Cable operators managed to crack the top five of a recent J.D. Power telecom technician satisfaction survey, with Charter Communications’ Spectrum brand placing second behind Dish Network.

The survey -- the J.D. Power 2019 U.S. Telecom In-Home Service Technician Study -- looked at a wide range of satisfaction touch points, including ease of making appointments, the use of social media, the web and apps for follow-up and others.

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“It’s not enough for a telecom service technician to simply show up on time, exchange pleasantries and fix the problem,” J.D. Power said in a press release, adding that providers with “stand-out levels of customer satisfaction are executing a well-choreographed, multi-channel communications campaign that incorporates web, mobile and social media, in addition to traditional phone and in-home service call interactions.”

Dish Network finished first in the rankings with a score of 889 points out of a possible 1,000. Charter placed second with a score of 867 and AT&T/DirecTV was a close third with a score of 865 points.

According to the study, some of the key components of a good score was punctuality -- overall satisfaction was lower (750 points) for providers that arrived early or late to appointments vs. those that appeared on time (874 points). Customers also valued the ease of making appointments. While the phone was the most common way to schedule an appointment (83% of those surveyed did it that way) it was the least satisfying (765 points). Scheduling via web site or mobile app scored highest (845 and 831, respectively).

Customers that received service notifications via their mobile app also were more satisfied (876) than those that received notifications through email (836), text message (809), phone representative (799), or automated phone message (795). J.D. Power added that only 5% of customers receive notifications via mobile app and 11% receive them via e-mail. The phone remains the most common means of receiving notifications (86%).

J.D. Power noted that follow-ups after service calls go a long way to improving overall satisfaction. According to the study, overall satisfaction increases by 74 points when the provider contacts the customer after a tech visit to ensure everything is running smoothly. When the tech offers to schedule a follow-up visit to fix any outstanding issues, overall satisfaction increases by 90 points.

“Service technicians are critical front-line ambassadors for their brand, but securing high customer satisfaction with the service experience requires a lot more than just a capable technician,” said J.D. Power managing director Ian Greenblatt said in a press release. “The brands that are most effectively managing the in-home service customer experience are communicating in advance with customers across multiple communications platforms. They make it easy to request service, accurately project the technician arrival time and follow up to address outstanding issues. Doing all of this well requires an enterprise-wide commitment to service.”

Shorter appointment windows and technicians that are on time resonate best with customers and helped drive satisfaction levels, according to a telecommunications services study by JD Power.

“The more flexible telecom companies can be with offering service windows that work with their customers’ schedules and the more precise they are at hitting those target times, the higher levels of customer satisfaction they can realize,” said Peter Cunningham, Technology, Media, and Telecommunications Practice Lead at J.D. Power in a statement. “Though this may seem like common sense, there are huge performance gaps among the different providers. Those that are getting it right have developed strong skill sets in both managing customer expectations and delivering on them.”

Among telecom providers, Dish Network scored the highest in the study with a score of 885. Charter Communications finished second with 860, followed by AT&T/DIRECTV (859) and Verizon (856). The industry average score was 853.

The 2018 U.S. Telecom In-Home Service Technician Study was fielded in December 2017-January 2018, collecting 3,744 responses. To be eligible to participate, respondents needed to have an in-home telecom service technician visit in the past six months.

According to the study, satisfaction ratings were 49 points higher for customer with service appointment windows of one hour or less than those with a two-hour window. The gap jumped to 104 points when customers were given a four-hour window, JD Power said.

Punctuality was important as well. Overall satisfaction for customers whose tech showed up on time was 871. That score dropped to 819 when techs arrived early and to 683 when they showed up late. The survey found that although service providers have placed a huge emphasis on timeliness, 12% of techs arrived outside of their service window (7% were late and 5% were early). And among the techs that were late, 20% were at least two days late.

Customers also complained of issues not being fixed the first time around – 26% said their service problems were not corrected on the first visit. Overall satisfaction scores are 112 points higher when the issues are fixed the first time. And providers should take note: JD Power found that customers who have to endure multiple service visits to fix an issue are more than twice as likely to say they “definitely will” or “probably will” switch providers than those whose issues are fixed during the first technician visit.

