Mediacom Communications said Tuesday that it has promoted Jon Coscia to SVP of Customer Service and Jack Griffin to SVP of Finance and Treasurer.

Coscia, who was formerly group VP of Customer Service,  will take full responsibility for customer care, including centers for sales, retention and field support and will report to EVP of Operations John Pascarelli.

“Since joining Mediacom, Jon has established himself as an industry expert in his field and introduced numerous groundbreaking, technology-driven solutions aimed at elevating the customer experience,” Pascarelli said in a press release. “I am confident his strategic insight and proven leadership of over 850 employees will further advance the quality of our customer care.” 

Griffin, previously group VP, Corporate Finance, will continue to oversee Mediacom’s corporate finance and treasury group, including debt financing, liability and cash management, banking relationships, investments, external reporting, mergers and acquisitions and business development. He will continue to report to Mediacom EVP and chief financial officer Mark Stephan.

“Jack has played an integral role in shaping the company’s financial profile over the past several years and achieving our much-coveted investment grade rating,” Stephan said in a press release. “His skillful stewardship of Mediacom’s balance sheet and the corporate finance and treasury group will benefit Mediacom for the many years to come.”

Both men joined Mediacom in 2007. 

“I am pleased to offer my heartfelt congratulations to both Jon and Jack. They have long been recognized as emerging leaders within our organization, and their promotions are well deserved,” Mediacom chairman and CEO Rocco Commisso said in a press release. 

Media and entertainment companies are under siege from all sides — new content sources, new channels, new competitors, new technologies (i.e., streaming media) and new hybrid business models. The pay TV industry is projected to lose more than 5.1 million subscribers in 2020, the largest loss in history. At the same time, 5G is expected to make a swift entry on all platforms, with more than 10 million 5G subscriptions projected by the end of 2020. For incumbent providers, enhanced mobile capabilities will eliminate the need for fixed-line broadband data, as well as create new business opportunities around the internet of things (IoT) and other rich data services.

Unfortunately, traditional providers have been slow to evolve and are hampered by inflexible legacy technology, so it’s not surprising that they are shedding subscribers, and associated advertising dollars, at staggering rates. Newer market entrants offer something that the Comcasts of the world still don’t: choice and flexibility.

In order to reverse the decline, incumbents must change how they engage their subscribers — treating them like individuals rather than markets. Key to this transition is replacing legacy technology with flexible, cloud-native platforms that allow providers to leverage artificial intelligence/analytics into personalized content subscribers can enjoy whenever and however they choose.

The good news is that the barrier to entry is extremely low. According to a joint report from Accenture, Ovum and PWC, the same technology that has become a massive enabler for new market entrants from Netflix to Disney+ can also be used by incumbents to transform their businesses into nimble, omnichannel offerings.

Omnichannel Market Values

For organizations unclear on how to begin, the importance of understanding the business rules that govern the new landscape can’t be emphasized enough.

Subscriber lifetime relationships should be based on 1:1 relevance. Customers must be empowered with individualized content, product recommendations, personalized messaging, tailored communications and the most relevant next best offer (NBO) powered by third-party AI engines.

Providers grow faster with seamless omnichannel engagement across media and entertainment business lines. Providers enhance subscriber value across business lines by delivering unfettered access to any content, consumed anytime and on any device.

They also prevent revenue leakage and improve profitability while standardizing bundled sales and service processes across all lines of business. Through personalization, they guide subscribers to select the products and services providing the best value for their needs, while protecting margins through sales process optimization.

Serving customers intelligently deepens brand loyalty. Done right, personalization delivers more than customized bundling and effective cross-sell. It also leverages an industry-specific data model with packaged subscriber-model capabilities that include bill payment and renewals.

This new model deflects support calls through omnichannel digital service to enable customers to self-care on their own terms and, when paired with a formal loyalty program, that delivers real consumer value (either points-based or just tenure-based) providers can materially reduce churn.

Providers must compete with continuous industry innovation and business agility. The way to break through legacy customer relationship management/operations support systems (CRM/OSS) barriers is with a 100% cloud platform that embeds customer-specific intelligence across the sales and service lifecycle.

Total Subscriber Lifecycle

New subscribers begin their journey with maximum flexibility. They should be able to choose specific channels (e.g. news, leisure, sports) or any combination of the aforementioned, then subscribe on a standalone basis or for their preferred duration (e.g. one month, three months, six months, etc.).

From the provider perspective, the cloud-enabled solution offers a 360-degree customer view. In place of siloed, on-premise offerings, a media and entertainment cloud platform helps the organization manage the customer experience right from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud or whatever cloud solution is being used for outbound lead management.

The goal is to empower incumbents with an omnichannel platform that allows them to grow faster, increase profitability and subscription revenue, retain subscribers over multiple renewal cycles, as well as increase overall agility, enabling them to deploy new offerings rapidly and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). The cloud approach brings subscriber management to a new level of quality and profitability. Providers can not only diagnose subscriber issues on a granular level, they can also leverage real-time data from channels for self-care for sales and service. For omnichannel incumbents, there is the added benefit of integrating self-care capabilities with the traditional call center.

The (Customer) Bottom Line

Successful lifecycle management depends on both conversion and retention. For example, once a trial period expires, it’s about presenting customers with the right guided flows that drive easy renewal as well as suggestions to cross-sell/upsell.

The upshot, beyond increased revenue and overall efficiency, is real-time clickstream data that a provider can redirect into their analytic systems to trigger new, more intelligent content offers.

For incumbents that want to transform their business, this is the kind of vertically specialized, end-to-end subscriber management that separates an ad hoc or legacy solution from a true omnichannel offering that both speaks directly to — and delights — subscribers.

An online security expert has found yet more ways for malicious individuals to obtain sensitive information on Comcast subscribers using the company’s online customer service portal.

As first reported by Buzzfeed, cyber-security engineer Ryan Stephenson--a self-described “penetration tester”—has found two more ways a hacker could exploit Comcast customer-facing websites. It’s at least the second time in the last three months that Stephenson has found a breach in a Comcast portal, before going to the press about it.

In his latest discovery, Stephenson found one flaw on Comcast’s Xfinity in-home authentication page, which lets customers pay bills without entering their username and password, given that they’re connecting with their own IP address. Stephenson determined that a hacker could obtain a customer’s IP address, then derive partial home address info for the user.

Comcast is now requiring customers to authenticate, even though they’re in their bed or living room.

Related: Comcast Confirms Deactivation of Congestion Management System

The other exposed vulnerability involves Comcast’s authorized dealer sign-up page. If a hacker could obtain a customer’s billing address, they could use this tool to also illicitly obtain the last four digits of the subscriber’s Social Security number, the security consultant found.

“We quickly investigated these issues and within hours we blocked both vulnerabilities, eliminating the ability to conduct the actions described by these researchers,” Comcast said in a statement. “We take our customers’ security very seriously, and we have no reason to believe these vulnerabilities were ever used against Comcast customers outside of the research described in this report.”

The cable company continues to reconcile customer demand to make online tools intuitive and easy to use with the efforts of at least one notable online security guru, determined to find every conceivable way possible to exploit the cable company’s portals.

In May, for example, Stephenson discovered a means to use a Comcast online portal for router configuration to illicitly obtain home address info, as well as Wi-Fi network names and passwords, then reported to ZDNet.

And in June, ZDNet reported on a tip from anonymous security expert, showing that an API used by Comcast could be “tricked” into returning customer data, including account numbers and home addresses. 

Dish Network released its 2017 Corporate Citizenship Report Wednesday (June 6), and employees across the country showed their commitment to community by supporting disaster relief efforts, planting trees and helping the environment.

“Dish team members have been dedicated to customer service since day one, and Dish Cares is a natural extension of that mindset, connecting communities together through positive change,” said Dish CEO Erik Carlson in a statement. “As Dish TV and Sling TV continue to grow, we remain committed to improving the local communities our customers and our team members call home.”

Read More: #CableInTheCommunity

Among the highlights from 2017, Dish employees:

• Provided 110,000 hours of internet & TV service to disaster relief organizations and their workers at relief sites across the nation including Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico.
• Logged 7,023 hours of service to nonprofits by Dish Cares teams.
• Planted 50,000 trees in partnership with customers and American Forests.
• Drove 2,220,468 alternative fuel miles in Dish tech vans.
• Donated 21,550 pounds of food to 35 communities.

The full report is available here.

After decades of trying to boost its status among its competitors in the pay TV service industry, cable companies believe they have finally found the answer to better customer care: take the cable out of cable TV. It’s not as easy as it sounds. 

But after years of laying the groundwork by building fiber networks that anticipated service outages before they happened, promoting technology and equipment that made accessing TV content and the internet easier and faster and shortening appointment windows to one or two hours instead of a full day, cable is moving toward a time when customers will be able to buy, provision, troubleshoot and repair service almost entirely by themselves.

Related: Cable’s Retail Efforts Take Center Stage

That is the path the banking industry — once at the bottom of customer satisfaction rankings and now near the top — has taken over the years, starting with ATMs and evolving into allowing customers to pay bills, transfer money and apply for new credit online.

To an extent, it’s already happening in the cable business. Customers can now provision some services online, and with technology like Comcast’s X1 operating system, Charter’s upcoming Worldbox and Altice USA’s Altice One hub, the era of plug-and-play cable service and provisioning is coming quickly. For some, it couldn’t come soon enough.

A Do-It-Yourself Era

“Ultimately, the idea is for us to go full self-install,” Altice USA chairman and CEO Dexter Goei said at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media & Communications conference earlier this month. “You should be able to connect your headless gateway at your drop, push a button … [plug] in your mini-box into your TV and into the wall for power, and should be able to self-provision everything.

“Every incidence going forward should be able to be dealt with remotely,” he said. “Unless there is a fault in the box itself, where we have to replace the box, nothing should require a customer technician coming into your home anymore.”

Altice USA is in the middle of a company-wide fiber buildout, dubbed Generation Gigaspeed, that will bring fiber to the home to all of the company’s 4.6 million customers in the next five years.

Cable has made some monumental strides in the past several years. Appointment windows are now from one to two hours in length, shaved down from windows of eight to 12 hours. Customers can now use their cellphones to track technicians and upgrade internet service speeds or add additional channels via the cable box. Yet cable continues to rate near the bottom of customer care lists compiled by independent researchers.

According to The Temkin Group, an independent customer care consultant in Waban, Mass., cable has consistently placed near the bottom of the company’s independent surveys. In its latest — the March 2018 Temkin Experience Report — cable again brought up the rear, running neck and neck with used car dealers, no-frills airlines and health-care insurers in almost every major category.

Best Efforts:In the March 2018 Temkin Experience Report, cable placed at the bottom of the list when customers were asked how easy it was to interact with the company. (Source: The Temkin Group)

Cable operators have taken customer care seriously for decades. To share ideas and concepts, the industry has formed the Cable Center Customer Care Committee (C5), a consortium of executives from the largest operators in North America and Europe that is focused on expanding industry knowledge and facilitating new approaches to customer care. Dr. Charles Patti, a University of Denver and Queensland University of Technology professor emeritus and the James M. Cox professor of customer experience management and senior fellow at The Cable Center, leads the C5 efforts.

In the past, Patti told Multichannel News, cable’s customer care efforts were centered on Net Promoter Scores (NPS), which are determined when customers get asked how much they would recommend a service on a scale of one to 10. While NPS still plays an important role, other metrics and terms are beginning to creep their way into cable’s customer care vocabulary. In the future, terms such as “Trust,” “Effort,” “Likability” and “Forgiveness” will become mainstays in the cable dictionary.

All About the Journey

Patti said the focus now in the cable industry is on the “customer journey,” or how a subscriber to cable services gets to where they currently are in the relationship. Making sure their travels are enjoyable should be a top priority for every cable company.

Patti said other industries have used more emotional terms to measure their customer care success, including banks, retailers, supermarkets and fast food companies.

“You’re trying to find the relationships between the measures that you use,” he said. “The downside of Net Promoter Score — it’s essentially one question: How likely is it that you would recommend Comcast, Cox, whatever, on a scale of 1-10? But it doesn’t tell you why, just how likely are you to recommend. There may be 50 different things going through your mind, as a responder, as to why you’re saying that.”

Those can be addressed in additional questions. NPS has a transaction score, which could ask for customers to base their recommendation on an installer visit. If that score is low, then the company knows it may have to offer additional training to that installer.

That inquiry, too, can lead a customer down a rabbit hole. Maybe the installer was late for the appointment, but he or she fixed the problem quickly.

Sweet Smell of Success:Asked to what degree customers were able to accomplish what they set out to do with a company, cable firms again did poorly. (Source: The Temkin Group)

“That’s why companies will look at multiple measures, because if you improve effort, then you’re natural inclination should be, what is the relationship between that and my Net Promoter Score?” Patti said. “Is it increasing? If it’s not, then I have something else I have to explore.”

At Medallia, a customer-care software vendor that counts Comcast among its clients, senior customer care principal Brian Andrews said 60% to 70% of his company’s customers still use NPS as the primary metric, and for many it is a fine way to determine how a company stacks up against the competition.

