kemp said. “We are constantly putting that in front of people, in front of our employees, in front of our customers, to say along with reliability, along with innovation, along with all of those things, customer experience is a core value.”  

Operators also stressed the importance of their local presence, which gives companies a regular opportunity to reinforce their brand. 

“I’ve been to more franchise meetings than I care to talk about, but every single one of them they are appreciative of how local we are,” Williams said. “It is their residents that are answering the phones every day, or responding to a message or coming to their homes.” 

He added that it makes a big difference, especially when small operators are competing against larger operators that have huge bureaucracies and make it difficult for customers to access care reps. 

“It’s not hard,” Williams said. “You have to make it easy to work with. You want to delight your customer.” ￭

The Cable Center unveiled its five-year plan Jan. 19, including the expansion of its Intrapreneurship Academy, in an effort to bolster its brand and role as members evolve into connectivity companies.  

The Cable Center said its team has been working for the past year with 34 industry leaders and experts on all facets of its business plan -- from brand to finance to program development -- and now is focused on implementation, including continuing to host industry conferences, panel discussions, events like the Cable Hall of Fame and maintaining a strong link with academia.

“Through this detailed work, we know affinity for The Cable Center runs deep among cable veterans and there is continued desire to modernize and advance our industry innovation story,” The Cable Center CEO Jana Henthorn said in a press release. “We take our responsibility to uphold and preserve our industry’s legacy seriously. By drawing on our depth of knowledge around the achievements of the original entrepreneurs, we enable and inspire a new generation of connectivity industry innovators.”

The Cable Center is addressing that shift toward connectivity, especially amid the COVID-19 crisis, through the expansion of the Intrapreneurship Academy. Citing a 2020 McKinsey Survey of corporate executives, where 85% of those asked said they were concerned that the pandemic would have a lasting impact on customer needs, but only 21% had the expertise, resources, and commitment to successfully pursue new growth -- the Center believes a beefed up academy can help.

The Cable Center said it will relaunch the Intrapreneurship Academy brand and its website, while also expanding its course offerings. The Center also will provide a community to share resources and ideas, publish data and information on intrapreneurship, agility, and the customer experience (CX); and tap top industry leaders as course speakers and mentors.

“The connectivity industry is ever-expanding. As our industry evolves, so does The Cable Center,” said Chris Lammers, chief operating officer of CableLabs and member for The Cable Center Board of Directors Executive Committee, in a press release. “They are making the right choices to keep pace with change and to develop our greatest source of innovation – our people.”

Formerly known as one stand-alone course, Intrapreneurship Academy now includes two courses, with more on the horizon. According to The Cable Center, 164 leaders have graduated from the flagship course Driving Intrapreneurship (formerly known as Intrapreneurship Academy) and this spring will launch Leading With Agility, a course designed to help seasoned and emerging leaders develop skills during a period of unplanned change and unexpected opportunity. Their premier CX course is also scheduled to launch in late 2021.

Liberty Global has been an enthusiastic backer of the Intrapreneurship program and also helped shape the Center’s five-year plan. In a press release, Liberty Global SVP and chief people officer Amy Blair, also a member of the Center’s board of directors, said the company has invested in the Academy since its inception in 2017, and looks forward to the future.  

“We have seen firsthand the extraordinary benefits of Intrapreneurship Academy for our participants and how the approach complements what we do at Liberty Global,” Blair said in the release. “Our people have honed their skills to think more innovatively and to contribute in new ways. We are excited to continue our partnership.”

While virtual MVPDs (multichannel video programming distributors) and over-the-top competitors are each trying to outdo the other with increased service flexibility and lower prices, top-notch customer care is becoming the differentiator for traditional pay TV service providers today.

Cable operators, who have spent the past several years focusing on the nuts and bolts of customer care -- narrowing appointment windows, improving on-time service and increasing network capacity and reliability -- are now taking a more macro approach, concentrating on bettering the overall customer experience and ensuring that the customer journey is an enjoyable one.

Join B&C /Multichannel News Senior Editor Michael Farrell, along with two of the cable industry's top customer care professionals, and learn tips about the following:

•  Customer experience and customer journey mapping
• How terms like "trust," "effort," "reliability," "likability" and "forgiveness" are becoming essential pieces in the overall approach to customer service
• What role customer service and improving customer experience has in rebranding efforts

Have a scheduling Conflict? We have you covered! Register for the live event and we’ll send you the on-demand recording shortly after the broadcast date.

