Cable Customer Service Examined

Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

Cable Customer Service Examined

Comcast and its cable brethren already have a bad customer service reputation. In fact, Congess held hearings with cable execs! What did they find?

Cable is over-charging customers and training agents to avoid accepting cancellations (following the AOL procedural manual probably). Plus cable is tied with health insurance companies for the worst customer service. And yet people still buy from them. (Case in point, I have Bright House or Charter/Spectrum now.)

"In its latest competition report, the FCC estimated that about 61 percent of U.S. homes only have the choice of one cable company or the satellites if they want to watch television." [source]

Now that they are consolidating and debt is increasing, cost cutting will become Job 1.

DSLR has a story about Altice's first moves as owner of Cablevision. There is going to be some cost cutting because "Altice has told New York regulators it won't reduce customer-facing jobs for four years," per the WSJ. Altice is taking over Cablevision just six months after taking over SuddenLink - spending $26.8 Billion to buy the two MSOs.

"We believe that investing in service and delivering a best-in-class service experience is the most important factor in driving long-term customer growth," testified John Keib, Time Warner's former executive vice president and chief operating officer for residential services. You want to believe them, but since FCC or Congress haven't fined them, why would they fix anything? You only fix what affects your Wall Street numbers.

Rackspace is offering fanatical support for AWS. Maybe companies will pop up to offer fanatical support for resold cable modems.

Interesting side notes:

Frontier and Charter are suing each other in Connecticut for false advertising!

Disclosure from ARS: The Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which owns about 13 percent of Charter, is part of Advance Publications. Advance Publications owns Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica.



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