PHILADEPHIA – Believing you offer excellent customer service in response to customer complaints is all well and good, but wouldn’t it be better if the network were so reliable from a technical standpoint that the number of those phone calls were cut significantly?
Comcast COO Steve Burke noted that his company, which serves over 25 million U.S. customers, logs over 200 million phone calls per year which cause “tens of millions of truck rolls.” No wonder he said this morning during the opening session of the 2008 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo that “video reliability” is his focus for now and into the foreseeable future.
The company has grown from no phone subscribers to five million in two years and in the past decade has gone from four million total subs to 25 million thanks to numerous acquisitions. Comcast has rolled out digital and VOD and HD and HDOD and DVR and all manner of high speed Internet solutions and applications. “There is lots on the network,” added Burke.
While the company’s network is “right” 98% of the time, that’s nowhere near good enough in today’s world, he continued. In the old days, such errors meant that one channel might be a little fuzzy. But now, if there’s a two percent error rate on the DVR and two percent on VOD and two percent on HD and so on, “before you know it, 20% of the time you’ve got error rates on the network,” said Burke.
So instead of just reacting to problems when customers call, Comcast, like most other cablecos, are being far more proactive. “We are spending millions to spot problems before our customers do.”
“Error rates of two to three percent on VOD,” may not sound like much, “but that gnaws at customers,” insisted Burke, “and it gnaws on a company’s reputation.” He added that Comcast is committed to getting to the “five-9s” of reliability for its video network.
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When asked about the U.S. cable industry’s joint ventures on wireless (Clearwire) and interactive advertising (Project Canoe), Burke noted that the industry can’t afford to let these flounder, as some partnerships have in the past. “We have to make these work,” he said. “We have to have a wireless play… and advertisers do not want to deal with six cable companies to do national advertising, they want to deal with a single entity.”
While Project Canoe is in launch mode right now, Clearwire needs regulatory approval, which Burke and Charter Communications CEO Neil Smit said they hoped would come by the end of this calendar year. After that, Clearwire WiMax deployments could begin with six to 12 months – and if the industry looks to the head start it gave itself in the broadband market a decade ago and how successful that continues to be, “there is a real case for us to be aggressive and to move quickly,” said Burke.