Speakers

Dr. Patti has deep international experience through consulting and academic appointments throughout Europe, Australia, and Southeast Asia, with extensive experience in building, delivering, and evaluating curriculum in a wide range of settings, including doctoral seminars, MBA and other specialized postgraduate courses, undergraduate programs, and professional and corporate learning. He has special expertise in case method learning and has coordinated several case learning workshops, including a Harvard Business School case workshop. Dr. Patti holds a A.B. (history and literature), an M.S. (advertising) and a Ph.D., all from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.

Courtney has been an integral member of the Atlantic Broadband Customer Care organization for the past 12 years. In her role, Courtney and her team work to ensure the company is delivering an outstanding customer care experience. She oversees residential and business call center operations including phone, chat and dispatch across all four operating regions. Courtney holds a BA from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently pursuing an MBA from St. Francis University. She is also a member of the Young Professionals of the Alleghenies.

Click here to watch! 

If you’re a cable subscriber, you’ve been a participant in the slow but steady transformation of a complex and multifaceted industry. While most consumers may think that turning on the television to watch CNN or stream Netflix is a simple process, making these processes work seamlessly has been years in the making.

The television was once the central component of our home entertainment experience; now, it could be a wireless phone or tablet, laptop or other screen-based device. Consumers with 4G/LTE-connected devices can get HD-quality pictures without the need for WiFi, and the wireless providers have created packages to lure them to do exactly that. Competition has cost the cable industry a large portion of younger audiences, who now use Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Roku or their wireless devices to stream online services such as Hulu, Netflix and Amazon. These new options create business headaches for the cable companies, who must either coexist, cohabitate or partner with these content providers.

Related: Millennials More Likely to Stream, Less Likely to Avoid Ads

What does this mean for cable MSOs? It means a forced hand to innovate, and likely faster than they’ve been used to. Over the past five years, we have seen investments in fiber, expansion into wireless services, higher broadband speeds and a broader service portfolio. This is all happening in areas where many U.S. consumers only have a single cable provider or ISP they can subscribe to.

However, the competitive threats from outside have also been a driving factor in forcing these changes. Together, these influences have driven providers to look further than the service-centric portfolio, into operational efficiency, customer support, workforce management and in a generic sense, greater levels of automation — and all done without causing any disruption to services.

Related: Global OTT Video Viewing Doubles, Conviva Finds

The cable and broadband industry’s focus of all this innovation must been centered on one key outcome — customer retention. The reasoning is simple: Regardless of what may be a broadband monopoly in certain markets, consumers are still cutting the cord. Research firm eMarketer states that in 2017, a total of 22.2 million U.S. adults will have cut the cord on cable, satellite or telco TV services. That is up 33% from 16.7 million in 2016. Enterprise customers are a growing portion of the total base but remain a small fraction of the overall business today. These numbers paint a somewhat dire long-term picture for the industry. That makes the customer experience one of the most, if not the most critical factor that companies must embrace, and the cable industry must take note.

Investing in the Customer Experience
Cable providers should be investing in innovation around the customer experience in both tactical and strategic ways. While some of these innovations may not be customer-focused, all are business-focused, which in turn has a direct impact on customer satisfaction, retention and churn reduction. Following are some of the more effective methods that can have a positive impact on the customer relationship.

Intelligent Use of Net Promoter Scores For Both Organization and Employee: Investment in the right tools to gathering data at every step of the customer lifecycle is one of the best real-time methods to gain access to customer expectations and sentiment. Cable providers should be gathering NPS regarding home installs, follow-ups to calls or visits designed to speed problem resolutions, and all activities concerning issue resolution.

Greater Use of AI and Analytics For Network Performance Management: The use of a broad range of tools to measure network performance, node health, enhanced correlation across a broad range of end points and workforce guidance on next best action creates process efficiencies that help eliminate customer facing problems.

Increased Use of DevOps to Speed Innovation Cycles: DevOps is gaining ground across the entire communications industry as a way to accelerate product development, increase efficiency and become more responsive to changing customer and business needs. The DevOps methodology can offer the cable MSO major advantages as they take on digital transformation and address customer expectations. These include accelerated time-to-market for new services, increased flexibility and optimized cost-efficiency.

