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Do You Know How
Good You Are? There are several ways to gauge how well you are doing in this business, or in other words, how well you are satisfying your customers. You can call your primary contact at the home office who may tell you ("I haven’t heard anything — I guess everything’s going fine"). Or you can call the property manager who may tell you ("It seems to be okay — my customers just call you directly if they ever need anything"). But you don’t really know until you contact your subscribers directly. Some on-site managers and property owners (or their representatives) are very good at keeping a pulse on the situation with their cable operator’s service. They ask the right questions, they talk to staff members, and they regularly visit their properties. But, you may speak with some clients and believe things are going well, and yet that could be very misleading. Or even worse, they may give you wrong information. For instance, suppose you’re told that the only issue at their property is that "reception is poor on channel 27," when the real issue among customers may be that you’re not carrying a Spanish channel. The key point is do you obtain good feedback from your customers? Do you contact the ones that you never hear from, or do you only speak to the ones who call with a billing question? It is critically important that you attempt to communicate with every customer, on a regular basis, to determine their opinions, attitudes, concerns and comments about you, your service, and your product. A "customer feedback" program is a very enlightening exercise. When you sit down and review the ratings and comments about your performance, it might paint a very different picture than what you initially thought. And at the same time, it will give you the advice and direction you need on how to improve and how to elevate your service. Obtaining this data is a competitive advantage, too. In three years, my local franchise cable company has not asked me once how much I like or dislike their service. I am sure that this is the norm in this business. Asking someone how they feel about their cable company is certainly the "exception". At MediaWorks, we send a customer satisfaction survey to every one of our subscribers twice a year (March and September). The survey is sent out with their bill, and is sent back to us with their payment. Within three or four weeks, we have collected a tremendous amount of information on each of the communities we serve. (Usually, 20%-30% of our customers respond to our survey). And the data is shared with everyone on our project team — marketing, customer service, operations, and construction. We also send copies of the scores to our clients and to on-site managers. The most important part of measuring customer satisfaction is asking the right questions. You must break the relationship down into its various elements and determine their satisfaction on each item. Some of these include convenience of ordering, accessibility of customer service, having the adequate product information, helpfulness/friendliness of staff, installation process, accuracy of order and responsiveness. In addition, you should measure satisfaction with channels offered, pricing, value, reception and comparison to other cable companies. Each of these questions will give you a great reading of your customer’s perceptions of your performance. The data becomes even more meaningful when you conduct the survey every six months. Tracking the results will help you spot various trends — are your actions improving things? Are they making a difference? You will also find that what you learn on one property may help you on another. I must warn you that if you are going to ask the questions, you better be prepared to respond. Your customers need to know that someone is reading the results, and that you will work on addressing certain issues. We send a personal note card and place a follow-up phone call to every customer who has had a bad experience, or suffered with a particular problem. We have made a number of changes over the years due to our results. We have expanded our call-center hours later in the evening, opened on Saturdays, offered different programming channels, and revised service tech routing to accommodate properties. We have also been able to head off growing concerns about offering newer, increasingly popular channels like Food Network or Home & Garden. I have seen independent studies published by several companies over the years about customer satisfaction with franchise cable companies and it's always been very poor. Even after recent upgrades, the scores remain quite low (normally just 50% satisfaction). But that is no excuse for good PCO’s not to target 100% customer satisfaction. After all, wouldn’t it be great to be twice as good as the competition?
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