Top Story: Charter Moves into New Home for State Operations Operations: Verizon Causes Service Headaches for Comcast in Baltimore Research: Consumer Satisfaction Growing for Cable Firms Q &A: John Higgins Corporate VP, Customer Care Charter Communications Briefing Room · Comcast Sponsors Job Fairs for Former AOL Employees · Peace Declared in Marin Around the Web Movers &Shakers Welcome to the latest edition of Focus on Customer Care. This e-mail newsletter covers issues of importance to the cable, satellite and telecommunications industries as they seek to provide customers with the very best experience using their services. If you are not interested in receiving this, click here to opt out.

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Charter Communications recently moved into new state offices in Vestavia Hills, Ala., allowing the company to expand its customer-service operations, as well as open a new retail store. The 37,000-square-foot facility brings under one roof Charter’s Alabama management staff, dispatchers, field technicians, installers and retail sales reps.

The new centralized facility has allowed Charter to reduce its service windows, according to director of communications Lynne Coker. The facility’s location was very important because Charter wanted to be accessible to as many of its customers as possible, Coker said. And with dynamic dispatching, service techs can be easily directed to other calls, reducing wait times for customers. The new facility also includes Charter’s largest Alabama warehouse, where the company will stock its priciest equipment, sending shipments to ancillary locations as needs arise. Charter plans to increase the number of employees it has in Birmingham, which now stands at about 200, but it’s unclear how many more will be added.

The retail center allows the company to show off its newest products and services. About 70% of Charter’s new business continues to come in through its call centers. But the retail center has been successful and traffic flow has been growing steadily since it opened April 27, Coker said. Retail employees can demonstrate the possibilities of digital products including digital video recorders, HDTV sets, video on demand and other services.

“We have retail centers in other Charter facilities, but none as comprehensive or as big as this one,” she said. “Customers have room to really experience the products, and the environment is inviting for them to take their time and really experiment with what we have to offer.”

Customers also can pay bills at the facility, or get tips on how to install equipment themselves. Charter now operates 14 retail locations throughout Alabama.

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Outages are always a customer service hassle. But when outages occur and the cable operator isn’t at fault and has no control over when or where they occur, it’s a nightmare. Comcast has experienced just that in Baltimore.

The operator has experienced over 4,500 cuts to its mainline and drop cables since Verizon began laying 2,500 miles of fiber optic cable throughout the Baltimore area last month. The interruptions have affected between 45,000 and 50,000 customers, according to Comcast spokesman Jim Gordon.

The operator generally can’t determine what has caused the service interruption until the technicians are on site, Gordon said. The company’s technicians fix the problem regardless of who is at fault.

So far, the damage from the physical plant has cost Comcast $1.5 million. But that doesn’t take into account the number of disgruntled customers who experience service outages. Verizon has paid back Comcast for some of its costs associated with the service interruptions, but negotiations continue. Verizon has also agreed to pay Baltimore County $2.7 million for the right to lay the network in the public rights of way.

“We keep telling the city regulators that this isn’t about competition,” Gordon said. “This is about continuity of our service. It shouldn’t be impacted when a new provider comes to town.”

Gordon noted that when Verizon enters the market with its video product, there will be five multichannel video providers in the area including Millenium Communications. He also said Comcast has never experienced so many outages before.

Verizon said the interruptions were not on purpose.

“I’m not here to tell you we’ve never damaged facilities,” Verizon representative Robert Olsen told the Baltimore Sun. “But we take every step we can to mitigate that damage.”

Verizon is building the network but is holding out on applying for a cable franchise, councilman Kevin Kamenetz told the Sun. “We’ve done everything we can to encourage their submission,” he said. “If they had submitted a franchise application in October when I asked them to, they probably would have had an approved franchise agreement by now.”

James Irvin, Howard County’s public works director, said Verizon’s construction initially caused problems, but that the company has been able to reduce them significantly, mostly by increasing the number of employees in the field who provide more oversight of contractors.

But Comcast is still bearing the brunt of customers calling to complain about outages and rolling trucks to fix the problems all while handing the day-to-day things that happen, including outages due to inclement weather. “We’re entering our busy season for bad weather and this, combined with that, is making it difficult to stay ahead of the curve,” Gordon said.

One solution: Comcast has assigned staffers to follow Verizon’s construction project so the company can anticipate or at least know immediately when a line has been cut.

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Consumers appear to be happier with their cable providers, but that doesn’t mean they think highly of cable overall, according to a recent survey.

Consumers still rail about their cable bills and waiting for the repairman, but they are generally happier with their service, thanks to bundled packages, according to a study by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which is produced by the Stephen M. Ross Business School at the University of Michigan, in partnership with the American Society for Quality and CFI Group, the international consulting firm.

The annual satisfaction index for cable and satellite combined rose two points in the first quarter of 2006 to 63 from 61 a year ago, marking the first increase since the university began questioning consumers about their television service five years ago, Reuters reported May 18. At the same time, the index for fixed line phone services was unchanged at 70, while the wireless phone index rose to 66 from 63.

Cable customers like the ability to bundle voice, video and Internet services. But they still complained about prices and lack of customer support. And while subscribers may like their cable service better today than a year ago, customer satisfaction for cable remains lower than almost every other segment ASCI follows. For instance, in the first quarter the satisfaction index for utility companies averaged 72.4; the post office index was 71, the airline industry index was 65; the wireless phone service index was 66; and the health care index was 74.1.

ACSI spoke to 250 customers per media company, including DirecTV, EchoStar Communications, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, and Time Warner Cable among others. DirectTV had the highest score at 71 and Charter was at the bottom with an index of 55.