Virtualization, Starting With vCPE/vCCAP: The move to virtualization in cable is well underway. CableLabs, in a recent Open Networking assessment, said the combined technologies will lower OpEx and CapEx and increase revenues from new services provided to consumers. MSOs also have the opportunity to leverage the newfound flexibility of virtualizing service endpoints, pushing cost at the end-point level down, and moving functionality to the cloud. Going to a virtual CCAP architecture migrates the current headend from RF to digital, allowing the MSO to provide IP centric services (video and data) from the headend to the node. This in turn removes the need for a physical CCAP/CMTS, reducing costs, complexity and still allowing for easy integration into the cable provider’s existing OSS/BSS.

vCPE lets the MSO place a low cost “dumb box” in the home and have all services and operations fed directly from the cloud. This translates into reduce costs for hardware, more “plug and play” functionality, fewer truck rolls to the home to replace out-of-date CPE, and the ability to push more innovative services more quickly, keeping the customers engaged and loyal.

Winning the Retention Game
While each of these innovations is more or less invisible to most cable customers, the investment in each provides a tangible benefit to the customer journey and experience. The rising expectations of the customer will continue to drive innovation and created disruption across the IT landscape. Opportunities to serve the customer have never been more significant, and the biggest changes are yet to come. If innovation still has a predominant focus on customer outcome, then the cost of that innovation will ultimately be “priceless.” In today’s competitive market, that’s a cost worth investing in.

Hulu on Tuesday (November 28) opened the doors to its “Viewer Operations Experience” HQ, a building in San Antonio, Texas, that spans 45,000 square feet across two floors and today employs more than 300.

Hulu announced plans for the new facility in April, noting then that more than 500 jobs are projected to be based there by later next year. The building, Hulu’s second largest following its Santa Monica HQ, is opening more than six months after Hulu beta-launched its new live TV service.

The new San Antonio building, which is about three times larger than the temporary site Hulu first used in the city, is home to the company’s customer-focused functions, including customer support operations and service and network operations. In August, Hulu announced the hiring of Linda Cardenas as head of viewer experience operations, who leads Hulu’s viewer experience team in San Antonio.

Hulu’s capital investment in the new headquarters is expected to exceed $13 million, San Antonio Express-News reported, citing Texas Enterprise Fund records. Cardenas also told the paper that about 30 of Hulu’s employees moved from California to work at the new facility in San Antonio.

Hulu notes that the new facility has more than 400 desks, with 351 that are “hotel” desks that are shared by “Advocates” across s shifts. Conference rooms there are named after San Antonio landmarks, Marvel superheroes and Mexican loteria, a Bingo-style game that uses images on a deck of cards, with each image having its own assigned name and number.

Among other elements, Hulu’s new building has a training room with a movable wall and uses infrared technology that can sense when it’s being used as one or two rooms, and an operations center/command center with 12 screens that monitor Hulu’s service 24/7. 

The facility also has a gender-neutral restroom, a game room with massage chairs and arcade and board games, and a “micro-market” that offers lunch and snack options around the clock. 

Altice USA has opened its first customer Experience Center in the New York Tri-State area, with an Optimum-branded store location at the Garden State Plaza Mall in Paramus, N.J., getting the honors.

Altice USA, which acquired Cablevision Systems in June 2016, said its second Experience Center will open in the coming months in the Westfield South Shore Mall in Bay Shore, Long Island.

Altice USA said the new stores are next-gen retail stores where customers can interact with Optimum-branded TV, broadband, WiFi and voice products, and purchase third-party merchandise.

The new store in Paramus features an “open floor design” that occupies 3,695 square feet. Among the demos and interactive display are those for Altice One, the company’s new all-in-one service hub/device, which runs on a new interface.

Also on show and for sale are smart home connected products from Nest, including connected thermostats, smoke and CO alarms and Nest cams. Altice USA and the Google-owned company announced a product and services partnership in late October.

RELATED: Altice USA Hawks Nest Smart Home Products

Altice USA is also using the store to sell Samsung TVs, tablets, home theatre equipment and accessories, and has set up an area for children’s gaming and television programming, as well as one dedicated to small business services.

It won't be surprising to see Altice USA use the new outlets to sell mobile services once a product launches that comes way of its "full" MVNO agreement with Sprint. 

Update: Altice USA's traditional retail stores will continue to handle equipment exchanges and returns of equipment such as cable boxes, routers, remotes, and to handle bill payments and other questions.

“What an exciting and unique opportunity for consumers to come together in a community-centric environment at our Experience Centers to test drive current and future technologies, view educational product and online service demos, purchase products, plus have a little fun,” said Hakim Boubazine, Altice USA’s co-president and COO, said in a statement. “With our Experience Centers, we are changing the way we interact with our customers and the way they interact with us by providing a more personal, in-store experience that showcases the many ways we enable seamless connectivity.”

