Doriot: Incumbents Rate Mediocre in Customer Service

The incumbent telcos had the same monopoly positioning for their traditional services. So why are they any better than cablecos on the cus-tomer service front?

Doriot: Well, telcos do a little bit better. And even though they had monopoly status for a long time they also had a lot of public service commis-sion/government/regulatory constraints or requirements put on them with regard to customer service. So their ability to serve is a little bit higher because of the bigger push from the PSCs or the PUCs in various places. They do a little better nowadays because they have much more of an infrastructure built and because they have been working in more differentiated services for a longer period of time than the cable companies do.

But haven’t many of those regulatory requirements been removed in recent years?

Doriot: Yes, on both sides. Either less regulatory constraints or more competition, which both have kind of the same effect with regard to what the con-sumer is ultimately going to experience.

When you talk about the telcos having the infrastructure in place to offer better customer service, to what infrastructure are you referring?

Doriot: It has to do with both traditional customer service operations that would be call-center-related, and … much more of a repair and replacement and quick reaction infrastructure with regard to field personnel and equipment so they’re able to react much quicker to issues of service being down. In today’s world that allows them to more quickly provision new services and work proactively, hopefully to the benefit of customers.

That said, how concerned are the incumbent telcos with customer satisfaction? And how do they compare in this realm to other major busi-nesses?

Doriot: The telcos and cablecos as well, neither one of them would be identified as a world-class industry [in terms of customer satisfaction]. The industry does middling in terms of satisfaction. If you look at ACSI for instance, satisfaction in the overall sense in the telecom industry is probably in the low 70s on a zero-to-100 scale.

What does low 70s mean?

Doriot: Low 70s means you’re probably not shedding share or churning customers at a really alarming rate, but you’re quite vulnerable to competition.

What can a top-level executive at a service provider do to improve customer satisfaction?

Doriot: They really do need to understand better what it is that the customer is interested in. For so long, the industry has pushed out features and said to customers ‘You’re interested in these, right?’ And some of them have been adopted and some of them have kind of just fallen by the wayside over the course of time. And it’s a real mismatch between what’s available technologically and what’s perceived to be of value for the customer.

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