Customers also like to be in the loop during service calls – those who were contacted prior to the arrival of the tech were 138 points higher than those that weren’t contacted. Convenience also goes a long way. Satisfaction was much higher among customers who used a digital channel—such as website unassisted (834)—to schedule an appointment than among those who used a phone (761).

Some longtime cable rate critics will get another chance to publicly criticize cable rates.

Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), chair and ranking member, respectively, of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, confirmed they will hold a hearing June 23 at 10 a.m. on the state of the pay TV industry, signaling their displeasure with it.

“Consumers in every corner of the country share common experiences about fending for themselves against customer service and billing practices by TV providers that are at best confusing, and at worst deceptive,” they said in a joint statement. “For more than a year, we have conducted a bipartisan investigation of the largest cable and satellite TV companies. We believe our hearing will be a big step forward for consumers, allowing them to understand how their TV providers really work and make informed decisions about their video service.”

McCaskill, who formerly chaired the Senate Commerce Committee's Consumer Protection subcommittee, has been hammering the cable industry on rates and customer service for years; her actons have included trying to amend STELAR, the satellite reauthorization bill, to include provisions to put cable's feet to the fire. Another veteran cable rate critic, Republican John McCain (R-ARiz.) is also on the subcommittee. 

McCaskill's office said the hearing will focus on billing, fees, refunds and customer service issues and is part of a general inquiry, which will extend into the fall, into potential barriers to competition .

No witnesses were identified, but they are said to represent more than 70 million subscribers and more than 70% of pay TV households.

The senators cited the recent American Customer Satisfaction Index survey, which found pay TV near the bottom of those industries surveyed, following the previous year's finding that pay TV was tied for the lowest score.

Cable operators were literally the best and worst of telecommunications services providers yet again in a new customer-satisfaction survey.

The good news was that cable operators, who have pumped money, resources and personnel into improving customer service across the board, stopped their two-year slide in the pay TV portion of the survey. The bad news was they still finished last.

But the data also shows something about the mindset of the typical cable subscriber. The same customers that rate their cable provider among the worst for pay TV service see them as stellar broadband service providers.

Never mind that both services are traveling over the same network and use essentially the same customer-service personnel. It’s almost as if hating your cable company is a birthright. Broadband hasn’t been around long enough yet to foster that kind of hatred.

BROADBAND IS ESSENTIAL

Part of the reason also could be that customers perceive their broadband service as more important to their lives. Maybe this is further proof that customers are paying less attention to linear TV, and when they do, it’s because their tablets don’t work.

Another anomaly: Telco TV providers are at the top of the pay TV ranks yet have been losing customers over the past several quarters.

For the most part, cable’s performance in the American Customer Satisfaction Index — an annual survey of 12,710 customers on the often-touchy subject of customer satisfaction — has been consistent. For the past five years, cable operators have mostly received scores in the high 50s to low 60s.

Cox Communications usually got the highest rating. The big exception was last year, when despite fullyear gains in basic video subscribers at Time Warner Cable (53,000) and Charter (11,000), some operators, including TWC, turned in their worst showings ever.

Mediacom Communications has been battling a PR war after being singled out by some news outlets as “The Most Hated Company in America,” based on its ACSI showing. Mediacom’s scores of 54 in pay TV and 57 in Internet service providers was the lowest in all of the industries ACSI tracks, including cellular, wireless and wireline telephone. TWC (up 15.7%) and Comcast (up 14.8%) bounced back this year off declines.

Mediacom has countered that the sample size of its customers was small, which could skew the results, and has pointed out that it has boosted Internet speeds and introduced night and weekend service calls and 30-minute appointment windows.

MERGERS AREN’T HELPFUL

ACSI director of research Dr. Forrest Morgeson said in an interview that cable’s performance will likely decline this year and next as Charter moves to integrate TWC and Bright House.