“You have a group of customers that love them, a group of customers that hate them, and a group of customers that are in between,” Andrews said. “It’s a fairly easy concept to understand. You want to reduce the number that hate you.”

Companies find out quickly that customer care isn’t quite that cut and dried.

“If you are a customer and you’re dealing with cable company A, and you have an issue and call in, your likelihood to recommend is probably not going to be based on that one agent and that one call,” Andrews said. “It tends to be over time.”

Better NPS scores can come from reducing the effort a customer must exert to get their issue resolved, not having them answer the same questions repeatedly and making the overall experience as enjoyable as possible.

“You generally want less friction,” Andrews said.

Emotional Rescue:Asked to think about how they felt with their interactions with the company over the last 60 days, cable companies trailed the pack. (Source: The Temkin Group)

Patti said cable can learn from other industries and from competitors. Companies like Uber, Amazon Prime and Netflix made their mark initially through ease of use and lower prices. Cable companies are starting to take the hint. Comcast even bundles Netflix with its broadband service, something that would have been unheard of just a few years ago.

“It’s really what is the customer’s experience from end-to-end, how do we modify processes to simplify the customer experience, minimize any challenge points for the customers and create an experience that makes it easy for them,” Cox Communications, senior vice president of customer care Peter Lilly said. “The journey work is a big part of what we’re doing and it’s informing all of the other initiatives that we’re spinning up after the fact.”

One of those initiatives is alternate channel support, where Cox is using social media to help customer better interact with the company. While Twitter and Facebook are what most people think of when they think of social media, Lilly said Cox is giving customers the option to online chat or text with an agent rather than calling on the phone and waiting on hold.

Case management, or how the company gets to know each customer’s habits, is also important, he said. If a customer starts out on an online web or chat channel and then calls a support center on the phone, Cox will be able to transfer the information so it doesn’t have to repeatedly ask that customer the same questions.

Tracking Customer Questions

“In today’s world, it’s not uncommon that we would have to ask the same question a couple of times,” Lilly said. “In the future we hope we can eliminate or minimize the need for that. As you expand case management out further it points to the future, which is allowing customers to self-help.”

For Cox, the decision to license Comcast’s X1 operating system — to power Cox’s Contour platform — was also a big step toward improving the overall experience, with voice activated remotes and a better user interface that integrates services like Netflix and YouTube. Net Promoter Scores have risen 200% since Cox introduced Contour, MSO spokesman Todd Smith said.

“I think that has certainly changed the experience for the customer,” Lilly said. “It certainly has changed the way we support customers, because we’re getting questions and issues that we never had before, but in many ways they are easier to resolve than in the old days, and it’s more of an educational solution than a technical problem.”

Gateway devices like the Panoramic WiFi, which enables wireless home connectivity and will allow the company to launch wireless boxes and expand the level of services it provides on the road to self-help.

“Whether it’s web or mobile web, applications need to be really tight,” Lilly said. “As you expand your services, customers don’t want to call you for everything. They want to be able to resolve their issues themselves and be able to learn and use the products, because they’re simple and easy.”

A new survey by research firm PricewaterhouseCoopers validates what many cable customer service executives have been saying for years – customers want a better experience and are willing to pay more for it.

According to PwC’s new "Future of Customer Experience" study, customers across a wide variety of industries said they were willing to pay as much as a 16% premium for better service. For cable service, respondents said they'd pay as much as a  9% premium for a “great customer experience.”

PwC surveyed a nationally representative sample of 4,000 U.S. respondents, from Gen Z to Baby Boomers, via an online survey and in-field interviews in December 2017; 11,000 respondents from 11 additional countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Columbia, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, U.K.) were surveyed in January 2018.

Even as companies continue to automate customer service processes, consumers still crave the human touch – 74% of those surveyed in the PwC study said they wanted more human interaction, not less. And 64% of respondents said they felt companies have lost touch with the human element of the customer experience.

Whether consumers will actually pay a premium just for service, especially as over-the-top competitors have essentially gained share through lower prices, remains to be seen. Cable has gone down the premium-service-for-a-premium-price path in the past, only to find it wasn’t as important to customers as they had hoped.

In the meantime, many operators have invested time and money in improving the customer experience with shorter appointment windows, more reliable networks, and providing ways for consumers to contact service personnel and ask questions regarding their service though social media and other electronic avenues. Comcast alone in 2015 launched a $300 million effort to build new customer call centers, hire 5,500 new customer service reps and implement new technology to make the customer experience more friendly and efficient. Other operators have launched similar efforts over the years. And many OTT services have stressed their convenience, lack of long-term contracts and flexibility alongside their lower prices, which seems to be resonating with younger consumers.

“The ‘Experience Economy’ has ushered in a new B2C mindset, steering brands beyond emphasizing products and services to selling rich consumer experiences,” said PwC’s Global CxO and Experience Consulting Leader David Clarke in a statement.

But just putting a human face of the process isn’t enough. Companies have to work hard at making the experience fast, enjoyable and friendly. A bad experience, according to the survey, leads to customers dropping a service fast.

Globally, 60% of respondents said they would stop doing business with a company due to unfriendly service, 46% said unknowledgeable employees, and 50% said a lack of company trust would force them to sever the relationship. About 32% said they would walk away from a brand they love after a single bad experience.

Speed and efficiency are the cornerstones of the customer experience, according to PwC, with 52% of consumers surveyed saying they would pay more for greater speed and efficiency. About 43% would pay more for greater convenience; and 41% would pay more for knowledgeable and helpful employees. There’s also a willingness to give up personal data, especially among U.S. consumers: 63% say they’d share more information (location, age, lifestyle, preferences, and purchase history) with a company that offers a great experience.

“Brands won’t be able to solve their CX problems with technology alone – it’s just an enabler, facilitating the connection between a product or service and consumers,” Clarke said in the statement. “Instead, they must find a way to create an experience that blends consumer demand for tech with their strong desire for authentic, personal interaction. They don’t need to look far, though – employees hold the key to creating and sustaining great interactions with consumers.”

In just a few years’ time, the way we consume entertainment has changed drastically. Netflix and other video streaming services have taken the industry by storm, encouraging consumers to cut the cord and enjoy their content on demand. In fact, last year Netflix users collectively watched 1 billion hours of content each week, and more than 22 million U.S. adults were expected to drop cable services, up 33% from the previous year — a major blow to cable companies.

With streaming on the rise, how can cable outlets keep their current customer base coming back?

Stay Transparent
Open communication is key to maintaining a healthy customer relationship. When it comes to set-up fees, service upgrades or any extra charges, cable providers should be up front about a customer’s tab.

Unexplained price increases are a common cable customer gripe, and with monthly charges up an average of 53% in just a decade, according to S&P Global Intelligence figures cited by the Associated Press, customers are turning to alternate options. Nobody likes seeing an unexpected uptick in their monthly bill — be prepared to explain why things may be changing, and it’ll go a long way toward maintaining customers’ trust.

Tap New Revenue Streams
Who doesn’t like a healthy bottom line? By offering a valuable benefit like customized consumer electronics warranty products for TVs, gaming systems, laptops and more, cable companies can give current customers another reason to stay on board. Include this protection in a customer’s overall package, and you become much more than just a cable provider — you’re a one-stop shop for devices, service and coverage. Plus, you’ll be adding another line of revenue.

Don’t Be a Robot
While consistency in messaging is important when communicating with your customers, train your service reps to avoid being robotic in delivery. Sure, everyone has a script to read, but a simple gesture like asking the customer how their day is going can make a tremendous difference in the tone of a service call.

That interaction can have effects beyond one call as well. Angry customers aren’t hesitant to post bad reviews or recorded conversations online, potentially affecting your reputation. Take Comcast for example, where $300 million was pledged toward an updated customer service strategy. After multiple complaints, the cable giant promised customers incentives like $20 if a representative is late to an appointment, and a redesigned monthly bill to better answer customer questions.

And, despite the growth of streaming, it’s not all bad news. In a recent survey, Deloitte found that two-thirds of respondents are retaining cable packages because they’re bundled with internet plans. With so many still on board, cable companies can employ service tools like these to keep customers coming back instead of cutting the cord.

Roger High is vice president of new markets at Fortegra.

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.”

Back in May 2015, at INTX in Chicago, Comcast unveiled a bold and sweeping customer-service overhaul.

The effort was nothing short of a top-to-bottom makeover: an ambitious three-year plan to spend more than $300 million on new customer call centers, hire more than 5,500 new CSRs and implement technology to make its service technicians more efficient and customer-friendly.

More than anything, Comcast wanted to impress its customers with functionality and services that go above and beyond the norm.

“As we improve the service and offer more and more products, customers are saying ‘Gosh, I didn’t know I could do that,’” chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said at a kickoff event for the initiative in 2015.

The Distributor of the Year Issue:Smooth Operator|Five Ways Comcast Is Leading in Tech

Today, deep into the project, Comcast has so far delivered on its promises. It has built five state-of-the-art call centers in Fort Collins, Colo.; Spokane, Wash.; Albuquerque, N.M.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Charleston, S.C., and has hired more than 5,500 CSRs across the country.

But Comcast probably made its boldest move when it named Charlie Herrin, previously senior vice president of product design and development and one of the executives responsible for the X1 platform, as executive vice president of customer experience. Herrin didn’t have any customer-service experience but he knew the product on which Comcast had placed the biggest bet for its future, and that has been the difference.

Fixing a Broken Experience
“Customer service is what happens when the experience breaks,” Herrin said in an interview. “When you think about the experience, that’s the interaction you might have when shopping — that’s how you unbox the product, how you use the product.

“If the product is working well, for the most part you don’t have customer-service issues,” Herrin added. “That’s why I thought when they first asked me to do this, it’s kind of a brilliant way of looking at it. Because I think it’s an acknowledgment that our product can do more to help customers to avoid the need to call into a call center or feel like they have to go somewhere to get help.”

That ability will be tested again as Comcast comes out from under two of the most powerful storms in U.S. history: Hurricane Harvey, which caused massive flooding and damage in its Houston market; and Hurricane Irma, which ripped through Comcast markets in southern and western Florida.

Repair efforts are underway but are reliant on power being restored and flood waters to recede to allow crews into storm-damaged areas. In the meantime, Comcast has provided free WiFi service for all people in the affected communities. Comcast corporate has also donated about $1.5 million to help local Harvey efforts, and its NBC broadcast network aired a telethon (Hand in Hand: A Benefit for Hurricane Harvey Relief) that raised millions of dollars.

Herrin lauded the efforts of employees in the regions affected by the storms, adding that it is part of the inherent culture of the company.

“We do these things all the time, a testament to the character of the company,” Herrin said. “The leadership in those markets is astounding, and it’s times like this you see how fantastic they are.”

That innate sense to go to the heart of the problem is one of the defining features of Comcast’s X1 platform, which is also a tool to diagnose network and service problems before they happen.

Comcast Beltway Region senior vice president Mary McLaughlin, responsible for a market that includes Washington, D.C.; Maryland; Virginia; West Virginia and Delaware with about 2 million customers, said Comcast’s decision to change its focus on the overall customer experience was a game-changer for the company.

“One of the best evolutions in customer service, and I have been running cable systems since 2000, was looking at the customer experience as a product,” McLaughlin said. She said she credits X1 with changing the face of TV-watching forever, especially with regards to customer experience.

“If you want to turn on closed captioning, you merely need to speak into your voice remote,” she said.

But not every customer has X1. Currently the platform is rolled out in about 55% of Comcast’s footprint.

X1: The Linchpin
Comcast has always considered X1 to be the “the heart of the home,” as well as the foundation for additional products, Herrin said. X1, he said, can serve not only as a messaging tool for a customer’s entertainment package, but also to monitor and control their entire home through products such as Xfinity Home and other features, like voice control and the overall user interface.

“The challenge I have is making sure that our team thinks about the customer service experience all the way through,” Herrin continued. “Not just when it’s working, but when it breaks, what is that experience like as well?

“The last thing I want to see is, ‘Sorry your [service] is broken, call 1-800-COMCAST,’” Herrin added. “That shouldn’t be the message we put up. It should be, ‘We see you have this issue, we’re going to fix it and we’re going to let you know when it’s done.’”

Part of that effort, he said, is to allow the customer to control as much of the service experience as possible. In one current trial, Comcast is testing a technology that, when it determines the signal to a particular customer’s home isn’t quite right, would notify the subscriber of the issue and allow them, through a series of drop-down menus, to pick a convenient time for an appointment and schedule a truck roll.

“It’s a completely touchless transaction, but if you think about the data behind it, it was the product that was doing all the work there,” Herrin said. “When I talk about a proactive experience with customer service baked into the product, that’s what we mean. Where the product is essentially monitoring your experience and essentially letting you know something need to be fixed or a cable needs to be tightened.”

Comcast also introduced an Uber-like app a few years ago that allows customers to track the progress of their technician before he or she gets to the house, and sends a picture so they can identify the tech when he or she arrives. Besides cutting down on phone calls to the call center, the feature also adds to the customer’s peace of mind in what can normally be a stressful situation.