Tied to a focus on improving its customer service capabilities, Comcast has kicked off the national launch of RealTime Assist, a personalized service messaging platform that provides service info to customers on mobile phones, their My Account app or to the TV screen via X1.

RELATED: AI, Machine Learning to Change the Customer Experience, Comcast’s Watson Says

The messaging platform, delivered to the customer’s preferred channel of communication, keeps subs apprised of things such as technician appointments, equipment updates, info about self-install kits, network upgrades and planned outages. Some also direct customers to how-to videos.

RELATED: Comcast Folds Customer Experience, Service Teams into Technology and Products Division

Comcast said the platform has already been used to send more than 4.5 million messages to customers. About 16 million customers are using the My Account app to manage their accounts. 

“The launch of RealTime Assist will help us fit into our customers’ lives by providing customers the right information at the right time,” Piers Lingle, SVP of customer experience solutions, said in a statement. “Customers have told us they don’t want to call us to confirm their appointment or have to ask when their new equipment will arrive, and now they don’t need to.”

Hulu said it has hired Linda Cardenas as head of viewer experience operations.

In that role, Cardenas will lead Hulu’s viewer experience team at the company’s new contact center in San Antonio, Texas, and report to Karen Van Kirk, Hulu’s vice president of viewer experience.

Cardenas comes on board following the May beta launch of Hulu’s live TV product and Hulu’s announced plans for a Viewer Experience Operations headquarters in San Antonio.

Hulu said Cardenas will be the site leader for more than 500 employees at the San Antonio facility and will head up customer-focused efforts and be tasked with improving service operations.

Prior to Hulu, Cardenas was SVP of customer service and voice of the customer at SWBC, a financial services company that provides insurance, mortgage, and investment services to financial institutions, businesses, and individuals.

She holds a Bachelor of Business Administration, Marketing from the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Adding a capability that’s been popular with ride-hailing services such as Uber, Time Warner Cable said it’s testing a feature on its TWC TechTracker tool that will let customers track a tech’s exact location while they are en route to a service appointment.

TWC is testing the new feature in Southern California and expects to launch it across its footprint by the end of May. The operator developed the capability via a partnership with Glympse, a company that specializes in providing temporary, dynamic location services.

Comcast and Dish Network have also introduced similar capabilities.

The MSO launched its TechTracker mobile app last year as part of a broader effort focused on customer service and experience improvements and enhancements.

TWC said the enhanced version of TechTracker tool with Glympse’s technology provides customers with a unique Web link, valid only for their service appointment, delivered via text or email (whichever the customer prefers). Once the tech is en route, the customer will see the progress on a live map, show the route, and provide an estimated time of arrival. The tool also supplies the customer with the technician’s first name, photo and identification number. The unique web link expires once the technician arrives at the appointment location.

“We continue to give our customers simple ways to easily manage service appointments on their own time and in their own way,” said John Keib, TWC’s EVP and Chief Operating Officer, Residential Services, said in a statement. “Utilizing Glympse's location sharing technology significantly enhances the in-home customer service experience and reinforces our commitment to on-time appointment arrivals. By providing real-time updates, it allows customers to conveniently plan for their appointments and eliminate any wonder about when the technician will arrive.”

Comcast said it has picked Charleston, S.C., as the spot for a fourth new customer support center, joining others that have been opened or are opening in Spokane, Wash.; Albuquerque, N.M. and Tucson, Ariz.

The new center will employ more than 550 people, Tom Karinshak, Comcast’s SVP, customer service, announced in this blog post, noting that hiring at the new location will get underway this summer.

Comcast hasn’t announced a firm opening date on the new center, but said the new $21.4 million, 80,000 square-foot "Center of Excellence" will be part of a 2,000-acre mixed-use development consisting of office, retail, hotel and residential properties. The facility will located at 3450 Ingleside Boulevard near U.S. Route 78 in North Charleston.

The announcement on the new center comes about a year after Comcast kicked off a major customer care initiative that will include the hiring of 5,500 customer service reps over a span of about three years.

Time Warner Cable said it will launch a new “TechTracker” mobile app companywide by the end of the new year as the MSO spotlighted several customer service  and experience improvements and enhancements Monday in concert with the start of “Customer Service Week.”

The new tracker enables subs to receive appointment reminders, make changes to existing appointments via text, email or the phone. The app also provides customers with the tech’s name, identification number as well as a photo when the technician is en route. Comcast and Dish Network have recently introduced similar tech-tracking capabilities.