“What we generally see is in the wake of mergers, for a year or two after, both of the companies involved tend to do a little bit worse,” Morgeson said. “It’s tough to say what will happen in this case, but it is fair to say that neither Charter nor Time Warner are stellar in terms of customer satisfaction. My guess is you’ll see a little bit of erosion as new customers come on to the Charter brand and there are problems with accounts and expensive plans and so forth.”

Charter has said it has been preparing for the integration of Bright House and TWC for about two years and plans to take a slow, steady approach to minimize disruptions. It has said it plans to hire 20,000 customer-facing employees over the years to help improve the customer experience.

Charter’s intentions sound good, Morgeson said, but there is always room for unforeseen circumstances.

“It’s not the things that you prepare for that go wrong,” he said.

Cable operators improved their ratings significantly in the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index, with some providers improving their overall scores by 15% or more, but still couldn’t pass stronger showings from telco and satellite TV providers.

Cable stopped its two-year decline in ACSI pay TV ratings, rising 3.25% as a whole, but still finishing last in ACSI’s annual customer satisfaction ratings, a random sample of 12,710 consumers, with scores ranging from 54 to 66 out of 100. Telco TV finished first and satellite TV service providers placed second.

Among cable operators, the biggest gainers were Time Warner Cable, which rose 15.7% from a 51 in 2015 to a 59 in 2016 and Comcast, which increased its ACSI score 14.8% from 54 in 2015 to 66 this year. The highest rated cable companies were Bright House Networks and Cablevision Systems, each with a score of 66. Bright House was purchased by Charter Communications (which scored a 60) in May and Altice N.V. is expected to close its purchase of Cablevision later this month.

“It’s not too hard for cable companies to improve when their starting point is the cellar,” said ACSI Managing Director David VanAmburg in a statement.

Acquisitions could play a role in next year’s ratings as companies that are involved in mergers typically post lower scores once their deals are done. Charter closed on its $78.7 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable on May 18, the same day it closed the Bright House deal.

Again, telcos Verizon and AT&T U-Verse had the best scores in the subscription TV segment – 70 and 69, respectively.  DirecTV received a 68 rating (the same as last year) and Dish Network had a 67, even with 2015.

The tables were turned on the Internet Service Provider front, with cable operators performing best. Verizon secured the top spot again with a 73 rating (the highest ever for the segment), with Cablevision Systems up 13% to a score of 69, Bright House Networks up 7% to 67 and Time Warner Cable up 14% to 66. Charter increased its score 11% to 63 in the period.

“High-speed Internet access is a must-have in the digital age, making ISPs and wireless companies critical providers for the workplace as well as the home,” said ACSI founder and chairman Claes Fornell in a statement. “With relatively few options, consumers have limited means for punishing companies for poor service.”

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.  

With the clock winding down on its pending merger with Comcast, Time Warner Cable ended the year on a slightly sour note, being named the least popular brand in not one but two categories (Internet and Video service) in a consumer satisfaction survey done by the University of Michigan.

Time Warner Cable placed dead last in both categories in the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, a comprehensive survey that involves about 70,000 interviews covering 230 brands.

According to ACSI, Time Warner Cable scored a 54 out of a possible 100 for its Internet service and its pay TV service scored a 56, to take the two worst spots in the survey. The second worst spot for ISPs belonged to – you guessed it – Comcast’s Internet service, which scored a 57 out of a possible 100. Comcast also finished second to last for video service, scoring a 60 out of a possible 100, compared to 63 in the previous year.  

“We are always looking for ways to deliver improved value, reliability and service to our customers,” Time Warner Cable said in a statement. “We are investing nearly $4 billion into our network and operations in 2014 alone to provide faster speeds, new set-top boxes and better overall customer experiences. Specifically, we have added new channels and On Demand content; expanded access to live TV and On Demand via our TWC TV app to eight different platforms such as Kindle, Xbox and Roku; and provided access to more than 300,000 WiFi public hotspots.  We now also offer popular one-hour appointment windows and expanded weekend and evening appointment options." 