“One of the challenges we have is just making sure that customers realize all the value that they get with their subscription,” Herrin said. “It’s pretty significant. And are they availing themselves of all of it? Are they using Stream to be able to watch their shows when they’re on the go or watch their DVR content? Are they using WiFi hot spots when they’re out? Are they upgrading to the newest and best home entertainment system we have with X1?”

Putting Passion Into Play
McLaughlin said the strategy is to create “Passionistas” in the field, representatives that are passionate about the company and its products. That enthusiasm, she said, can be infectious.

“On the customer-service side of the house, it’s really my job to make sure people are picking up the phones and, when we have a customer call in, we are able to support them quickly and we’re able to solve their problem easily, so it becomes a no hassle experience,” McLaughlin said.

One of the things Comcast is focused on is making sure customers know what digital resources are available.

“If you just changed your plan or purchased a new product, how are you being educated on all the benefits that come along with that?” Herrin asked. “I think customers in this day and age really demand a digital model for that. You’re going to see us invest in that and really reach people in more digital ways. If we can deliver a timely message to a mobile or personal device you prefer, you’re going to pay attention to that.”

The sheer number of new-product rollouts helps Comcast in terms of customer perception, but it also highlights the need f or deeper education efforts.

“What it does mean is we have to make sure we’re doing our job so the customer can discover that on their own and we’re not reliant on our call-center agents,” Herrin said.

What should pay TV or wireless providers do when subscribers call to cancel? The obvious answer is to respond with an offer that will entice them to stay.

Retention offers are the most basic line of defense against churn, and communication service providers (CSPs) are becoming increasingly creative with such offers. Today, with advanced analytics technologies at their fingertips, service providers can even pre-empt cancellations by leveraging data to inform their retention strategies.

Retention offers cannot be one size fits all, and if providers want to truly stem churn rates and avoid giving money away to customers who don’t change their behavior, they must customize their responses. But with so many different levers to pull, how does one know which offers will be most effective with which customers? For many organizations, it is difficult to ensure the right callers get reached with the right offers and messaging, at the right times.

That’s why many leading service providers are taking a test vs. control approach to refine their outreach and offers to customers who are at risk of churning. By first testing various offers in subsets of the subscriber pool and comparing the response of those customers to responses from other, similar customers that did not receive a given offer, they can measure the offer’s direct, incremental impact. This method enables executives to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between new programs and any resulting changes, and to use these insights to better target high-risk subscribers and combat churn.

Even service providers who are already trialing various approaches are upping their game with sophisticated analytics software that enables them to truly test and better understand the impact of customer retention strategies.

For providers, rapidly testing programs to combat customer churn will be critical as they seek to refine personalized retention offers and responses based on caller profiles. Based on APT’s work with leading providers, key characteristics to consider when crafting custom offers include:

● Average revenue per user (ARPU);
● Home ownership;
● Tenure;
● Usage data, such as viewing hours, text message send and receive rates, data usage and more;
● Past customer interactions with the brand, including times they have issued complaints, requested service upgrades and more.

‘Right-Sizing’ Promotions
Using findings from test vs. control analysis, CSPs can take into account the characteristics of different customer segments to answer many key questions, such as: How do I offer this customer the right promotion without overinvesting in too large of a discount, or offering one that is too small to be enticing?

When trying to prevent customer churn, it can be easy to extend offers that are too generous — that is, an offer greater than what the customer would have been willing to accept. By testing different offers to learn which promotional threshold is best received by each customer segment, organizations can ensure they “right size” their promotions.

Another strategy that many providers turn to when customers call to cancel is offering free products or services, rather than a discount or promotion. These products or services can range from device giveaways like new phones to distinct offerings like home security services and free premium TV channels, and providers will need to determine which product and service giveaways will resonate with which customers.

Pre-empting Customer Churn
Some churn is inevitable due to outside factors, such as customers moving apartments, while churn due to factors such as expiring promotions is often preventable. Organizations have an opportunity to test many facets of an outbound offer, including the platform of communication, be it a call, text or email; its timing, in relation to the expiration of the customer’s contract; and the pairing of the promotion with add-on offers.

Testing also has the power to help pre-empt cancellation calls altogether by identifying which customers are most likely to respond positively to proactive outreach. For example, one effective way providers can reach customers likely to churn is through the common industry approach of trigger campaigns — outreach catalyzed by a customer hitting a certain threshold, such as calling three times to complain about service.

To inform elements of its retention strategy, a provider could test different versions of trigger campaigns — via different platforms, like mobile and direct mail, or with different offers — to identify which will lead to the highest retention rates among different customer segments.

As residential and wireless providers continue grappling with churn, many are experimenting with innovative new strategies. By taking a sophisticated test-vs.-control approach, CSPs can scientifically craft targeted retention strategies to maximize both customer satisfaction and long-term growth.

Jarred Brown is senior vice president at Arlington, Va.-based analytics software company Applied Predictive Technologies (APT).

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.

Altice USA said it has launched a new suite of whole-home premium service products that span areas such as in-home installation, remote tech support for mobile devices and PCs, and device protection plans.

Altice USA introduced four new service options, including three premier remote technical support and device protection plans:

-Premier Protection & Support plan:  Billed as the company’s most comprehensive of the plans, it covers remote technical support for all connected devices, including smartphones and tablets and home automation and security, gear, plus device protection, including repair or replacement of eligible entertainment and computing devices like PCs, printers, and TVs

-Premier Technical Support plan: Provides remote technical support for all connected devices (no device protection).

-Premier Home Entertainment Protection & Support plan: provides remote technical support and device protection for home entertainment devices, such as TVs and DVD players.

-Premier Installation and Support Service: Provides specialized, on-demand installation, setup and technical support, including services like television mounting, home theater setup, and computer virus removal.

Pricing for the service plans range between $9.99 and $19.99 per month for residential customers and between $29.99 and $36.99 per month for business customers, the operator said. 

Altice USA said it has teamed with two service companies, tech support company HelloTech for Premier Installation and Support Service, and Asurion for Premier Remote Technical Support and Device Protection Plans.

Altice USA said the new offerings are available across its Optimum (former Cablevision Systems)  service area and throughout most of the Suddenlink service area as they are rolled out footprint-wide.

“As a service-driven company, Altice USA is focused on providing customers with superior support and value to meet all of their connectivity needs 24/7,” Hakim Boubazine, co-president and COO of Altice USA, said in a statement. “We recognize that the proliferation of new devices and equipment has made the connected home a more complex environment for our customers, and we are pleased to help simplify their lives by being their go-to partner for whole-home service and providing a comprehensive end-to-end support experience.”

Consolidation among communications service providers (CSPs) has been on the upswing for years. And, with a convergence-friendly regulatory climate now in place in the U.S., mergers and acquisitions (M&As) could shift into overdrive.

There are many compelling reasons why CSPs are chomping at the bit to combine forces. Subscriber and revenue growth, cost savings, and access to new technology for rolling out emerging Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G wireless services top the list. Other motivations include broadening geographical distribution (e.g., Charter Communications’ merger with Time Warner Cable), market expansion (AT&T and DirecTV), content access (AT&T and Time Warner), and boosting mobile advertising (Verizon, scooping up AOL and Yahoo).

Moreover, through consolidation, CSPs can lower customer acquisition costs, improve retention rates, and increase average revenue per user (APRU). All worthy goals. But to achieve them, CSPs must go the extra mile to stay connected to the needs of subscribers, even as their companies expand. The kicker? It’s hard enough for them to do that already, and consolidation only makes it harder. Here are four ways CSPs can bake customer centricity into their consolidation strategy.

Make customer experience a top priority
Back in the day when CSPs had few competitors, they could take their subscribers for granted. And most did. That’s no longer a viable tactic. Thanks to cord-cutting options and disruptive newcomers like Google and Facebook, CSPs are seeing their subscribers—and their revenues—fleeing by the millions. And yet, despite efforts in recent years to improve services, telecoms, mobile carriers, cable operators, and internet service providers still occupy some of the lowest rungs in the latest industry comparison surveys, such as net promoter scores (NPS).

One of the best ways CSPs can boost customer satisfaction is by establishing formal customer experience (CX) programs. A holistic approach that encompasses the entirety of a customer’s history with a company over time, CX orchestrates all customer-related activities across all functional areas and lines of business. CX is the difference between noting that a customer service issue was resolved (something most operators already do) and capturing that a customer is still unhappy that there was a problem in the first place (something almost none of them track).

To provide consistently rewarding customer experiences, CSPs will need to overcome the dysfunction stemming from their historically fragmented processes and departmental silos, layers of complexity that greatly increase with M&A activity, by the way. They must also overhaul their creaky legacy operations and business systems, collectively known as OSS/BSS. Augmented with cloud-based options, these tired solutions can deliver the real-time digital agility CSPs need to respond smartly to subscriber demands.

Use data to serve customers, not just bill
CSPs have more data about their customers than practically any other industry. But so far, most have used that data for only narrow, blatantly self-serving purposes, such as documenting data consumption for billing or creating more targeted mobile ads. And yet hidden within that data are insights into customer behavior, preferences, and opinions that reveal how subscribers feel about a provider overall.

For example, with cognitive analytics, like those from IBM Watson, providers can predict which customers are likely to churn and take proactive steps to retain them. Data analytics can also detect which services give subscribers the most trouble, or which subscribers would be most receptive to upsells—handy information to have when you’re expanding offerings through consolidation.

The problem is, many providers can’t gain those insights because subscriber data is buried in separate systems for CRM, billing, accounting, and provisioning, among others. Again, cloud-based platforms can help them bridge information silos. With that data, they can deepen customer connections and increase retention by offering more intuitive services, surgically targeted incentives, and delight-inducing rewards based on customer usage history.

Expand customer self-service
Many of today’s subscribers are not just digitally savvy, they’re also more technically capable. Above all, they’re impatient. They want to explore service options, place orders, renew, and have everything fulfilled instantaneously, using any device or channel. Ideally with minimal clicks or agent intervention. CSPs have been slow to deploy self-service options that are on par with digital trendsetters like Amazon or eBay.

Self-service becomes even more critical as CSPs ramp up deployment of new smart home, connected car, mobile video, and augmented reality services that M&A deals make possible. These new services, along with new devices, product bundles, and pricing plans that accompany them, can be very confusing for subscribers. CSPs can help them navigate new offers and increase conversions by deploying brainier chatbots, richer online FAQs, and interactive guides that truly empower subscribers to get answers, resolve problems, and complete transactions without assistance.

Make customer service more personal
Establishing truly personal connections goes a long way to keeping customers loyal when competitors start waving the latest race-to-the-bottom pricing deal or multi-play bundle. Indeed, according to a 2016 Accenture report, 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from companies that know them by name, make recommendations based on past purchases, or know their purchase history.

Personalization becomes even more essential with consolidation, because customers can often feel overlooked or ignored as providers gain new subscribers and capabilities.

Technology now makes it possible for CSPs to bring old-school personal service to every subscriber interaction and touch point. For example, emails and chat sessions can be pre-populated with personal greetings. Newer omnichannel contact center solutions can capture all information on first contact, so subscribers never have to repeat themselves from one agent to the next. And a subscriber’s social communications can be merged with CRM and contact center solutions so nothing falls through the cracks.

It’s all about the customer
All indications are that M&A activity is here to stay. Comms are banking on consolidation as they jockey for best position in pricing, packaging, bandwidth, coverage, and content deals. The specifics may change, but those battles will continue. When all is said and done, however, the CSPs that will consistently grow their subscriber bases and revenue streams are those who ensure that their customers always come first, no matter how often they merge, how much technology morphs, or which disruptions come down the pike next.

About the Author:
Brendan O'Brien is chief innovation officer and co-founder at Aria Systems, a leading cloud-billing provider. In 2002, he introduced the world to cloud billing and innovated database-driven, enterprise-grade web applications before the concept of “cloud” was on the horizon and is among the industry's foremost thinkers on IoT and recurring revenue.

Photo by Jose Luis Pelaez Inc./Getty Images

It’s no secret that cable companies have earned a rather unsavory reputation over the years, due in large part to things like surprise service costs and customer grievances. Fortunately, there are specific steps cable companies can take to flip the script — and many don’t require a ton of effort. Little things like increased transparency, improved home visits, and more product flexibility can all go a long way.

Transparency that adds clarity
Over the years, transparent billing practices have been a serious shortfall for cable companies, and a major point of contention for customers. No one likes to be surprised by product and service limitations or additional fees showing up on the bill.

Want to build trust? It’s pretty simple: Be straightforward about your products and services and what they can and cannot do.

Customers will be much more forgiving of shortcomings as long as they know exactly what they’re getting into. Listing services and products individually and in specific detail online, including any limitations, is a great place to start. With popular sites like Yelp and Google reviews aiding customers prior to purchase decisions, consumers expect full details to be available at the outset. Not every service or product will be perfect for every customer; so being upfront on the exact pros — and even the cons — is a key selling point.