Cox had the highest index score of 76 compared to other fixed line phone providers. The average fixed line phone provider index was 70 in the first quarter.

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John Higgins was appointed corporate VP of customer care for Charter Communications in January 2003. Before that, he had been executive VP of government affairs and franchise relations. Shortly after taking the customer care helm, Charter undertook a massive overhaul of its customer care operations. Higgins spoke with Focus on Customer Care about Charter’s customer service initiatives. An edited transcript follows:

Q: What prompted Charter’s decision to overhaul its customer-care operations in 2005?

A: We stepped back and looked at Charter and said, ‘We want to look at our customer experience and our customer service and we need to give our customers what they want.’ We looked at a lot of customer data and we said we needed to do some things to better service our customers. We needed to have the right call go to the right agent all the time. So, we needed a routing plan to make sure the call went to the well-trained sales agent all the time or the retention agent or the billing agent or repair agent. That’s really from the customer’s eyes and viewpoint why we took the route that we did.

Q: What needed improvement?

A: We had different opportunities. 2005 was a building block year. We voted to focus on foundation elements such as workforce management or routing plans. In other words, to get the right call to the right agent, you had to be able to deliver that call to the right agent. We focused on training and call flows. We do not script our agents. I believe in call flow standards so you develop guidelines -- guardrails so to speak. But then you let them use their natural abilities to fill in voids to best serve that unique caller every time. The workforce stuff was fundamental call center workforce management and we saw tremendous benefits from that.

Q: What’s the next step?

A: This is a couple-year plan. And so this year we need to invest in high-value projects. We need to continue to look at root-cause issues, look at what the customer wants, what the customer experience is. And we need to invest in things that are good for the business such as our sales queue and retention queue -- high-value projects or quality assurance teams as we outsource some of our calls, we want to make sure the customer experience is standard and consistent and is great no matter where that call is handled.

Q: Did you meet your goals last year? How you measure your success?

A: We put into place numerous metrics. We have a holistic performance management plan that is consistent with customer expectations. We have a variety of metrics but they are cascading metrics. They either roll from the CSR all the way up to me or from me down to the CSR. So we’re completely aligned against the customer experience defined by the customer surveys we do. We do comprehensive customer data surveys continuously throughout the year. We benchmark ourselves and see where we’ve come from and where we need to go to meet customers’ expectations, not my expectations. Let me give you a good example of that. Many people monitor handle time and time targets. We don’t have handle time targets. If it takes a caller 12 minutes to be completely satisfied then it takes 12 minutes. If the next caller can be completely satisfied in four minutes, then we take four minutes. So we do not stress handle time as a metric because we want the agent on the phone long enough to meet the consumer’s demand.

We are exceeding our expectations. We continue to ratchet up key metrics. Are we where we want to be from our perspective or from our customers’ perspective? No. I think there is always room for improvement and the customer experience changes with the business. So we have to change as well. But I am pleased with our progress.

Q: What are your expectations?

A: We used to have one large queue -- billing and repair. In today’s marketplace, bills can be three times as complex and with repair, we have all kinds of new devices and intense consumer equipment. So we broke those queues apart. We said these queues deserve their own training and their own resources to best serve the customer. It’s things like that we’ve done and seen great success in. From an efficiency standpoint, just looking at workforce management, we created a centralized workforce management team. We’ve optimized our network. We created the equivalent of adding 700 full-time employees just in driving greater efficiency. We added the efficiency of 700 more agents to the phones without having to spend the money to add those agents.

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• When President Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996, observers expected a dramatically different industry to emerge. According to BusinessWeek, It may not have been a smooth evolution, but that's exactly what happened.
  There's a whole new breed of telecom providers including the new AT&T, eBay, and Google among others, offering a variety of bundled packages. This is a new era, and success won't depend only on which companies can get to market fastest with the holy grail of content. In good old-fashioned style, it will also ride on who can treat the customer best. Here are three tips to help service providers navigate this evolving market. For More...

• A federal judge rejected a privacy group's request to release documents that it claims show AT&T Inc. helped the National Security Agency spy on Americans by providing access to customers' phone calls, said The Washington Post. U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said at a hearing in San Francisco that the documents may contain AT&T trade secrets. The judge also ruled against an AT&T request to have the privacy group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, return the documents to the company on the grounds that they were stolen. The case has helped put AT&T, the largest U.S. telephone company, at the center of the controversy over the NSA domestic surveillance program. For More...

• Too often when consumers have a gripe about a business or the service they received, they don't tell the company because they figure it won't do much good. Instead, they tell friends, maybe switch to a competing company or just lower their expectations. They ought to give complaining a try. "It's not useless at all. The problem is that people don't know how to complain effectively," Karen Leland, co-author of Customer Service for Dummies, told the Chicago Tribune.
  Making an effective complaint takes some of the traits you learned as a child from a parent or kindergarten teacher. Be polite. Remain calm. Don't lie or threaten. Being on your best behavior, though, is hard when feeling wronged. Adding to the frustration, it often seems that businesses don't want to hear from you. For More...

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• Terry Kennedy was named VP/GM of Comcast’s new system in Memphis, Tenn. He had been area VP for the Comcast Mid-South systems in Alabama and Mississippi.
• David Valdez was tapped as senior VP for Verizon West. He had been VP for public policy and external affairs for the Northwest region.
• Farrel Ryder was named GM of Comcast's Southern Mississippi cable system. He had been GM of Comcast's Florence, Ala. system.

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