Cable customer service struggles to climb

Saying that cable customer service stinks is like saying the sun rises in the East: It's a statement fully accepted as fact by consumers, many if not most of whom have experienced some level of substandard customer care--from the minor inconvenience of having to wait for the installer to major billing issues. But is that statement going to remain true for long?

MSOs are making efforts to right their customer service ship. How long it takes for those efforts to turn things around, however, is still up in the air.

Customers go to war on cable services

"How bad can a company get by providing bad service and overcharging for it? Well it apparently can't get much worse than Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA)," a customer wrote in a RateItAll.com review of the cable operator on Feb. 3, 2011. Other reviews on the site are decidedly negative, with complaints about frequent loss of TV service and billing errors predominant.

Complaining about Comcast has practically become a sport: The MSO routinely makes the finalist rankings for the Consumerist's annual Golden Poo award (Comcast won the dubious distinction in 2010). Cable companies ranked among The Atlantic's "19 Most Hated Companies in America," with Cox Communications settling in at the #17 spot, and Charter (Nasdaq: CHTR), Comcast, and Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) taking the 5, 4 and 3 spots respectively.

And consumer fury has taken on legendary proportions: In October 2007, a 75-year-old Manassas, Va., woman marched into the local Comcast customer service office and took a hammer to computer monitors and other equipment. A couple of months before that, Bob Garfield's noted "ComcastMustDie.com" blog went live with its call for a sea change in how cable companies dealt with customers.

Earlier in the decade, subscription television service providers as a group had one of the lowest average ratings on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). And many cable operators languished in the 61 point spot for nearly four years, from 2003-2006.

Click here for J.D. Power and Associates customer satisfaction rankings for television service providers.

Righting the ship

But here's the thing: Cable customer service ratings, low as they are, are actually going up, incrementally and very slowly.

In May 2010, the ACSI reported that customer satisfaction with cable and satellite TV providers rose 5 percent to an average rating of 66, the sector's highest ratings in ten years.

This wasn't reflected in J.D. Power & Associates' 2010 study of U.S. residential satisfaction; cable television providers' scores fell slightly from the year before, from an combined average of 632 in 2009 to 629 in 2010. But the average is still up from 2008, when providers scored 609, the lowest since 2003.

Did the grass-roots efforts that sprung up a few years earlier spur MSOs to start making a change in how they treated their customers? In Comcast's case, they were probably at least partly responsible. Comcast's Jenni Moyer, senior director of corporate communications, said that the cable giant began taking a closer look at its customer service operations around 2007.

"About four years ago, we were watching the conversations that were happening online but we weren't necessarily participating in those conversations," Moyer said. "For example, if we saw somebody posted something about their experience, if we could identify them easily we would try to reach out to them by phone or by email."

Moyer added that by early 2008, "we decided we were going to participate in these conversations where our customers were having these conversations and sharing their thoughts. We were going to take a very visible presence and be there."

Gerth

Take a look on any given day at the @comcastcares Twitter page and you'll see a nearly nonstop feed of tweets with almost the same mantra: "Can I help?" Bill Gerth, who tweets as @comcastcares and as @comcastbill, is one of the Comcast Digital Care team members who, from the MSO's Philadelphia headquarters, answer tweets from customers nationwide on any number of service issues, from billing issues to service outages.

The 10-member Digital Care team is the most visible element of Comcast's renewed focus on customer service. Team members use social media as an additional tool in the customer service kit to hear from and respond to customer complaints, participating in forums as well as on Twitter, Facebook, and customer-focused site Quora.

"In many cases they're communicating with our local field folks because, if it's a service issue and we need to get a technician and our person on Twitter is in Philadelphia and the customer is in another part of the country, they're going to work closely with a care team in those markets to resolve any issues," Moyer said. "The team also collects feedback from the customers it interacts with and sends it to other parts of the customer service operation."

The social media effort was part of a "broader refocusing on the customer experience" at Comcast, with the MSO taking a closer look at its customer service operations and, notably, actually talking to its subscribers. "We went on a listening tour and we heard from our customers--really what they wanted was, they understand that things happen, but they wanted us to fix things right the first time; they wanted us to be respectful of their time," Moyer said.

Refocusing customer service entailed internal changes such as installation of a back office system that gives customer service reps an aggregated view of a customer's entire service package and the status of the equipment on their premises, as well as new customer guarantees. "If we're not on time, they'll get a $20 credit. If we don't fix an issue the first time, they'll get $90 of complimentary services. We also offer a 30-day money back guarantee on all of our services," she said.

A directed approach: Suddenlink

Jones: "Suddenlink has always been serious about improving the customer experience"

Reaching out to customers has long been a part of the customer service strategy for Suddenlink, a St. Louis, Mo., operator that serves Southern regions including Texas, West Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Arizona.

"We can't speak for other cable companies, but Suddenlink has always been serious about improving the customer experience," said Gibbs Jones, senior vice president of customer experience at Suddenlink.

The MSO added a new measuring tool to its customer experience set in 2007, when it began commissioning surveys of customer satisfaction through a third-party vendor. Key to the survey results was a rating called "net promoter score" (NPS)--which is derived from what Fred Reichheld calls "the ultimate question" (in his book of the same name), that familiar query, "How likely are you to recommend Company/Product X to someone you know?"

"As we learned more about the importance of NPS, we began to view it as the gauge of customer satisfaction," Jones said, "the umbrella measure of how well we are performing across the range of our customer touch points or interactions."

The commissioned customer surveys, along with ratings from J.D. Power and other sources including Sametrix, were used by Suddenlink to prioritize its customer service efforts. Steps included increasing technician training (all of its technicians hold at least one SCTE certification), improving the quality of its digital networks, adding a new customer help site, and other measures. Suddenlink also has a presence on Twitter and Facebook for customer outreach.

The result, according to Jones, was a 96-point jump on the J.D. Power Customer Satisfaction Index between 2007 and 2011. Its NPS scores improved, with "promoters" (those answering the ultimate question with a rating of 9 or 10) growing from 54 to 59 percent, and "detractors" (those rating the question below 6) declining from 26 to 18 percent. Suddenlink's overall NPS scored climbed from 28 to 41 in that four-year period.

Jones says Suddenlink's customer service efforts resulted in a 7.2 percent revenue increase from June 2010 to June 2011.

The road ahead

Even with more than four years of increased focus on customer service issues and steady growth in customer satisfaction rates, MSOs like Comcast still sit near the bottom of overall industry ratings by the ACSI. Can a sustained effort to improve service make a bigger difference?

Current Analysis analyst Larry Hettick sees a long road ahead. "MSOs like Comcast and Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) are moving forward with better service plans for their higher-end customers when buying premium tiers, but I'm not sure if this is helping them on their customer service in general," he said. "Cable operators have a long history of dissatisfied customers to overcome before they will be seen as having outstanding customer service."   

Meantime, customers are still brimming with dissatisfaction, hoping for any number of solutions to the service dilemma. Gizmodo recently put together a "Cable Customer's Bill of Rights" from the litany of issues they heard from people on their website; the list includes requests for accurate billing, better equipped call centers, shorter installation windows, delivering the broadband speed customers pay for, and not capping that broadband bandwidth, among other things.

Between a long legacy of poor service and the demand for newer, faster networks, building and sustaining an improved customer service effort could be a difficult feat indeed.