The same is also encouraged when it comes to billing. No one enjoys getting surprised by unexpected charges. If extra fees do need to be applied to a bill, then the customer should be notified as soon as possible. From there, providing a concrete explanation can smooth over an uncomfortable situation, improving customer relations.

House calls that bring the love
Home installation of cable and internet services is one of the few times customers have a face-to-face experience with the cable company. That rare connection makes these interactions some of the most important moments your company will have with each customer, and can leave a lasting impression. Narrowing down appointment time slots and quickly replacing damaged goods on these visits are simple ways to mitigate negative customer feelings.

As some companies have begun to figure out, a shorter appointment window is a huge (and easy) way to improve the service experience, because it allows customers to maintain a better sense of their personal schedule. If you can pull it off, a two-hour timeframe is preferred.

In more serious scenarios, the longer appointment window could cause previously installed hardware to become inoperable or damage to personal belongings. No matter the situation, it should be handled quickly and without additional cost to the customer. Resending a technician to replace malfunctioning products or a customer’s damaged personal electronic devices at little to no extra cost should be offered as soon as possible. This can be accomplished by partnering with a third-party warranty provider.

Personalization that increases flexibility
Today’s consumers live in an a la carte world. By offering more personalized packages with set prices for each individual service, cable companies can set themselves apart and better compete with streaming options, while also catering to customer lifestyles and budgets.

Cable companies have earned a negative reputation over the years — but it doesn’t have to be that way. With these tips and suggestions for breaking harsh stereotypes, you can make your customers’ lives a whole lot easier.

Roger High is vice president of new markets for Fortegra, a credit protection, warranty and underwriting provider.

Dish Network confirmed that it has teamed up with Samsung to repair in-home washing machines, adding another item on the satellite TV giant's fix-it capabilities. 

The partnership comes amid a recent voluntary Samsung recall of some 3 million top-loading washing machines that were made between March 2011 and October 2016 that were at risk of losing balance and triggering excessive vibrations that could cause the top to separate from the washer.

“DISH is working with Samsung as an authorized repair partner, providing convenient, in-home washing machine repair for impacted customers nationwide. As an authorized repair partner, we’ve worked with Samsung to develop training for DISH technicians, which includes hands-on experience,” Dish said in a statement, noting that its “flexible workforce was well-positioned to quickly respond to Samsung’s needs." 

Other partners that have been trained to help Samsung handle the recall include A&E Factory Service, Installs Inc., and National Service Alliance, though some told The Consumerist that they weren’t happy with the outside techs or that the techs tried to sell them other products. Dish told the pub that techs performing in-home repairs of Samsung washers are there to focus on that, but “may discuss other offerings on a case-by-case basis.”

Dish pointed out that the Samsung partnership also highlights the expanding scope of its techs, which now serve both Dish and non-Dish customers with various kinds of services.

Dish, for example, launched a national smartphone repair business last May. 

Dish’s Smart Home Services unit also handles other work such as TV installations (including mounting TVs to walls) and help with wireless networking and other home audio/video products.

Glympse said its location technology is powering some recently launched tech-tracker apps from Rogers Communications, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which is now part of Charter Communications.

Of that group, Rogers has begun to roll out a version called EnRoute that keeps customers apprised by sending an appointment reminder the day of a scheduled appointment, and another when a tech has been dispatched to the address, and a real-time map that tracks the progress of the technician’s arrival time. Rogers has rolled it out in Hamilton, Ontario, and expects to offer it across its residential footprint by early 2017. Rogers’s Fido mobile/wireless unit is also using Glympse’s platform for Internet customers.

Time Warner Cable went wide with its “TechTracker” app last year. Comcast began to expand the reach of its “Tech ETA” offering last year.

Such customer service features are becoming more commonplace. Dish Network rolled out its version, called “My Tech,” in 2015.

Other Glympse customers include Blackberry, Ford, Garmin, GM, Gogo Inflight, Peggle, Samsung, Verizon and Vodafone, among others, and counts Verizon Ventures among its financial backers.

Comcast said a “hardware issue” was to blame for a temporary outage that affected the MSO’s voice, video and broadband services nationwide early Tuesday morning.

“Early yesterday morning, our engineers detected a hardware issue that impacted voice, video and Internet services for a subset of customers across the country for several hours,” Comcast said, in a statement. “During this time, customers also may have had difficulty reaching us by phone. Our engineers quickly identified and resolved the issue, and services have returned to normal. We appreciate our customers’ patience as we worked to fix this and are sorry that we inconvenienced them.”

Comcast did not detail the precise nature of the hardware issue, but did keep customers apprised of the situation on Twitter:

Today’s issues have been resolved for almost all customers. We apologize & thank you for your patience. Details here:https://t.co/4EHedcLHCr

— ComcastCares (@comcastcares) October 11, 2016

Comcast has struck a partnership with electronic payment provider PayNearMe to offer customers who prefer to pay their TV, Internet and phone bills in cash to do so using the XFinity My Account App in more than 7,700 7-Eleven stores across the country.

Using the new feature, combined with the more than 500 XFinity stores, Comcast customers will have access to over 8,000 cash payment locations across the country.

A list of participating 7-Eleven stores can be found here.

“Improving the customer experience is our top priority, which is why we’re giving customers more options when it comes to interacting with us,” said Comcast Cable vice president, strategy & development, customer service Mark Allen in a statement. “About five percent of our customers prefer to pay their bills in cash each month.  This new partnership gives those customers a payment option that is convenient and simple.”

Here’s how it works:

• Go to the ‘Pay Bill’ section of the XFinity My Account app and select the new ‘Cash via PayNearMe’ option.  
• Choose the amount you want to pay and follow the instructions provided by PayNearMe until you receive a barcode.
• Head to a nearby participating 7-Eleven store, scan the barcode on your phone and pay the amount you selected. There is a $1.25 PayNearMe convenience fee per transaction.
• 7-Eleven will provide you with a paper receipt and you will receive a digital receipt on your phone confirming the payment amount.  The payment will post to your account within 48 business hours.

Customers who are not already using the XFinity My Account app can download it for iOS and Android. Customers can manage all aspects of their account using the My Account app, including scheduling a call with a care representative, troubleshooting their equipment, checking their appointment time and rescheduling appointments, easily viewing, changing and sharing their Wi-Fi network name and password, and more.

“We’ve seen steady growth in the number and size of businesses that use PayNearMe to remotely collect cash payments,” said PayNearMe senior vice president of enterprise and government Christian Solomine in a statement. “Customers consistently tell us they want to pay at convenient locations on their own time and schedule.  Comcast’s addition of PayNearMe as a cash payment option is an exciting example of what businesses can do to improve the customer experience.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) slammed cable operators for customer service at the opening of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing on customer service and billing.

McCaskill released a report outlining the issues addressed and problems discovered related to a year-long investigation and based on information supplied by MVPDs. "All of the companies in this investigation have increased their prices since 2011, with the cost of some packages
increasing by as much as 33%," said the report, "while all of the providers notified customers of upcoming price increases, this notification was not always effective."

Related:Senate Report Cites Charter, TWC Overcharges

She also narrated a "nightmare" customer service call she recently placed to try to get a fee removed from her bill, suggesting she was given the runaround before a customer retention rep took various steps to keep her from dropping the service. (She got $120 bucks in credits and cancelled a $7.99 fee.)She said the industry had a long way to go to cure its customer service problems. Most of the witnesses conceded the same, but said they were working dilligently to improve.

The first witness out of the gate was Tom Karinshak, SVP, customer service for Comcast, who acknowledged that Comcast and the industry in general have not always made customer service the priority it should have been, adding: "I am sorry for that."

NCTI, the Colorado-based provider of cable and broadband technology training services, launched a newly-integrated learning platform alongside a new website and brand.

Those additions and changes come about six months after CEO Stacey Slaughter finalized a deal to acquire the company, known then as Jones/NCTI, from Jones International, the conglomerate founded by Glenn R. Jones, the cable and distance education pioneer who died last July.

On the product front, NCTI introduced AMP 2.0, an integrated, multi-device training platform for human resource professionals and frontline employees that ties in analytics, tracking tools, and training content. NCTI said the new platform is available to all its customers.

The new website features a new NCTI blog, called Converge,  and applies a focus on product areas spanning Connected Home, Connected Business, Advanced Network, Technician Development, Customer Experience and Leadership Pathways, said the company, which recently opened its new corporate headquarters in Littleton.

“Industry consolidation, rapid technology advancements and fast-changing residential and business customer needs mean our MSO customers need to think about learning and development in new ways,” Slaughter said. “NCTI is supporting our fast-changing industry with a comprehensive approach that includes an emphasis on data-driven learning management and digital learning.”

“The new Amp experience unifies learning management, team and course administration, and learning activities into one intuitive, responsive and easy-to-use platform,” added David Hoyt, NCTI’s VP for client and student support. “ Leaders, training coordinators and human resource professionals gain a comprehensive view of learning and career progress across the enterprise. “

NCTI, founded in 1968, said it has trained nearly 500,000 frontline employees. It also offers an accredited college certificate and degree program through its partnership with Arapahoe Community College.

Today (June 14) is the 20th anniversary of the release of what at the time was thought to be actor/comedian Jim Carrey’s biggest flop, and a movie that was universally hated in the cable community – The Cable Guy. But I come not to praise the movie – although I do have a bit of a soft spot for a certain scene. Instead my aim is to point out that its obvious stereotypes of cable installers nothwithstanding, the movie is a bit misunderstood.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. The Cable Guy came after what was a remarkable one-year box office run for Carrey – Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber came out in quick succession in 1994, transforming him from TV comedy actor to movie star. The next year he played The Riddler in the biggest box office hit that year, Batman Forever.

Taking on The Cable Guy was a bit of a risk for Carrey – the character was a lot darker than he was used to and the role wasn’t a starring one. And despite being directed by Ben Stiller (in just his second movie) and produced by a young Judd Apatow – who both went on to much bigger things – The Cable Guy was considered a flop.

In a review Tuesday on avclub.com, A.A. Dowd pointed out that the movie actually wasn’t the disaster most remember it as – something I cannot say about Freddy Got Fingered.  According to Dowd’s article, The Cable Guy ended up raking in twice its $47 million budget (when international box office is included) and reviews were mixed at worst, not universally despised.

But according to Dowd – and this is the whole point of this blog – Cable Guy wasn’t a flop it just “took on the reputation of a flop.”

There you go. Cable Guy wasn’t so bad; it’s just that everybody thinks it is. I think there are some obvious parallels to the cable industry.

Take customer service. I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement but if the industry truly was as bad as it appears to be in customer service surveys, it wouldn’t have lasted a month. Sure there is the argument that for a long time cable was the only pay TV game in town, but that hasn’t been the case for decades. And cable has managed to pull out of all of its past death spirals caused by satellite TV and telco TV, improving losses and even adding video customers in the past year. And it probably will do the same with the latest threat – over-the-top.

High-speed data growth continues to outpace the competition and cable operator consistently place higher in broadband customer surveys. Pretty ironic since they both travel over the same network and use a lot of the same customer service personnel.

Charter Communications chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge, who last month became the head of the second largest cable operator and the third largest multichannel video service provider in the country, has a stellar customer service reputation. As chief operating officer of Cablevision Systems, he helped reverse that operator’s once dismal customer service rep. At Charter, he has worked hard to bring customer service in house, taking transactions out of the business and  giving customers more opportunities to solve their own service problems remotely. At Comcast, the country’s largest cable company, has been building call centers and retail stores, compressing appointment windows and guaranteeing on-time service. 

The point of all of this is that cable obviously has a long way to go, but it is making progress. Let’s hope that in another 20 years, the cable industry outpaces The Cable Guy, and reality overtakes reputation, for the better.        

CallVU, an Israel-based developer of mobile digital  platforms for contact centers, said it has raised $3 million from a group of investors led by Liberty Global Ventures, the VC arm of Liberty Global, After Dox Angel Investment Group, 2B Angels and NICE.

CallVU said it will use the funds and a partnership with NICE, a big data company, to develop a joint approach aimed at expanding CallVU's reach and to expand abroad.

CallVU said its platform targets the need to divert customers to mobile digital self-service, and counts banks, credit card companies and telecom carriers among its customers. 

"Our primary objective at Liberty Global Ventures is to discover new, innovative and interesting solutions that are directly relevant to our core business," Bruce Dines, vice president of Liberty Global Investment Group, said in a statement. "CallVU certainly fits into that category, and we are excited to support the company as it differentiates itself in both feature/functionality, customer service and digital engagement."

Here’s a somewhat dated video about CallVU

Comcast said it expects to hire 600 new employees for technical product and service support for a new 80,000 square-foot facility it’s upgrading in Fort Collins, Colo.

Comcast said the call center is scheduled to open within a year after “significant upgrades” are made to the facility on the Hewlett Packard campus at 3420 East Harmony Road. Comcast plans to start advertising and posting new positions for the facility later this year.

