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Comcast CEO Tries To Calm Investors
VoIP going well, trying to improve customer service...

Investors have been afraid of Comcast lately, in part because they believe the company is planning to spend a fortune to enter the wireless broadband space, but also because investors have gotten caught up in all the press surrounding telcoTV. As we've discussed previously however, it will take the telcos many, many years to make a dent into cable's footprint. For the time being, overbuilders like RCN actually have more to worry about.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts talks to Fortune Magazine in an effort to calm skittish investors. Roberts reminds the magazine that the company is adding VoIP customers a lot more quickly than Verizon and AT&T are adding TV customers, and they're set to leapfrog Embarq and become the nation's fourth largest phone provider before the end of this year. He admits the biggest problem they face is their poor reputation for customer service:
quote:
I hope that reputation is not universal, and we are working very hard to improve where we have made past mistakes. We do 250 million phone calls a year between orders and services, and, inevitably, with that many calls, you are going to have failures. We have added 11,000 technical and customer-care employees just in the past 18 months. And we are beginning to call customers before and after service appointments to make sure we did the work properly. It is a major goal to continue to improve.
Roberts touches on a number of other topics including DOCSIS 3.0 and DirecTV's NFL stranglehold, and makes the interesting claim that "video-rich content works better on cable modem."

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Tim2
Premium Member
join:2006-06-19

2 recommendations

Tim2

Premium Member

Custtomer service

I don't think Comcast's customer service reputation is "set in stone." But it's a longer process than anyone would like to improve it... as Brian Roberts said, they've hired 11,000 people in last 18 months. If my math is correct, that's 20 people a day. Along with that comes the infrastructure to support it... building or expanding the call center itself, hiring and training the new people, the supervisors, the managers, the HR department, etc.

It's not an easy task to localize call centers. But it's being done. Just check Google News to see the number of new call centers being created, and a lot of them aren't even mentioned in the news.

Will everyone be happy when the project is complete? No. 100% customer service is unattainable for any industry. It's especially true of cable... it's a completely different animal from other service companies. It's amazing how many customers can't operate their own TVs... and cable will roll a truck to do simple things like turn off closed-captioning. It's expensive and it takes time away from customers who have real problems with their service.

Still, I think Comcast is moving in the right direction.