Revenge of the Cable Customer 397
Posted
by
timothy
from the spindling-jim-carey dept.
from the spindling-jim-carey dept.
crimeandpunishment writes "After years of poor service and poor reception, years of hoping the cable guy shows up sometime within that four-hour window, years of constant price increases ... it may be payback time for cable customers. Cable TV companies are trying to treat customers better. Considering the industry has long had some of the worst customer satsfaction ratings of any industry, it may take a while to overcome that reputation. But they'd better succeed. Cable customers are switching to satellite and phone companies in droves. According to industry research, cable companies lost five million video customers from 2006 to 2009."
I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called replacing cable, satellite and everything else with just the internet.
Right (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the phone company is known for their warm, friendly, helpful customer service. Can't speak for satellite, but my years with DSL with SBC yielded only marginal support at best.
Nothing new (Score:5, Insightful)
Time Warner, at least here in north central NC, has been making a concerted effort for the last several years, and actually has pretty darn good service. Their broadband is almost never down. They almost always show up when they say they will, you can get someone on the phone typically within 5 minutes, and the people on their phone support seem to actually know what they are talking about. Yes, they are still too expensive, but service hasn't really been an issue for me. We are moving our business phones and internet access to their business class service as it will save us around $30k a year, so we will see how that works out, but other than price for home service, I'm pretty happy with them.
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also known as turning off the TV and experiencing the truly wonderful show known as "real life". It can be boring at times, but the upsides are worth waiting for.
In My City (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Day late and dollar short... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:3, Insightful)
You can get cable Internet and not pay for TV. I am, anyhow. True, I pay an extra $10/mo because it's not part of a bundle, but $50/mo vs. $90/mo or $120/mo isn't hard math. I take the money I'm saving and buy shows a-la-carte on the xbox 360 or apple tv. Paying for each show seems weird at first, but when you think about it, at least you're directly supporting the programming you want, and not the 99.9% bullshit that's on cable.
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Favorite (Score:3, Insightful)
>Actually, what they should have is the client's signature. No signature = no visit.
How could the customer give them a signature if the customer really wasn't at home, though?
Sports over Internet? (Score:3, Insightful)
I pay an extra $10/mo because [my cable Internet is] not part of a bundle
Where I live, Comcast charges an extra $17/mo, which comes dangerously close to the price of lifeline cable.
I take the money I'm saving and buy shows a-la-carte on the xbox 360 or apple tv.
Can you get sports that way?
Re:I already had my revenge 10 years ago. (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want "revenge" .. (Score:5, Insightful)
.. just ask The Hammer [washingtonpost.com] how it's done.
Comcast's customer service is so bad they drove a 75 year old lady to taking a hammer to the local office.
Re:Sports over Internet? (Score:4, Insightful)
Solving the technical problems isn't a big challenge if you ignore all the politics and other nontechnical machinations at work. Realistically, there is no way the NFL, NASCAR, MLB, etc. would allow their content to be multicast without solid protection of their revenue streams. And to even get to that point, you either need to convince them to throw together their own multicasting infrastructure (complete with closed clients), or, more likely, some single entity needs to invent a magic "sports box" and strike deals with all the sports entities.
It's a mess. And all of that completely ignores the fact that the average consumer Internet connection is never going to be as reliable as plain old cable/satellite.
Re:Why do companies do this to themselves? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because most businesses have specialized in making money as their sole raison-d-etre. Everything else is outside of their "core competences", and is really a cost they would rather avoid. If they can get away with it, noone at the helm cares whether it's "nice" or not. They have customers while being an ass? They will just become a fatter ass.
There used to be time where big businesses would be good at something, and *that* was making them money. Then they started optimizing everything to make money, not on whatever the "something" was that used to be good. This happened everywhere.
Prime example: banks. Used to make boatloads of money from taking deposits and lending out part of that. Now the govt is trying to regulate some trading that become very profitable to the banks, and the banks scream bloody murder. Greedy optimization misses opportunities, but of course bankers are not computer scientists and wouldn't know that...
Some businesses shield you from their mediocricity: for example car companies. You really wouldn't want to be buying your car directly from Ford or GM. It'd be a horrible experience. The car dealers -- comparatively small enterprises -- are the customer's last line of defense in making car companies do a relatively good job.
Some car companies used to be good at making cars. They slowly became banks, and make their money lending money. The car making part of the operation is often the loss leader.
The problem is that the business people's mentality, that gets implanted right there in the business schools, is that the money making aspect is the thing that should drive everything else. You get idiot business school grads who expect that they should be paid $100k/year for doing nothing much, with zero experience. Eventually the yes-sayers who are clueless but "problem-free" end up in middle management, and their ineptness drives the bad service, and eventually the upper management blames the poor results on "environmental" factors: competition, bad economic situation, societal changes in the neighborhoods, etc.
No one in cable company division management typically has any clue about the technical side of the business, and none of the decisions they make actually help with the quality of service. The "technical" people and their managers are disinterested, since the people higher up don't give shit. The contractors, who often provide the actual technical service, are directed by same money-, erm, results-oriented monkeys -- but of course the cable company thinks they are clever by offloading the "technicalities" that are not their "core competency". It's batshit insane.
It's this self-nurturing disease, and solid competition is the only way to fix it. Bad cable companies must be driven out of business, and their upper management should be publicly ridiculed for what they are: overpaid idiots who have zero clue.
Re:Favorite (Score:3, Insightful)
Hiring directly in the area and hiring local contractors in the area are both "hiring locally".
If the company's oversight of its contractors is less effective than its oversight of its employees, then it should be expected that places where it relies on contractors will be less well served than places where it relies on employees to perform similar work. I suspect that this -- differences in degree of accountability -- is more the problem than local contractors being lazier than anyone else.