When the new center is up and running, Comcast estimates it will have more than 8,000 employees across the state, including more than 700 in Northern Colorado.  Comcast said it has spent more than $7 billion in its tech infrastructure in the state since 1996, including more than $300 million in the last five years.

The announcement for the Ft. Collins facility comes about a year afterComcast 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.  New Comcast customer support centers have opened and are operational in Albuquerque, N.M.; Spokane, Wash.; and Tucson, Ariz.  Last month, it picked Charlotte, S.C., for another customer support center site.

The plan for Ft. Collins received praise from local leaders.

"Colorado is thrilled to see continued growth of Comcast in our community,” said Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, in a statement. “With over 8,000 employees in the state, Comcast is a significant employer and partner to Colorado's success. The company's expansion in Fort Collins is a testament to the state's talented workforce and collaborative spirit."

“Comcast’s decision to move this customer service and technical support center here reinforces the supportive business environment in Fort Collins. The addition of these jobs in our community will ensure that we continue to provide a diversity of employment opportunities in the region,” added Fort Collins Mayor Wade Troxell.

“The new Fort Collins customer support center is integral to Comcast’s multi-year strategy to reinvent the customer experience and create a culture of exceeding customers’ expectations,” said Rich Jennings, Comcast Senior Vice President Mountain West Region. “We’re excited to hire 600 employees and give them the training and tools they need to be successful in ensuring every customer’s experience is excellent.”

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.”

You may have seen the commercials. The one where the guy is on hold with the cable company and does his own self-soothing dance to the “elevator music” on the phone while he waits…for less than a minute.

Or, the woman settling in for a long day’s wait for the cable guy, only to have him promptly show up at her door. Immediately the ad cuts to a Time Warner representative who makes a full apology to the customer comfortably “waiting” for the cable company…because there is now no more waiting, just a swift solution.

This is Time Warner Cable? You bet it is. The company is displaying examples of the horrible customer service that made it notorious and replacing it with examples of timely, quick solutions.

Small But Meaningful Change

While the ads may be funny and clever, they also show TWC taking control of its image and credibility. The company is changing its customer service story into one of humility, ownership and innovation. By being accountable in its advertisements, TWC is acknowledging consumers’ past grievances, while committing to tangible service improvements. The choices are smart, proactive and surprisingly small. But, the small changes are the most meaningful in customer service. They help build trust in and loyalty to the brand.

Get Your Customers Talking About You Less

When making the customer experience better, the impression customers have of a business will improve as well. Happy customers are not as damaging because they talk less. In the 2014 AMEX Global Customer Service Barometer study, respondents said they would tell nine people if they had a positive experience at a business, but they would tell 16 people if they had a bad one. Nearly double the number would talk about their bad customer service! If TWC can improve upon this, it gives people less to talk about. This is the ultimate in brand damage control: utilizing the power of customer service.

Perception Is Reality

The Customer Satisfaction Index rates subscription television service and Internet service providers as the lowest on its scale, with a 62% customer satisfaction rating. As one of the major players in these two fields, TWC has a lot to gain by changing its customer service standards and improving customer perception. Perception is indeed reality. And if the perception customers have of a brief moment of service with the company has improved, it is likely to color their impression of the brand as a whole. TWC’s efforts to make small improvements to its service are likely to improve the impression its customers have of the entire business.

TWC is focusing on the small things that can make a significant impact on its customers: wait times and punctuality. The company is building trust with customers by making its solutions timely and swift, and by doing so, is making its brand trustworthy. This improved trust has translated into customers, with TWC reporting a 4.9 percent improvement in revenue in Q4 of 2015. According to CEO Rob Marcus, TWC will “continue to improve the customer experience and build value for our shareholders.” Great news for TWC, and even better news for its customers.

Kate Edwards is a consultant, service expert, executive coach and author ofHello! And Every Little Thing That Matters(Palgrave Macmillan).

Comcast apologized for a brief video service outage on Monday (February 15) and said the operator will issue a credit to any customer who requests one.

“Unfortunately, we did not live up to expectations around 100% reliability with your TV service,” Kevin McElearney, Comcast’s SVP, network engineering, wrote Tuesday in this blog post.  “We’re sorry for that, and we will be crediting customers.  Just reach out to us, and let us know you were impacted, and we’ll credit you, no questions asked.”

The outage, which lasted about 90 minutes for most customers, affected the MSO’s VOD service, most broadcast and local channels, as well as some cable networks.

Regarding the cause, McElearney said Comcast discovered it was due to a “configuration error in a network device” that supports the MSO’s live video network.

“Our national video infrastructure is fully redundant, and our back-up systems normally operate successfully when unexpected issues happen,” McElearney explained. “This specific issue caused national cable channels to reroute, which resulted in a service interruption….We know exactly what went wrong and have fixed the issue and put in place technical measures to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.” 

Nearly half of customers surveyed said they would take their business elsewhere within a day after a bad service experience as long as the price and products are comparable, according to a study by [24]7, with cable and satellite service providers the most vulnerable.

In its [24]7 2016 Customer Engagement Index, the research company surveyed 1,200 U.S. consumers and found that 47% of those surveyed would take their business elsewhere within one day of being on the receiving end of poor customer service (79% would switch providers within one week).

 “The way customers engage with brands has dramatically shifted, yet many enterprises’ approach to customer service and sales is stuck in yesterday’s paradigm,” [24]7 founder and CEO PV Kannan said in a statement. “For this reason, it’s more important than ever for brands to be where their customers are, and allow them to engage on their own terms. Companies that fail to prioritize the customer experience risk falling behind.”

According to the survey results, cable and satellite providers are the most susceptible to losing customers due to poor service, and a quarter of millennials have changed retailers due to poor customer service.

Cable and satellite service providers had the lowest customer satisfaction scores in the survey with 59%, with Internet service providers the second lowest at 63%.

Customer service has been a major priority for cable companies in the past, with major providers like Comcast, Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable pumping resources and stepping up efforts to improve the customer experience. In the past few years cable operators have made big strides in reducing basic video customer losses, with Charter and Time Warner Cable reporting their first positive full-year basic video customer growth in several years in 2015. 

Automated phone service appears to be a common frustration for customers. According to [24]7, 37% of consumers who ended a business relationship from poor customer service did so because they were frustrated with the interactive voice response (IVR).

Additional findings from the [24]7 2016 Customer Engagement Index include:

• 95% of customers use three or more channels and devices to resolve a single customer service issue
• One in five consumers who ended a business relationship from poor customer service did so because they waited too long to talk to someone on the phone
• 86% of consumers describe a great customer service experience as one of the following: the company anticipates their needs, the self-service is optimal and they’re able to contact the company any way they want.
• 35% of millennials report that optimal self-service is what they look for in a great customer service experience.

As part of a broader effort to boost customer service and customer care, Time Warner Cable has rolled out a new online tool that provides instant feedback questions customer pose about their service.

Via the “Ask TWC Virtual Assistant,” customers can use a mobile device or PC to type a question in their own words or choose from a list of common questions and get immediate assistance.

In addition to providing on-the-spot assistance, the new feature, which is included in the My TWC mobile app and via areas of the twc.com web site, also enables TWC to learn about the type and volume of customer inquiries and to work out new resolutions.

“We’ve transformed our online Ask TWC feature into a virtual assistant by enabling customers to now simply type in any service question they have rather than just using search terms,” said John Keib, Time Warner Cable’s EVP and COO, residential services, in a statement. “This tool is all about giving the customer control over their service experience by putting it on their schedule and eliminating potential phone wait times and transfers.”

TWC recently launched a “TechTracker” mobile app company-wide.

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.”

A Texas woman who received more than 150 “robo-calls” over the course of a year from Time Warner Cable sent her own message to the cable operator Tuesday after a Manhattan federal judge ordered TWC to pay her nearly $230,000 and scolded the operator for what he called “particularly egregious” conduct.

Araceli King of Irving, Texas said the calls began in October 2013 and were for a former Time Warner Cable customer Luiz Perez who previously had her cellphone number. But even after King had contacted a live TWC rep and after a seven-minute conversation believed she convinced them she was not Luiz Perez, the calls continued.

Time Warner Cable claimed that because it believed it was calling Perez, who had consented to the calls, it was not in violation of the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the 1991 law specifically meant to prevent computerized or  “robo-calls” and telemarketing abuses. In addition, the calls were made by an interactive voice response (IVR) system set up to notify customers of delinquent payments, not technically an automatic dialer, which TWC claimed also does not violate the Act.

In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein wasn’t buying any of it.

“A responsible business in TWC’s position might have dispatched a live agent to reach out to Luiz Perez after the IVR failed to reach him the first several times,” Hellerstein wrote in his ruling. “…The responsible company will reduce its exposure dramatically by taking proactive steps to mitigate damages, while its competitor, who unthinkingly robo-dials the same person hundreds of time[s] over many months without pausing to wonder why it cannot reach him, cannot complain about much higher liability.”

He added that even after King filed the lawsuit on March 26, 2014 she received an additional 74 calls from TWC, which proved to the court that TWC was not taking the lawsuit or its customer complaint seriously.

“Defendant harassed Plaintiff with robo-calls until she had to resort to a lawsuit to make the calls stop, and even then TWC could not be bothered to update the information in the its IVR system,” Hellerstein wrote. “The calls placed after March 26, 2014 are particularly egregious violations of the TCPA and indicate that TWC simply did not take this lawsuit seriously.”

Hellerstein awarded King treble damages -- $1,500 for each of the 153 calls – for a total of $229,500.

According to reports, Time Warner Cable is reviewing the decision.

Hating your cable provider has almost become a rite of passage in America over the past six decades.

Despite real progress in on-time delivery, trouble-call reductions and improving service quality, cable operators still reside at the bottom of every major customer-satisfaction poll, finishing lower than previous customer-care pariahs such as fast-food restaurants and banks.

“It is almost like you learn to hunt, you learn to fish and then you learn to hate your cable company,” said Temkin Group managing partner and customer experience transformist Bruce Temkin, adding that the hatred isn’t necessarily misplaced. “They earned their position at the bottom. They literally are terrible.”

With consolidation poised to sweep through the cable industry over the next year or so, customer service has again moved into the spotlight, at a time when the cable industry brushes up against the possibility of its first TV-subscriber growth in more than a decade. Comcast, which consistently brings up the rear in customer-satisfaction surveys, ironically has been at the forefront of reversing a 10-year trend in increasing customer losses, reducing basic-subscriber declines by 27% in 2014 and by 75% since 2010.

KEEP THEM HAPPY

Keeping those customers happy and willing to buy even more services is the key to the future.

While customers have heard similar talk before, this time the cable industry is putting money, people and expertise behind what is growing into an industry-wide effort.

Comcast is leading the charge, spending more than $300 million this year and announcing plans to hire 5,500 new customer-service representatives and to build three new, state-of-the-art call centers by 2017. Other companies, such as Charter Communications, Cablevision Systems and Cox Communications, are pushing forward with ongoing initiatives aimed at making the overall customer experience more enjoyable.

It seems as if past moves to improve network reliability, on-time service delivery and increased convenience have laid the groundwork for a radical concept: making customers enjoy interacting with their cable company.

That is not an easy goal to accomplish, and it will probably take at least two years before results are evident. But the industry appears ready for the commitment.

Although the cable business has been through several customer-service changes over the years, what appears to be different is the convergence of technology and the level of commitment from the operators themselves, National Cable & Telecommunications Association senior vice president of communications and public affairs Rob Stoddard said.

“One thing that has come to the fore in recent years is the use of technology as our friend, the ability to more finely tune automated systems, the ability to provide customers more channels by which they can reach companies and customer care staff and personnel,” Stoddard said. “We have, in some cases, been successful in using social media as a boon, rather than a spoiler.

“I think the Comcast commitment is significant,” he added. “Whenever a leader takes a strong position on something, virtually everyone else is going to sit up and take notice.”

Comcast’s participation and its overall commitment to the effort will be key.

According to Temkin, what has derailed past customer-service improvement efforts has been the unwillingness of major operators to not only change the way they treat customers, but to change their internal cultures as well.

“It requires more than hiring a bunch of people or bringing in someone to try and focus on it,” Temkin said. “It really does require a strong push from senior executives to take a stand and change the culture of their companies.”

Despite cable’s past track record, reversing its poor customer-care reputation isn’t impossible, Temkin said.

“Look at where banking was 10 or 12 years ago,” he said. “People hated their banks. Now if you look at the ratings, banks are right in the middle.”

Competition is what forced the banks to look at their industry and their customers in a different way, Temkin said. Though consolidation usually has the opposite effect on customer satisfaction, he said — taking away competition could allow some companies to get lazier on the service front — footprint expansion could force companies to rethink their approach to customers.

“As they get bigger and have a larger footprint, they have to worry about selling more into their existing customer base as opposed to acquiring new customers,” Temkin said. “Look at the alternatives to those guys — Amazon Prime, Netflix and Hulu are putting pressure on them as far as some of their service models. But it will take one of those cable companies to say, ‘We’re committed, we’re going to treat our customers better than how we treat our prospects.’