All pay TV providers scored lower in the most recent survey than in the previous year, especially when it came to video service.  Charter Communications scored 60 for video service in 2014, down from 64 in the prior year; Cox Communications scored 63, down from 65 in 2013. DirecTV (69) and Dish Network (68) also fared worse than in the previous year, when they scored 72 and 70, respectively. Survey leader  AT&T U-Verse with a score of 69 was below the 71 it scored in the prior year as was Verizon’s FiOS TV’s 68, five notches below the 73 it scored in 2013.

On the ISP side, telco competitors Verizon Communications’ FiOS and AT&T U-Verse topped the list with scores of 71 and 65, respectively, matching their previous year’s tally. Rounding out the ISP scores were Charter with 61 (compared to 65 in 2013); and Cox with 64 (compared to 68 last year).

The ACSI survey was started in 1994 and was developed to provide information on satisfaction with the quality of products and services available to consumers

Cable operators and Internet Service Providers continued to sink to the bottom  in the American Customer Satisfaction Index, while two recent telecom companies in the news – DirecTV and AT&T – tied for first place in the survey culled from interviews with more than 70,000 customer nationwide.

AT&T announced Sunday its agreement to acquire DirecTV in a cash and stock deal worth $48.5 billion, making the combined company the second largest pay television service provider in the nation with 26 million video customers. The news comes just months after Comcast announced it would acquire Time Warner cable, creating the largest pay TV company in the country with 30 million customers.

Despite actually declining slightly from the prior year DirecTV (-4%) and AT&T (-3%) finished with an ACSI score of 69 out of a scale of 100, edging out Verizon Communications (68) and Dish Network (67). Despite their decline, DirecTV and AT&T finished well ahead of the closest cable operator – Cox Communications, which ended the year with an ACSI score of 63, down about 3%. Comcast and TWC brought up the rear, with Comcast down 5% to 60 and TWC down 7% with a score of 56, its lowest ever. Subscription TV  in general fared poorly – with a cumulative ASCI score of 65, down 4.4% from the previous year.

“Comcast and Time Warner assert their proposed merger will not reduce competition because there is little overlap in their service territories,” said ACSI Director David VanAmburg in a statement. “Still, it’s a concern whenever two poor-performing service providers combine operations. ACSI data consistently show that mergers in service industries usually result in lower customer satisfaction, at least in the short term. It’s hard to see how combining two negatives will be a positive for consumers.”

High prices, poor reliability, and declining customer service are to blame for low customer satisfaction with pay TV services, according to ACSI. The cost of subscription TV has been rising 6% per year on average—four times the rate of inflation. But with over-the-top video services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime, customers have more choice than ever.

ISPs, which include many of the same companies, fared even worse, ending the year with an ACSI score of 63, down 3.1% from the prior year.

“The Internet has been a disruptor for many industries, and subscription TV and ISPs are no exception,” said ACSI chairman and founder Claes Fornell in a statement. “Over-the-top video services, like Netflix and Hulu, threaten subscription TV providers and also put pressure on ISP network infrastructure. Customers question the value proposition of both, as consumers pay for more than they need in terms of subscription TV and get less than they want in terms of Internet speeds and reliability.”

Verizon’s FiOS Internet service continued to lead the category with a score of 71, surpassing AT&T, CenturyLink and the aggregate of other smaller broadband providers, all at 65. Cable-company-controlled ISPs languished at the bottom of the rankings again. Cox fared best – and stayed above the industry average despite a 6% decline to a score of 64. Customers rate Comcast (-8% to 57) and Time Warner Cable (-14% to 54) even lower for Internet service than for their TV service. In both industries, the two providers have the weakest customer satisfaction.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is a national economic indicator of customer evaluations of the quality of products and services available to household consumers in the United States. The ACSI uses data from interviews with roughly 70,000 customers annually as inputs to an econometric model for analyzing customer satisfaction with more than 230 companies in 43 industries and 10 economic sectors, as well as over 100 services, programs, and websites of federal government agencies.