TWC said it has also issued an open letter to customers in major newspapers to coincide with the new customer service campaign, noting that it’s got 7,000 U.S. care agents in 36 service centers and north of 13,000 field techs ready to assist.

Among the highlighted commitments is to send a technician within 24 hours, and often the same-day, when a disruption occurs that can’t be resolved remotely.  Customers can also use the My TWC app to request a call from TWC or schedule a call when it’s most convenient to them.  If a customer is on hold, they can schedule a callback.

TWC, which is in the process of being acquired by Charter  Communications, noted that it now offers a one-hour arrival window across its footprint after introducing it in New York City and Los Angeles in 2013.

“We’ve seen where we’re ranked in customer satisfaction surveys and we’re familiar with the perennial jabs from the folks at ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said TWC chairman and CEO Rob Marcus, in a statement.  “We’re telling our customers how we’ve made profound changes over the last two years to better respect their time, provide more value for what they pay us and deliver the kind of experience anyone would expect from a leading entertainment and technology company. The many changes we’ve made are just the beginning of the new TWC service experience.”

TWC also noted that TWC Maxx, its service upgrade program that includes faster broadband speeds, an "enhanced" DVR and more VOD, has seen a 35% reduction in the number of customers who chose to disconnect from either the MSO’s video or Internet service. 

TWC is also stressing these improvements as it continues to lag in the JD Power rankings for customer satisfaction.

And Marcus also addressed why TWC is doing this amid its pending deal with Charter.

“Merger or not, our customers expect and deserve the best customer experience we can deliver,” he said. “Today, we’re telling our customers that we’ve made great strides in delivering that experience over the last couple of years and that we are completely committed to doing even more in the future.”  

Seizing on a growing customer service trend among top MVPDs,  Dish Network has launched My Tech, a Web-based tool that provides customers with real-time status updates on their service appointments.

Similar in some ways to Comcast’s recently expanded Tech ETA feature for its My Account app, Dish’s My Tech enhancement, offered at MyDish.com, lets subs track the arrival of service tech’s while they’re on the road via an interactive digital map. Additionally, My Tech provides other information such as the tech’s name and picture an hour before their estimated arrival.

Dish said My Tech is proprietary software created by the company that incorporates Google Maps’ location access interface.

This video shows My Tech in action:

“We recognize that people want control of their own time and DISH’s My Tech tool helps them get on with their day without waiting on the TV guy,” said Erik Carlson, Dish’s executive vice president of operations, in a statement. “A minute-by-minute countdown and interactive map allow the customer to track their DISH technician to determine when to leave work or if they have time to run to the store.”

Comcast said the failure of some hardware on is backbone that caused local DNS (domain name system) servers to overload was the culprit for an Internet outage that affected the MSO’s customers on the West coast Monday night. 

Following an outage that left service unavailable or degraded for several hours, Comcast restored service to most customers by about 9 p.m. PT.

“A piece of hardware in our backbone network failed yesterday morning,” Mark Muehl, Comcast’s SVP of platform technologies, explained in this blog post apologizing for the outage and noting that Comcast is giving a credit to customers who were impacted. “Hardware issues of this sort are fairly commonplace and redundancy in our network addressed any immediate concern.  Most backbone networks, including Comcast’s, are designed to heal themselves and route traffic along alternate paths much like a detour would route automobile traffic around a street closed for construction.”

He said the issue arose when Internet traffic that “shifted in an unexpected way” overloaded local DNS server capacity. Comcast, he said, has been working to resolve the problem and has brought additional DNS capacity online in the affected areas to prevent it from occurring again. 

"We know that having a fast, reliable connection to the Internet is vital and that interruptions of this sort are unacceptable. We’re sorry that we didn’t live up to that last night," Muehl said. 

For Comcast, the outage happened at particularly inopportune time, coming amid a new American Customer Satisfaction Index report finding that satisfaction ratings for pay TV, Internet and wireless offerings have reached seven-year lows. Comcast, which has launched a big program aimed at improving customer service and the overall customer experience, fell in the latest ACSI rankings.  

Comcast said it has appointed Wendy Liu to the newly created post of vice president of customer experience for the MSO’s Greater Chicago Region, which includes Central and Northern Illinois, Northwest Indiana and Southwest Michigan. 

Reporting to regional senior vice president and business lead John Crowley, Liu will create and institute new practices designed to boost customer experience for the region.

