As Merger Mania Rises, Cable And Broadband Customer Satisfaction Worse Than Ever
from the bang-up-job dept
As Comcast pushed tirelessly to try and sell regulators on its doomed acquisition of Time Warner Cable, the company repeatedly stated it was making customer service a top priority, even going so far as to hire a new "customer experience" VP. But what became an almost comical series of horror stories in the media continually showed that simply wasn't the case. If you have a memory, you'll recall that companies like Comcast have been promising to make customer service a priority for the better part of the last decade, yet things somehow manage to actually get worse.The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), for example, shows companies like Time Warner Cable and Comcast performing worse than ever. They're doing so badly with consumers, they're rated not only the worst in telecom, but the worst in any U.S. industry. The latest Consumer Reports ratings for pay TV and broadband ISPs back up this narrative, noting that mediocrity was a high bar for the industry in the latest survey findings:
"Only one of 39 Internet providers received a middling score for value, with the remainder failing to reach even that level of mediocrity. TV-service providers also took a beating, with 20 of the 24 companies earning our lowest scores for value; the rest managed to do just a little bit better. Bundles also weren’t deemed especially good deals, since only one of 20 bundled services got an average mark for value—the others all did worse."Take a moment to let that sink in. In broadband, only one ISP managed to be seen as utterly mediocre in terms of offering a decent value. On the TV front, the vast, vast majority of companies scored as poorly as was technically possible. That's the kind of abysmal performance that can only be perfected after a generation's worth of effort. According to Consumer Reports, these ratings are a seven year low for the broadband and television industry.
On a positive note, the study did find that it still pays to haggle with your cable or broadband provider, assuming you live in a semi-competitive market:
"One other finding from the survey: It pays to negotiate. Among the 42 percent who said they tried to negotiate a better deal, 45 percent reported that the provider dropped the bundle price by up to $50 per month, 30 percent got a new promotional rate, and 26 percent received additional premium channels."That only 42% of consumers even try to get a better deal is fairly pathetic. But as cord cutting's slow-trickle-statistics suggest, there are tens of millions of customers that hate nearly everything about cable, yet continue to pay an arm and a leg each month. There are a number of reasons for that: lack of competition, being downright lazy, loving sports, or being a Luddite. The horrible customer service itself has been caused by two things: companies merging and growing too quickly without spending the money necessary to scale their customer service operations, and the lack of competition ensuring things stay that way.
Enter Charter Communications, which is busy promising regulators that all of these problems will magically go away if they're only allowed to acquire Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in the industry's latest $60+ billion mega merger. Like beaten house pets, most loyal, older traditional cable customers aren't optimistic that things will change. But as the Consumer Reports survey suggests, with younger demographics veering toward internet video and such choices on the rise in 2015, the clock is ticking for America's love-hate relationship with the legacy pay TV industry.
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Filed Under: broadband, cable, customer satisfaction, mergers
Companies: comcast, time warner cable
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I'm optimistic that things will change...
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That's a big assumption in the U.S.
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How to interpret the results
and if you hate your ISP, (very likely)
then just realize that Comcast is actually worse than your ISP. You might not have thought it possible, but it really is.
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Local Telco
The next week TWC sent me a letter begging me to come back with their "blazing speed" 15 Mb for $50 a month.
Go suck lemons TWC.
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Banking conspriacy
Think about it. They Steal Millions and BILLIONS from people. They do their best to screw with international currencies(and just got caught doing so). The big banks literally RUIN lives.
But Comcast is so terrible they consistently get rated worse than the people who actually ruin lives and steal millions and billions of dollars.
How?
Never mind how a video game company, EA, could win most hated company in America over won who literally made people homeless and bankrupted people.
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That being said, I don't see how acquiring TWC will make them better, just larger.
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Re:
Generally speaking, I've had fairly decent experiences with them too. Plenty of general cable company nonsense of course ("between 1 and 4pm", and asking them to call you when they're on the way is like pulling teeth) and a few occasions where I actually had to inform the service tech how their system actually worked, but for the most part I've had good luck with both cable and internet.
My biggest complaints with them have always been regarding TV service. Too expensive by far, too much bundling (which relates to the expense), and repeated glitches during the digital switchover.
Don't get me wrong, I'm as worried about any merger as the next guy. But from everything I've heard about Comcast (and TWC, and others) I'm at least cautiously optimistic that things won't get any worse.
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Re:
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Missing reason
- Use Chrome with DRM.
- Use crazy Wine hacks to run Silverlight DRM.