“Changing attitudes and the way a company makes its core decisions is more important. All it will take is one of the cable providers to make a substantive change and that will change the overall dynamic of the industry.”

Comcast, fresh off the termination of its $67 billion merger with Time Warner Cable, unveiled its customer care plans in May, including the hiring initiative, plans to open three new fully-equipped customer-care centers in Seattle, Albuquerque, N.M., and Tucson, Ariz.; and a series of high-tech, customer-friendly retail stores complete with virtual-reality games and snacks for kids.

It’s a big change from just a few years ago, when operators were heavily promoting on-time guarantees and one-hour appointment windows. Those things are still essential to the overall process, but now the message seems to be more universal.

‘NOT THROWING BODIES AT IT’

Newly appointed Comcast executive vice president of the customer experience Charlie Herrin, who took the job in September after spending several years in product development — most recently as the architect of the much-lauded X1 operating platform — said there is much more to Comcast’s customer-care commitment than dollars and cents.

“It would be a huge mistake to just think that we are throwing bodies at this. That’s not what we are doing,” Herrin said, adding that Comcast is implementing measures in all aspects of the business that are “rooted in the customer lens.”

That includes finding ways to simplify how customers do business with Comcast.

“We’re focused on service levels, for sure; focused on the quality of those interactions. But we’re equally focused on, can we simplify the way that we bill, so we’re launching a trial to do that. We’re looking at our activation process, how do we make that much more clean. We’re looking at taking friction out of the business.”

Herrin said Comcast has also implemented different ways of measuring its service function — like focusing more on net promoter scores instead of internal efficiency metrics — so that it looks at the business from more of a customer perspective.

That approach includes implementing technology such as the Tech Tracker app, which in Uber-like fashion shows where a service technician is at any time before a scheduled appointment, determines when the tech is likely to show up at the door and displays the tech’s name and photo for the customer. If the tech is late, the customer will automatically get a $20 credit to his or her bill. A customer can also rate the tech’s performance via the app immediately after he or she leaves the house, and any rating of less than four stars will receive a follow-up call from a service rep to determine how the customer could be better satisfied.

That focus on the overall experience is something that has been sweeping the industry for the past few years. At Cox Communications, senior vice president Paul Cronin said that the goal isn’t just to be on time or to do the job right — that should be a no-brainer — but to make sure that customers have a good feeling about their interactions with the company as a whole.

Cronin calls it a “holistic” approach.

“Historically, I think our industry and our company have looked at customer service along very specific customer touchpoints, be that our care organization, field-service organization or our retail point; places where we physically interact and touch with customers,” Cronin said.

“Over the last several years, what we’re looking at is more of the end-to-end customer relationship that starts with the brand message in the marketplace, how they interact with our products and services and what value they see in our products and services.”

COX’S RECENT EXPERIENCE

But even Cox Communications, which has been considered the gold standard in cable customer service, has begun to see its ratings slip. In the past three years, Cox’s American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) ratings have slipped from 65 in 2013 to 62 in 2015. The company that had consistently been the leader among cable operators fell to third place, behind Bright House Networks and Charter Communications, in 2015.

Cronin said Cox’s internal customer-care research shows that satisfaction is improving. He said measurement metrics don’t reflect the overall holistic care approach that many operators are taking.

“Customers are seeing value,” Cronin said. “We’re introducing products and services, new technologies, new ways to interact with us. I’m not sure all of the measurement systems out there necessarily reflect that holistic view of what customers are asking for and, frankly, what we’re delivering.”

Aside from traditional ways for customers to interact with the company, Cox and other cable operators are putting more emphasis on contact points, including Web interactions, social-media exchanges and chats.

“These are all channels that aren’t brand new but are clearly becoming more important and evolving,” Cronin said. “Regardless of the channel you want to do business with us in, we’re meeting your needs and exceeding your needs. We’re moving beyond the traditional call centers.”

Traditional metrics are also showing that some cable operators have been making strides in improving the customer experience.

Cablevision Systems launched a track-the-tech app in 2013 and has been a pioneer in self-installation of services all which have led to strong results.

Over the past nine quarters, Cablevision said, service calls are down 21%, trouble call-related truck rolls are down 32%, repeat trouble calls are down 46% and about 88% of outages are identified before a customer reaches out.

Cablevision also has been actively using social media — it had a Twitter account (@OptimumHelp) since 2012 that has about 11,000 followers and has trained social-media agents that specialize in customer support, account information, product information, sales and others.

Other cable operators have followed suit. Cox has a strong social-media presence and Comcast expects to hire 60 people in its social-media unit by late spring or early summer. Since launching its social-media efforts in 2010, Time Warner Cable has grown that team from just three people to about 25 today.

Herrin said the focus of social media is shifting, in that it isn’t being used solely as a way to inform customers of outages after the fact, but more as an engagement tool.

“I think we’re also using it as a valid care channel,” Herrin said. Like any other marketing tool, social media also can be used to make sure that customers are aware of the total customer-care plan, he said.

“It’s something we want to make sure we leverage. Let’s face it, a lot of people would prefer to consume news and information that way,” Herrin said. “We have to make sure we’re using that channel to let people know the plan and the journey that we’re on.”

DAMAGING ANECDOTES

Still, cable has a long way to go to right the customer-care ship. It has endured several black eyes over the years, especially at Comcast.

As the largest cable company in the country, with about 22 million video subscribers, Comcast has been an easy target of ire. It has brought up the rear in several customer satisfaction surveys: J.D. Power, the ACSI and Temkin Group all have ranked the cable giant near the bottom in each of their TV service surveys for the past two years.

In 2015, Comcast received its lowest ACSI rating since 2008 — a 54 — and its only consolation was that Time Warner Cable was slightly worse, with an ACSI rating of 51. That TWC ranking, by the way, was the lowest mark among 300 companies in the ACSI Index.

The low ratings ironically come as video-subscriber metrics have been at their best levels in years. In the first quarter of 2015, Time Warner Cable reported a gain of 30,000 video customers, the first time it crossed into positive video-subscriber increase territory since 2006. Comcast reported a gain of 6,000 basic video subs in Q4 2014 and has reduced its basic-video losses by 75% since 2010.

At Charter, which had a gain of 3,000 basic-video customers in the fourth quarter of 2014, losses have declined by about 92% since 2010. Even Time Warner Cable, which saw basic video losses balloon to 833,000 in 2013 — the aftermath of its month-long CBS blackout — cut those losses in half in 2014 to 408,000.

Though there seems to be a disconnect between the satisfaction ratings and better subscriber metrics, Temkin said, the disparity isn’t uncommon. He characterizes those customers as “trapped.”

“The trapped are customers who are dissatisfied with how they are being treated, but are still remaining loyal and staying with their current provider,” Temkin said. “I would bet that that industry has more trapped customers than any other industry. There is an opportunity for someone who comes out with something that is noticeably and significantly better to grab a lot of those customers.”

Efforts to increase the number of customer-service representatives and build new call centers are all well and good, in Temkin’s view, but they miss the true mark. Cable, he said, could go a long way toward righting its past customer-service wrongs simply by treating its existing customers better.

Comcast has been the butt of jokes and the focus of two of the most high-profile customer service disasters in the past two years — the eight-minute haranguing a customer who simply wanted to disconnect service got from a retention specialist and the “A**hole Brown” incident, for the name a Comcast customer-service rep placed on a customer’s bill after that subscriber attempted to reduce his service. In both instances, Comcast immediately rectified the situation — apologizing personally to the former customer trying to cancel service and, in the case of Mr. Brown, offering two free years of service, refunding him for his previous two years and correcting his name in the system, according to reports.

Granted, these are two incidents in a company that receives more than 20 million customer service calls a month. But in the age of instant communication on the Internet and via various social media, any bruise can quickly turn into a hemorrhage with the click of a mouse.

“It is true that, in past years, something that might have been a small blemish in a local market takes on national stature, because it can be spread so quickly through the communications tools at our disposal today. What used to be a small blink in a local market can now spread nationally,’ ” Stoddard said. “That’s not to make excuses for the state of our customer experience. Virtually every customer-care professional that I talk with in the business acknowledges that we are nowhere near where we need to be.”

CABLE-CENTER EFFORTS

Stoddard said operators aren’t alone in their quest to revamp customer care. The Cable Center has several programs available — its C5 program (Cable Center Customer Care Committee) has become more intensive in terms of sharing best practices between companies and turning more frequently to expertise outside the cable business for new ideas in the customer-care space.

Cable Center senior vice president academic and industry outreach Jana Henthorn, who runs C5 with University of Denver professor Dr. Charles Patti, said the program was started about seven years ago and brings cable professionals face to face with customer- care experts from companies like Charles Schwab, Scotiabank and others about twice per year.

“Dr. Patti talks about the functionality of customer experience, things like having the best features, the highest broadband speeds, having the best services and the best price; those are what I would call the head issues,” Henthorn said. “Then there are the heart issues, the emotional things — your customers want to know that you know who they are, that you value them and that you listen to them. I think that now cable companies are now working in both areas.”

Herrin is well aware of the power of the Internet to turn customer care stories viral. And he also is cognizant that it only takes one bad experience to unravel a lifetime of goodwill.

“Any one point of failure can be very damaging for us, that is why we’re so focused on looking at every aspect of the business, of not being content that good enough is good enough,” Herrin said. Safeguards are in place to ensure the quality of customer interactions, he added, but one of the most effective tools in making sure that such incidents don’t happen again is to give more control to the customer.

“Part of our plan is, how do we put more and more of that control in their hands so that it is more convenient and quicker to do?” Herrin said.

CUTTING OUT TRANSACTIONS

Charter CEO Tom Rutledge has said that the key to improvement for the industry is removing transactions out of the business.

According to Rutledge, that means reducing the interactions between customers and Charter service employees.

“The inherent problem in all of cable, and always has been, is that you have to schedule a job with a person who doesn’t really want you to come to their house,” Rutledge said at a recent industry conference. “And you have to do work of an indeterminate length of time and get to the next job on time. And that’s inherently difficult.

“And all businesses that do it — plumbers, contractors — everybody can’t stand them, because it’s a difficult transaction to manage. So the more you can take that out of the business, the higher the satisfaction goes, just inherently.”

Temkin said putting more control in customer hands could be a huge benefit in improving subscriber satisfaction, but it has to include more than just letting customers sign up for service online.

Temkin said one of the biggest factors in the turnaround in the banking industry was the advent of online banking. But the added convenience also required the industry to place a massive support network behind the service, something the cable industry has to be willing to commit to as well.

“You have to help customers learn how to do stuff,” Temkin said. “You have to make it easier, you have to support them and if they have questions, you have to be there for them. They didn’t just put it out there and say, ‘Now, instead of calling us up or going to your branch, go online and do this stuff.’ ”

Five Ways to Improve the Customer Experience

Making cable customers feel good about doing business with their cable company is job one at most cable operators today. Here’s what some are saying is the quickest path to getting there:

1. Treat your existing customers as well as your prospects. Temkin Group managing partner and customer-experience transformist Bruce Temkin said cable’s biggest drawback is that loyal customers feel forgo_ en. While promotions like free months of service and $300 gift cards are saved for potential new customers, the people that drive the bottom line get nothing — save for the occasional upsell call. Temkin said recognizing customer loyalty can be relatively cheap — sometimes a free month of HBO will do the trick — and will go a long way towards extending the life of that customer.

2. Engage customers through social media. While Facebook and Twitter are great tools for informing customers about outages and other potential problems, they can also be valuable in keeping the customer conversation ongoing, finding out what subscribers want and determining how the service provider can make the overall experience more enjoyable, as well as notifying customers of special events and upcoming programming.

3. Make the customer experience an integral part of corporate culture. It’s not enough to just pay lip service to customer care or make sure that the network is reliable, appointments are kept and service outages are at a minimum — people already expect you to do that. Customer care has to become part of overall decision-making, not just selling more products and acquiring new customers.

4. Put more control in the customer’s hands. The best service problem is one customers can solve quickly and efficiently by themselves. More cable companies are using technology and apps to help customers self-install, troubleshoot and solve their own problems and for CSRs to reconfigure or add services remotely.

5. When there is a problem that requires a truck roll, make the experience as enjoyable as possible. That doesn’t just mean being there on time and not tracking mud through the customer’s home. Many operators are using technology like Comcast’s Tech Tracker, a mobile app that lets customers know when, where and who a tech is prior to their appointment. In addition, more operators are letting customers rate their experience almost immediately after it happens — and at some, anything less than a four-star rating prompts a call to see how the company can make the experience better. Comcast also issues an automatic $20 credit to a customer’s account if the technician doesn’t arrive on time.

— Mike Farrell

Among 262 companies whose websites were evaluated by 10,000 consumers, six cable MSOs were among the lowest-scoring organizations on the list.

The "2015 Web Experience Ratings," conducted by the Temkin Group, a customer experience research and consulting firm, examines consumers' likelihood to forgive companies for a poor experience at their websites. The Waban, Mass.-based firm included nearly 300 companies across 20 industries, including pay TV service and Internet service.

