Doriot: Incumbents Rate Mediocre in Customer Service

Despite all the talk about expanding bundles and more competition in the communications services sector, cablecos and telcos haven’t made great strides in customer satisfaction, according to Philip Doriot, program director and partner of CFI Group North America, a customer satisfaction measurement and management company whose clients include Best Buy, British Telecom, the U.S. Federal Government, Yahoo!, UPS and other leading companies around the world.

xchange Editor in Chief Paula Bernier recently spoke with Doriot about why that is and what the prospects are for service providers to do better going forward.

As a group, how are the service providers doing with customer satisfaction?

Doriot: There’s a fairly clear split between the traditional telcos and the cable companies in particular, if you think of them as the multiservice providers in that part of the industry, with the telcos doing better in customer service than the cable companies do. ACSI, which is the American Customer Satisfaction Index, that is out of the University of Michigan, records it that way [with a] pretty clear distinction. There’s enough of a difference in performance scores that it’s significant statistically speaking. And in our own cable and telecom industry study published in the middle/summer of last year, we found something very similar. The cable companies really do the worst with regard to customer service, really across the board.

That seems to have been the case for some time. Several years ago, the cablecos as a group offered public recognition about their poor history of customer service and vowed to correct it. I guess they had limited success. In any case, are the cableco customer service issues you speak of the same old problems — like customers waiting at home for hours to get their service turned up, or what are we talking about?

Doriot: I think it comes from a couple of areas. They do have a pretty long history [with this], so they do have an uphill battle coming out of the gate to win over customers with customer service. They’re not helped at all by the perception and the degree to which it’s a reality, what most consumers see as rather arbitrary and a lot of times very large price increases that have been put upon them. And, of course, the telecoms have played that to the hilt with regard to choice in the variety of services both of them are trying to provide to consumers nowadays. [Also, the cable TV] franchises that were historically geographi-cally bound, they operated in areas largely as a monopoly. Therefore, if you were going to have cable TV, you had to go through a single provider who was already identified for you, and those guys didn’t have to fight for your business as a consumer, so consequently they didn’t really build the infrastructure to do customer service particularly well. So they’re also playing catch up with regard to their ability to really react to things and improve the consumer’s ex-perience. 

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