- Use a virtual machine to run Windows.
Source: MythTV Wiki
Proper way to support Linux users (and pretty much everybody else): offer a clean streaming service and/or clean downloadable video stream (e.g. mp4).
Ordinarily, I would not bother to post this, but the claim that people stick with cable out of laziness or Luddite-ism is just wrong in my case.
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Re: Missing reason
A valid reason, but certainly not Netflix's fault. You can blame the MPAA and the studios for that. I suspect that if Netflix could get away with it, their DRM would disappear.
Ordinarily, I would not bother to post this, but the claim that people stick with cable out of laziness or Luddite-ism is just wrong in my case.
Not sure how this would actually *keep* people on Cable (except maybe for premium channels,) since most of the cable content doesn't even appear on Netflix until months or even years after it shows on cable (if ever, try streaming Game of Thrones on Netflix.)
Though I suspect, if a legal streaming company existed that had all the content anyone would want, cable wouldn't exist any more.
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Re: Re: Missing reason
If you are lucky enough to live in an area with very good over-the-air broadcasting, and have no one in your household who insists on non-OTA content, you could cut the cable company out of this and go back to rabbit-ears based recording. If you can't get a good signal via OTA or you do want non-broadcast content, then your choices are: cable, horribly painful legal online, BitTorrent, or go without.
Your remark about some content not being available on Netflix is a good one, and is another example of how copyright combined with obnoxious contracts leads to Netflix being unable to serve willing customers. I do not necessarily blame Netflix for making Linux use so painful, but whether they do it voluntarily or contractually, the point remains that they do it, and until they stop doing it, they are not a valid choice for some would-be cord-cutters.
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Re: Re: Missing reason
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Re: Re: Re: Missing reason
DRM is built into the Netflix client, which is likely not possible to remove for one product but keep for others. Since you appear to be a word lawyer, let me fix my statement by saying "I suspect that if Netflix could get away with it, their DRM built into their client would disappear." with the caveat that the majors won't let them get away with it.
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Re: Re: Re: Missing reason
Absolutely agree. When I was a cable subscriber, before I cut it, I would often use this method to space/time shift videos in order to watch them at a time that was more appropriate to my busy schedule. At least until they started encrypting the video/audio stream and my video capture card broke and I replaced it with one that didn't ignore the "do not copy" bit.
Your remark about some content not being available on Netflix is a good one, and is another example of how copyright combined with obnoxious contracts leads to Netflix being unable to serve willing customers.
Most of the streaming companies/options are difficult in this regards. Don't get me started with the blackout stupidity with MLB.tv. I'd happily pay them for content, but no dice if I want to actually watch the team I have season tickets for.
I do not necessarily blame Netflix for making Linux use so painful, but whether they do it voluntarily or contractually, the point remains that they do it, and until they stop doing it, they are not a valid choice for some would-be cord-cutters.
As a Linux user, and one that has had to deal with the pain that is Netflix, I agree with everything you have said, but I am a cord cutter that is doing perfectly fine. I've found that those shows I couldn't live without are things that I am living without perfectly fine. Youtube has replaced a great deal of my entertainment, along with Netflix (which works fine on many DVD players and other set-top boxes, though not on my chosen platforms, as a workaround,) Amazon, and Spotify/Pandora.
I wish companies cared more for their consumers, and would not implement stupid restrictions based on obnoxious contracts by people with a vested interest in maintaining their monopoly rents and status quo, but that is where we are now.
Getting rid of copyright, or at least making it more in line with the original goal of giving an author (not a large multi-national corporation,) a reason to produce, and restricting stupid restrictions like being able to prevent someone who buys or rents a product from viewing it on their chosen platform instead of being forced to buy something they don't need or want in order to view said product would be the ultimate goal.
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'Fix your problem, then we'll think about letting you make it bigger'
Any evidence suggesting that they are trying to game the system by artificially raising customer satisfaction ratings is grounds for permanently being barred from any acquisitions or mergers.
Give even those in monopoly positions a real reason to care about what their customers feel about them, and then they might start bothering to try and actually keep their customers happy.
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USApathy, The National Disease
This is not a capitalist system, this is a feudal system. And the majority of US citizens are just serfs.
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Re: USApathy, The National Disease
That's from Democracy in America, written in 1831. Anyone who hasn't read this book yet, should.
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Re: Banking conspriacy
That's not hard to understand at all. When the large banks fuck you over, there's almost never a direct and obvious connection between what they did and your hardship. When the telecoms fuck you over, they're looking in your eyes and grinning while they do it.
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