Overwhelmingly, consumers indicated they were unlikely to forgive Time Warner Cable, Comcast and CenturyLink (all three tied at #252 of the 262 firms) and Frontier (dead last at #262) for lackluster website experiences in the Internet service category; and TWC (#256), Comcast (#258), Charter Communications (#260) and Cox Communications (#261) in the pay TV service category.

Additionally, Cox was one of the companies that fell the most in the annual ranking from last year, Temkin Group noted, with only 29% of respondents saying they could forgive the MSO for a poor online experience. The two categories earned "very weak" ratings across the board while banks and credit card issuers generally had "strong" ratings.

"It's ironic that many of the cable companies that provide Internet service earned such poor ratings," Bruce Temkin, managing partner of Temkin Group, said.

The top spot went to USAA for its banking business (it was also ranked at #3 for its credit card business and #13 for its insurance business), while Amazon took second place for its retail business (as well as fourth place in the computers category). Temkin Group said the two companies had traded the No. 1 and No. 2 spots for the five years it has been conducting the study.

Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge said cable could go a long way toward solving its customer service problem by simply reducing the number of actual face-to-face interactions with customers and helping them solve their problems remotely.

“The inherent problem in all of cable, and always has been, is you have to schedule a job with a person who doesn’t really want you to come to their house and you have to do work of an indeterminate length of time and get to the next job on time,” Rutledge said at the Guggenheim TMT Symposium in New York. “That’s inherently difficult. And all of the business that do that -- plumbers, contractors – everybody can’t stand them, because it’s a difficult transaction to manage. The more you can take that out of the business, the higher the satisfaction goes, just inherently.”

Charter, he said is moving toward that future by putting more functionality in the cloud – its user interface for example, is backward compatible and works with a number of different set-top boxes.

“We want to put advanced user interfaces in all of our customers’ homes and not just in their homes but every outlet they have a TV connected to and every device that they have that they could watch video on," Rutledge said. "We can be state-of-the-art without a physical transaction.”

The Charter chief also had some thoughts on stricter federal regulation in the wake of its $78.7 billion agreement to purchase Time Warner Cable. That deal, expected to close by the end of the year, has yet to begin the regulatory approval process.

Rutledge said he agrees with the basic tenet of net neutrality. But he said that many of the concerns that former FCC chairman Julius Genacowski managed to alleviate through Title I, current FCC chairman Tom Wheeler is seeking to remedy through Title II.

“We agreed with Julius as an industry and as a company with the Title I net neutrality requirements that he wanted us to embrace,” Rutledge said. “Those are the same ones that Tom Wheeler is trying to get using Title II. We embraced the idea of openness to the Internet and everyone having an opportunity, without throttling, without prioritization to use the two-way interactive capability that broadband provides, We were not happy with Title II because of the inability to determine exactly how it will all unfold.”

Rutldge added that Wheeler and Genachowski’s objectives are basically the same, just that Wheeler is going to manage them differently because the process is now largely complaint-driven.

But he added there is a movement afoot that could bring more clarity to the situation.

“Legislation could be passed that would limit net neutrality to a particular set of facts and the risks of other kinds of regulatory creep through Title II; I would prefer that,” Rutledge said.

But Rutledge stopped short of predictions.

“I don’t know if it’s not possible or possible,” Rutledge said. “It’s still being worked on.”   

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.  

The cable industry’s recent push to boost customer service ratings couldn’t come at a better time, as satisfaction ratings for pay TV, Internet and wireless offerings have reached seven-year lows, according to a recent American Customer Satisfaction Index report.

According to ACSI, customer satisfaction with information services – including subscription TV, Internet, wireless and fixed line telephone and computer software, dipped 3.4% in its more recent survey to a 68.8 score out of a possible 100. ACSI said that satisfaction with subscription TV service deteriorated the most, dropping to 63 and tying with Internet Service Providers for the worst score among the 43 industries ACSI follows.  

ACSI data, which is based on 14,176 customer surveys collected in the first quarter 2015, show the decline results from poor customer service combined with higher prices.

“There was a time when pay TV could get away with discontented users without being penalized by revenue losses from defecting customers, but those days are over,” says ACSI chairman and founder Claes Fornell said in a statement. “Today people have more alternatives than ever before. Consumer abandonment of pay TV is shaking up the industry and lower satisfaction could mean even more cord cutting by subscribers ahead.”

On the subscription TV side, Comcast and Time Warner Cable had some of the biggest declines, with Comcast falling 10% to a 54 ACSI score. TWC, according to ACSI, earned the distinction of the least-satisfying company in the index, dipping 9% to a score of 51. Mediacom Communications also scored a 51 on the survey.

The news comes on the heels of major efforts by some cable operators to boost their customer service profile. In May, Comcast unveiled a sweeping customer service program aimed at enhancing the overall customer experience, opening new user-friendly Xfinity stores across the country, building new customer service centers and committing to hiring 5,500 new customer care reps over the next three years.

Charter Communications, which agreed to purchase Time Warner Cable on May 26 in a deal valued at $78.7 billion, has said improved customer services will be a major factor in the combined company’s expected $800 million in annual cost synergies.

Charter actually rose 5% in the ACSI survey to a score of 63 and its other merger target – Bright House Networks logged a score of 65 – for the title of most improved in the cable sector. But ACSI warned that momentum may be hard to maintain as its data typically shows that mergers usually result in lower customer satisfaction, at least in the short term.

“Cable companies are trying to strengthen their positions through consolidation, but the benefits to consumers of one coaxial cable company absorbing another are questionable,” said ACSI director David VanAmburg in a statement. “The AT&T-DIRECTV merger may be different, however, because it would allow AT&T to deliver TV service via multiple technologies.”

While cable operators continued to struggle, telco TV and satellite TV service providers showed gains. With a score of 71 (up 4%) Verizon’s FiOS snatched the lead from DirecTV (-1% to 68) and AT&T’s U-verse (unchanged at 69). Cablevision Systems enters the ACSI as the highest-scoring large cable company with a 67 score, tying the lowest-scoring satellite provider, Dish Network.

Customer satisfaction with ISPs remained unchanged at 63, tied with subscription TV for last place among 43 industries. Two large ISPs did improve – AT&T (U-verse) rose 6% to an ACSI to 69; and Time Warner Cable gained 7% to 58. Bright House Networks matched the industry average at 63, while  Cablevision Systems and Frontier Communications debuted at 61.

Several ISPs suffer large drops in customer satisfaction, including CenturyLink (-8% to 60), Cox Communications (-9% to 58) and Charter Communications (-7% to 57). Comcast stays at the bottom of the category, slipping 2 percent to 56.

Despite the volatility in the TV and Internet space, consumers continue their love affair with their cell phones, which logged in with a score of 78, the highest yet for the industry. With some of the strongest scores in the entire ACSI, the two largest smartphone manufacturers lead the way: Apple and Samsung Electronics. Apple advanced 1% to 80, going head-to-head with Samsung (-1%).

“Despite its high-scoring phones, Samsung may find it difficult to chip into Apple’s market share because of the need to overcome the brand appeal that is Apple’s mainstay,” VanAmburg said in a statement. “Samsung gained an initial advantage as the first manufacturer to introduce large screens for smartphones, but with the launch of large-screen phones by Apple, its loyal customers have little reason to look elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, customer satisfaction with wireless telephone service fell 2.8% to 70. The aggregate of smaller wireless companies has the highest customer satisfaction and even shows slight improvement (+1% to 79). Smaller companies tend to be no-contract carriers with lower fees, which many customers see as better value.

Comcast continued to move forward on its plans to beef up customer service, announcing that it will open a new 100,000-square-foot customer support center in Tucson, Ariz., in the fall and will hire about 1,125 workers to staff it.

The supportcenter is one of three that Comcast said it would open by the end of 2017 – the others will be in Spokane, Wash. and Albuquerque, N.M. On May 5 in Chicago, during the INTX: Internet & Television Expo there, Comcast unveiled a sweeping customer service initiative that would include hiring about 5,500 customer service representatives during that period.

Comcast announced the Tucson plans in its “Voices” blog.

In the blog posted, senior vice president customer service Tom Karinshak said that at least 15% of the new positions at the Tucson Customer Support Center will be filled by military reservists, veterans and their spouses or domestic partners. Nationally, Comcast is committed to hiring 10,000 reservists, veterans and their spouses or domestic partners between 2015 and 2017 across all levels of the organization.

When the Tucson facility is completed, it will include product training labs, training rooms, video conference facilities, a cafeteria and a fitness center. The Tucson operation also will be home to Comcast ‘s new Spanish-speaking employees specializing in social media.

The bi-lingual Albuquerque customer service center was slated to open first and has already hired about 100 of the expected 450 employees for the site. All together Comcast said it plans to hire about 2,000 of the 5,500 new employees between now and early 2016. The company said it will provide further details on the Spokane operation soon.  

Hiring for the Tucson facility has already begun and Comcast said it has received “thousands” of applications already.

“These new hires will help us bring our customers, in Arizona and across the country, the support they need,” Karinshak said in the blog posting. “These additional hires will be an important step towards our goal of making call wait times shorter and helping customers get their service or billing issues resolved faster.”

Comcast has hooked up with Nextdoor on an Xfinity Neighborhood Program that provides cable subs in Seattle access to a local “concierge” who’s available to answer questions about the MSO’s products, communicate service outages and provide offers and passes to special events.

According to GeekWire, Nextdoor, a private social networking platform tailored for individual neighborhoods, recently alerted community leaders in Seattle about the pilot program.

Founded in 2010, Nextdoor’s free platform enables individual neighborhoods to create private Websites to exchange contact info, offer advice and recommendations, and to organize virtual neighborhood watch groups. Comcast Ventures was one of a handful of companies that participated in a $60 million round of funding in Nexdoor announced last fall.

According to an FAQ about the pilot underway in Seattle, Comcast isn’t paying Nextdoor. “While XFINITY is offering this new program through Nextdoor, the two companies remain completely separate, and XFINITY will have no access to information about Nextdoor members," it reads. 

The FAQ also notes that Nextdoor can’t assist with Comcast service support or technical issues.

However, Shelli, the first “Xfinity ambassador” for the Seattle trial, notes in this Web post that she’ll be providing help with questions about Comcast services. Describing her role as “kind of like a neighborhood concierge,” she’s “not a salesperson, just your conveniently located link to a larger team that’s dedicated to providing customer service for you.”

Comcast is testing out the neighborhood concierge idea as the operator expands on efforts to improve its customer service and care. Of recent note, Comcast announced it would hire 5,500 customer service reps over the next three years as it showed off a prototype Studio Xfinity store in Chicago during the INTX show.

CHICAGO – Comcast kicked off a major customer care initiative Tuesday, announcing that it will hire 5,500 customer service reps over the next three years, unveiling a prototype Studio XFinity store where customers and potential customers can try out the latest technology and announcing new programs aimed at enhancing the customer experience.

Comcast said it will hire about 5,500 CSRs across the country, 2,000 of them at three new call centers in Spokane, Wash.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Albuquerque, N.M. The Albuquerque center will open first, staffed with bilingual employees that will speak with Spanish-speaking customers across the country. The other two centers will open later this year.

In addition, Comcast revealed a prototype Studio Xfinity store in Chicago – slated to officially open in June – which will allow customers and potential customers to explore XFinity products and services and purchase them if they want. But the emphasis will be more on educating customers rather than the hard sell.

“We’re looking at this as a huge opportunity,” Comcast chairman Brian Roberts said of the Studio XFinity stores and the customer care moves. “As we improve the service and offer more and more products, customers are saying ‘Gosh, I didn’t know I could do that.’”

Comcast has about 500 retail stores across the country and has revamped 125 of them. The Chicago Studio XFinity is a flagship store, so chances are other converted locations will not look the same.  

Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit said the stores are only part of the changes in store for Comcast, all aimed at making the customer experience better. He added that the customer care unit has a budget of about $300 million and the additional employees will be added to that.

But among the bells and whistles – including on-screen notifications that the batteries in the customer remote need changing, and mobile tracking of service technicians – are several  back to basics initiatives. Those include an always on time pledge that will take effect in the third quarter, which would automatically credit a customer’s account $20 if a service technician is one minute late for an appointment.

Comcast EVP of customer experience Charlie Herrin said its customer care plan is broken down into four basic tenets: seeing things through the customer’s eyes; simplifying transactions; using creative technology to help customers enjoy the experience and giving employees the tools and training the need to deliver a top-notch customer experience.

Comcast has taken it on the chin on the customer service side especially during the approval process or the Time Warner Cable merger that was terminated late last month. Roberts acknowledged that there have been some black eyes on the service front, but added that they inspired the Comcast team to do better.

Roberts said that while those highly publicized slip-ups were minuscule compared to the 350 million customer calls the company receives each year, they were totally unacceptable.  

“It was a rallying cry inside the company, that we are going to top to bottom rethink every way we do business,” Roberts said. "Will we ever be perfect? I think the bar is always rising.”

