Will Customer Service Ever Cease Being an Issue for Access Providers?

Comcast customer service scores are improving--apparently by substantial amounts-- in Oregon, where Comcast has been testing new procedures and processes to improve customer service, the company says.  Comcast says complaints have dropped 25 percent in two years.

Oddly enough, one of the changes involves a new use for an old trouble-detecting mechanism. Decades ago, a cable operator would learn it has a problem because trouble calls started to pour in. Now, in a new way, Comcast monitors one specific behavior--customers using speed test apps--as an indicator it might have a problem in a neighborhood.

It really is not easy being a network-based service provider of any type, whether the service is electricity, mobile or fixed phone service, internet access or linear subscription video.

For years, customer satisfaction scores for internet access service and linear TV have been at the bottom of industry rankings, though there are signs of improvement, recently. That seems to always be the case.

Other “recurring services,” such as electrical utilities, fixed network voice or mobile phone service, also score relatively worse than many other types of products.

It never is so clear to me why that is the case, though any number of possibilities exist. Given the number of hours a television is used (often on in the background, and perhaps not being actively and intently watched), any network outage is going to have a higher chance of being noticed than if a fixed phone line drops. People do not actively use fixed line phones that many minutes per day, and an outage can occur without user awareness that has happened.

Others might suggest the “problem” is the recurring bill, a monthly reminder that a customer is paying for a product where there is some unhappiness with the value proposition.

Poor customer service can be an issue in any business where billing errors are likely to be common, as is any communications service with usage charges. Mobile service providers a decade or two ago had somewhat more common failures in that regard, though most of us would agree that customer service has gotten quite a lot better.

Internet access provider might suffer from the instability of IP connections generally, as well as the somewhat disparate experiences across the day. Wi-Fi channel performance also tends to vary significantly, all of which can lead to a user experience that seems--and is--unstable or disparate.

That does not help.

Base- line	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
Verizon Fios	72	74	73	68	71	70
AT&T U-verse	68	68	71	69	69	69
DIRECTV (AT&T)	69	68	72	69	68	68
DISH Network	67	69	70	67	67	67
Bright House Networks	NM	NM	NM	NM	65	66
Cablevision Systems	NM	NM	NM	NM	67	66
Subscription Television Service	66	66	68	65	63	65
All Others	69	68	69	66	66	64
Comcast	59	61	63	60	54	62
Suddenlink	NM	NM	NM	NM	57	62
Charter Communications	59	59	64	60	63	60
Cox Communications	67	63	65	63	62	59
Time Warner Cable	59	63	60	56	51	59
Mediacom	NM	NM	NM	NM	51	54
AT&T Corp.

source: ACSI