Liu, who joined Comcast in 1999, most recently served as Comcast GCR’s director of project management, where she helped teams manage new product launches, upgrades to company systems and processes and capital projects. Comcast said Liu’s move also follows several initiaitves that are underway that are aimed at improving the customer experience, including the addition of nearly 1,200 bandwidth-boosting nodes the to the GCR network last year and into 2015, reducing truck rolls by more than 6% during 2013 to 2014, and the deployment of more than 750,000 WiFi hotspots in the region.

Comcast is adding the new regional post as the MSO looks to improve its image and customer care capabilities amid its pending acquisition of Time Warner Cable. The appointment of Liu to the new position also comes about four months after Comcast tapped Charlie Herrin as SVP, customer experience.

“Making sure customers have a great experience is Comcast’s number one priority,” Crowley said, in a statement. “Wendy will bring focused, executive expertise to the task, and her appointment will give us an opportunity to build on and accelerate some of the great work we’ve done already to improve customer service.” 

In 2014, Liu received the Chicago Chapter of Women in Cable and Telecommunications “Visionary Leader” award, and in 2011, she received the National Association of Multi-Ethnicity in Cable’s Chicago Chapter’s “Unsung Hero” award.  In 1996, she earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where she researched and studied as a Hughes Fellow.  

Adding to some features that are designed to improve the customer experience, Comcast on Thursday introduced a new call-back feature for the Xfinity My Account App that allows customers to schedule a time window for a Comcast rep to call them back and help iron out their issues.

The feature means customers can avoid being left in hold limbo and put the onus on Comcast to reach out directly at a specific time.

Charlie Herrin, Comcast’s recently-appointed SVP, customer service, explained in this blog post that the feature becomes active through the My Account app if its integrated troubleshooting guide can’t solve the customer’s problem.

“If your issue is still not resolved after going through the troubleshooting steps, there is an option to call us.  But here’s where it gets good.  If you don’t want to call us, we will call you,” Herrin explained. “Simply enter in your phone number, select the time you want us to call you (call times are available in 15 minute windows), and you’re all set.”

The app also provides an option for subs to chat with a rep via Twitter.

Comcast is  also trying out other customer-facing features. Last month, the MSO announced it is testing a new Uber-esque feature for the same app that lets customers track the arrival times of techs and also rate their performance.  Among other recent moves, Comcast has also  inked an agreement that enables customers to return equipment such as set-tops and cable modems to Comcast for free at one of more than 4,400 UPS Store locations. 

As part of ongoing efforts to improve its customer service, Comcast said it’s testing out a new feature for the MSO’s MyAccount app that lets customers track the arrival times of technicians and also rate their performance.

Comcast is rolling out the trial, which tracks the whereabouts of technicians in real time, “outside Boston this week,” Charlie Herrin, Comcast’s recently-appointed SVP, customer service, explained in this blog post about the pilot feature.

According to Herrin, customers with scheduled appointments will be alerted through the MyAccount app when the tech is about 30 minutes away from arriving at the customer’s home, while also allowing customers to track this technician’s progress on a map.

“We’re hoping this will prevent our customers from just needing to sit at home and wait.  They can check the app from the office, or wherever they are, and head home when they see we’re on our way,” Herrin explained. “If we are running late, which can happen if our tech gets tied up at someone else’s house, we will let folks know that too, and provide real-time status updates so they can plan accordingly.”

In another nod to an Uber-like model, the trial app also lets customers provide feedback using a “rate the experience” feature. “If the experience isn’t what it should have been, customers can let us know, and we will call them to see how we can correct the situation as quickly as possible,” Herrin noted.

He said Comcast CEO Brian Roberts demonstrated the new features at an event in San Francisco. CSG Systems, one of Comcast’s key billing and customer care partners, has been talking up such capabilities, which are enabled by enhanced field workforce apps that rely on geographic analytics and GPS information.

Update: Comcast said it's not working with CSG on this test feature, but is using GPS tracking technology from an unnamed third party that is integrated with the technicians' phones. 

Comcast, Herrin said, could expand the availability of the feature next year if the trial is successful.

Comcast has been trying to improve its image and its overall customer service performance as the MSO seeks regulatory approval for its proposed merger with Time Warner Cable and faces a high-profile lawsuit from Conal O’Rourke, a former Comcast customer in California, who claims his complaints about the cable company's poor customer service led to his firing from PricewaterhouseCoopers.  Comcast apologized for its customer service performance, but denied playing a role in O’Rourke’s termination. 

Among other recent moves aimed at improving the customer experience, Comcast announced an agreement that enables customers to return equipment such as set-tops and cable modems to Comcast for free at one of more than 4,400 UPS Store locations.