Aiming to improve its communications path with customers, Suddenlink Communications has tapped a cloud-based platform from Fonolo to supply a customer call-back option that reaches out to customers directly instead of placing them on hold.

Suddenlink, which serves about 1.4 million customers, began to install Fonolo’s call-back platform in its contact center last July,  and estimates that it has already saved customers more than 400,000 minutes in hold time.

With Fonolo’s “In-Call Rescue” in place, customers now have the option to press 1 on their touch-tone phones to receive a call back instead of waiting on hold, without losing their place in line. When the customer’s turn arrives, the system places a call to the customer with a live agent.

"Suddenlink is committed to providing a superior customer experience," said Gibbs Jones, SVP of customer experience at Suddenlink, in a statement. "Implementing Fonolo’s call-back solution has been a huge success. To date we have saved our customers over 400,000 minutes in hold time and reduced our abandonment rate by 25%. It’s clear that offering a call-back option is essential to providing excellent customer service."

About 75% of callers consider the notion of a call-back feature “highly appealing,” according to a Forrester Research study. 

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.  

Cable, satellite and telco operators have been gathering data about their customers for decades, but results often fall short of expectations. These days, though, so-called big data analysis seems at least poised to create real operational efficiencies and improved customer care, big-data experts and cable operators said.

Up until recently, objections to using big data analytics seemed reasonable. Concerns over potential privacy infringement were among the biggest objections.

CONSUMERS LESS WARY

Making money on big data meant selling customer information to third parties, a practice that made subscribers even more leery of providing information. At the same time, overinflated promises and expectations dashed some operators’ enthusiasm to dive into the big-data pool.

But the technology has improved, and consumers are more willing to share information. Multichannel distributors, too, are becoming more adept at using big data to enhance customer care, improve operating efficiencies and add to the bottom line.

One of Canada’s largest multichannel pay distributors is using big data to determine where it can have the biggest impact on a customer’s experience, according to the director of consumer digital services at the unnamed MSO. The amount of data any company collects can be overwhelming, so this Canadian MSO has chosen to focus on specific customer-care areas. That means a lot data may remain in storage to be used later. But it also means present-day solutions are being crafted for present-day problems.

Most phone calls into care centers are still billing-related, so using big-data analytics to reduce those calls will not only make customers happier, it can also have a direct impact on the bottom line, Nibha Aggarwal, senior director of product marketing for Amdocs, said. In one case study conducted for Amdocs last year, an undisclosed wireless provider had a chronic problem of callers repeatedly asking for credits whenever their calls were dropped.

“The carrier found they could pre-emptively fix the problem by giving small credits to customers before they called in to the call center,” Aggarwal said. “That wireless provider saw a 40% drop in its call rates simply by communicating with those customers and saying, ‘Your call was dropped and you will not be charged.’

“We are also seeing increases in customer satisfaction with some multichannel distributors who are sending step-by-step videos and instructions via text or email to customers who are trying to self-install equipment,” Aggarwal added. “It is an example of helping educate the customer before they call into the call center to ask questions.”

In another case study involving an undisclosed operator, call volumes dropped 14% when the operator sent pre-emptive emails and text messages to customers who experienced onetime price hikes for such items as late charges, Aggrarwal said.

“By sending the emails before they call in, customers know what to expect and why. This company was spending millions of dollars every year giving out credits to customers,” Aggarwal said. “When they implemented this procedure, their credits dropped 12.5%. Using big data in this manner not only improves a customer’s experience, it reduces operating costs.”

SILOS A ROADBLOCK

One big hurdle that keeps big data from reaching its full potential is the hefty task of breaking down operational silos, experts said. It’s neither easy nor expensive.

But getting rid of those silos makes it easier to be proactive and helpful. For example, in the case of a TV service outage, it would be beneficial if customers in the affected area automatically received an email or text notification. That would reduce angry calls to the call center and reassure customers that their provider is on the case and working to fi x the problem. Advances in big-data technology are making this scenario easier to accomplish, but breaking down internal operational barriers and enabling communications between those business units is necessary to take full advantage of what big data has to offer.

Companies across multiple industries, including most telecommunications companies, are moving to break down those operational silos. Terms like “single customer view” or “customer 360” have been gaining traction in marketing circles for some time. Gartner Inc., an information technology research and consulting company, presents a annual summit on how to create a customer-centric organizational culture based on a companywide CRM strategy. And vendors such as Amdocs are working with operators to integrate those operational silos to improve efficiencies and customer satisfaction.

Meanwhile, balancing the benefits of big data with concerns over privacy is an issue that continues to require operators’ attention attention, the Canadian cable executive said. Companies like Google and Facebook have paved the way to help consumers feel less threatened by sharing their personal information. But minefields still exist, and operators must tread lightly to make sure consumers aren’t uncomfortable with the information their telecom providers have about them.

“When you use that big-data information in an impersonal way, it can have a negative impact,” the Canadian MSO executive said. “When a customer calls in to complain about his or her Internet speeds, it might not be the best time to upsell them at that moment even if it makes sense on paper to sell that bigger package to them.”

EARNING THE ‘RIGHT TO SELL’

He continued: “We have to earn the right to upsell or cross-sell our customers. We want to understand and fi x their problem first. We always bring it back to the human experience. Data collection is an issue people are increasingly concerned about and we have to earn the right to use that data.”

As multichannel distributors continue to build trust with their customers, they will use big data more to sell more services, the cable executive said. Operators can learn a lot from the fumbles, foibles and successes of companies like Google and Facebook. It’s one thing to learn from companies like Google when it comes to using big data effectively. It’s another to actually put those practices to use. To be sure, analyzing big data requires manpower and the skill sets needed to take advantage of those analytics are in high demand these days. Many colleges, including the University of California at Berkeley and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, are creating courses specializing in big data.

“It’s often hard to find the right people in this field,” the operator said. “Most people who deal with data are used tostructured analytics, and big data is not structured and it takes a different approach. We do a lot of internal training in the classroom and in the field, and we’re working with other companies to get ramped up in this space.”

“We are working in uncharted territory,” he said.

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. 

Looking to give its customer experience a boost, Comcast has struck up a deal with the UPS Store that lets customers return equipment such as set-tops and cable modems to Comcast for free from more than 4,400 UPS Store locations.

Comcast said customers can drop off their equipment “as-is,” noting that agreement, which aims to ease the process, covers processing, packaging and shipping. Customers who use the option will receive a confirmation or receipt and tracking information from UPS. Comcast customers can also to return equipment to  more than 500 Xfinity Stores.

“This is all about convenience for our customers,” Tom Karinshak, Comcast Cable’s SVP, customer service, said. “The process is super simple and will streamline equipment returns. Customers can walk into any The UPS Store location, drop off their equipment and take their receipt.  And this is all free for our customers.  The UPS Store is known for its efficiency and customer service so we’re excited to be working with them.”

Comcast said the agreement with the UPS Store is one example of how the MSO is trying to “rethink every aspect of the customer service.” The agreement comes soon after Comcast named Charlie Herrin to the new post of SVP of customer service.

Comcast’s customer service has come under scrutiny as it tries to gain regulatory approvel for its proposed merger with Time Warner Cable and as the operator faces a lawsuit form a former Comcast customer, Conal O'Rourke, who claims his complaints about the cable company's poor customer service led to him being fired from his accounting job at PricewaterhouseCoopers in San Jose, Calif. Herrin issued an apology to O’Rourke about the MSO’s customer service performance, but Comcast has denied playing a role in O’Rourke’s termination.

WiFi’s signal is getting clearer.

The local-area wireless broadband technology already carries more Internet traffic to consumers’ smartphones and tablets, laptops and PCs than licensed wireless and wired connections combined, according to data from the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.

Earlier this month, the WiFi Alliance, a trade group that promotes the technology and certifies products for interoperability, unveiled a set of “Passpoint” certification features that enable WiFi networks to look and behave more like cellular networks (see “Cable Inches Toward ‘WiFi-First,’ ” Oct. 13, 2014).

ONE STEP CLOSER

Passpoint puts WiFi one step closer to becoming a carrier-grade network. This is important because if cable operators want to increase what they charge their residential and commercial customers, they will have to offer them reliable and seamless connectivity.

It’s a scenario similar to cable’s entry into the telephone business in the 1990s. Operators had to prove they could offer a service that was comparable to, and ultimately better than, what the incumbent telephone companies offered.

In May, the Federal Communications Commission made an additional 100 Megahertz of wireless spectrum in the 5-Gigahertz band available for unlicensed WiFi use. This gave carriers and MSOs some much-needed bandwidth to operate WiFi networks without interference and bottlenecks, according to Justin Colwell, CableLabs vice president of access network technologies.

More FCC auctions are expected, which will benefit cable operators wanting to expand their public and private WiFi offerings going forward. The majority of consumer phones and tablets can now live up to their potential with this new spectrum, Colwell said, so the ability to build a bigger and better wireless offering will serve as a value-added service to consumers.

The expansion and interconnection of wireless networks will also likely be a financial boon for operators, experts said.

It’s unclear just how much money can be generated with WiFi networks, but everyone seems to want get into the game. Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts extolled WiFi prospects in a presentation at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Media Communications and Entertainment conference in Los Angeles on Sept. 16.

“We have a tremendous asset in WiFi,” Roberts said. “Our relationship with our customers and the people who are not our customers understanding how great and powerful a WiFi connection can be … is a great thing for our company and our investment.”

In addition to its pledge to activate 8 million hotspots in its service territory by year’s end and joining with Cablevision Systems, Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks and Cox Communications in offering customers free access to 250,000 hotspots across the country, Comcast has been busy laying the groundwork for other partnerships.

The company is offering two Asian cellular operators access to its WiFi hotspots in the U.S. Customers of Japan’s KDDI and Taiwan Mobile can use Comcast’s Xfinity WiFi hotspots when they travel to the U.S., reducing the need for their subscribers to pay expensive international roaming charges.

INTERNATIONAL PACTS

Financial details of these deals have not been released, but the pacts serve as an example of the potential windfall WiFi offers to operators.

Comcast has also cut a peer-to-peer deal with Liberty Global whereby the European MSO’s customers can use Comcast’s WiFi free of charge when traveling in the U.S. and Comcast’s customers can use Liberty Global’s hotpsot WiFi services free when they travel in Europe. Right now, it’s a fair exchange of assets and Comcast executives declined to discuss the deal or its long-term implications for the company’s business strategy. But it is another sticky service designed to keep customers happy with and tied into their service.

Most U.S. WiFi users currently connect at home, CableLabs’s Colwell said. But that’s changing rapidly as consumers increasingly want to take their services with them as they venture outside. And operators want that, too.

Yet burgeoning use of cellular wireless Internet devices has created a logjam for providers, who are increasingly offloading their data traffic onto WiFi to alleviate the burden. A Cisco Systems study has predicted that 52% of all worldwide mobile traffic will be offloaded to WiFi by 2018; in the U.S., that number jumps to 64%.

The increase in mobile data traffic will likely result in new and unlikely partnerships and mergers, with cable operators sitting in the catbird seat, some observers have predicted.

“The time is coming when WiFi will shift from being a ‘secondary’ network to being a primary one,” MoffettNathanson partner and senior analyst Craig Moffett wrote in an Oct. 6 research report on WiFi. “[I]nstead of thinking of WiFi as an alternative to cellular everywhere WiFi is available, we will instead to begin to think of cellular as a backup network needed only when WiFi is not.”

Some cable and cellular companies are already making money with WiFi services. Raleigh, N.C.-based Republic Wireless is offering a WiFi-first service starting at only $5 a month and other wireless providers, including T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless, are prepping their own WiFifirst services as well. But some industry experts think cable-enabled WiFi will be in the driver’s seat when it comes to controlling the spectrum and the dollars derived from offering the service to consumers and businesses.

While much has been made about consumer WiFi services, a big potential revenue generator for cable lies within the commercial sector. Comcast is already offering WiFi services in several public spaces in its service territory, including some subway stations in its hometown of Philadelphia, as well as in some shopping malls.

In Santa Clara, Calif., Comcast is handling the backhaul services for Levi’s Stadium, the new home field of the National Football League’s San Francisco 49ers, with service costs offset by leveraging in-game experiences. Event attendees can order food or drinks and have them delivered to their seats — and receive marketing messages touting deals on goods sold at the stadium.

Bright House Networks recently activated free public WiFi in in downtown Tampa, Fla., as well as the area’s riverfront public parks. It’s free to the public for up to two hours a day or 1 Gb per month. BHN subscribers can access the service for free all of the time.

Once a non-BHN customer surpasses the free allocation, there is an option to purchase additional service.

The consumer side of the business is somewhat easy to implement, as dual private/public routers are deployed in millions of customers’ homes, CableLabs’ Colwell said. The business becomes a bit more complicated and expensive on the commercial side of the equation, though. There are things operators can do to mitigate costs using automated planning and project management solutions from such companies as Amdocs.

Moffett predicted the revenue that could be derived from both residential and commercial WiFi justifies costs. The fourth leg of the cable telecom industry’s stool would be complete.