In the Wild: CFX Visits the Syndeo Institute at the Cable Center
CFX Editorial Director Amy Maclean joined industry all-stars Char Beales, Mark Snow and Wyatt Barnett for an oral history segment for the Customer Experience [CX] Archive of the Barco Library at the Syndeo Institute at the Cable Center. The video of the conversation just went live on Syndeo’s website. The wide-ranging discussion, moderated by Nicest Guy in Cable and former NCTA exec Rob Stoddard, covered the impact of CTAM’s Cable Mover hotline, today’s commitments to more transparent pricing and much more.
Beales, who spent more than 21 years as President and CEO of industry marketing association CTAM, helped set the stage for the industry’s CX revolution in talking about the on-time guarantee, which was a revolutionary promise for the industry in the mid-1990s. “We put in place this pretty simple on-time guarantee that said, ‘If we give you a window between 12pm and 4pm we will actually come between 12pm and 4pm, and if we don’t, we’ll credit your account 20 bucks.’ Not surprisingly, that was not an easy sell in an industry of mavericks, but the political need was so great that the majority of the industry went along with the on-time guarantee,” she said. “I think it was really a pivotal point for the industry. It worked in rebuilding our relationships and our reputation. And I haven’t had the need to call my cable provider in the last year, but the last time I had them out to my house, they’re still offering the on-time guarantee at Comcast.”
Snow, who serves as CTAM’s SVP and GM for Consumer Marketing and Insights, touched on how the industry has evolved from providing customer care to customer experience. “It’s nuanced. They’re very, very different things. So in customer care, it’s do I have enough people to answer the calls? Do I have enough people that have been trained well? Do I have the right training, the right information? Am I taking too long on the call? Are these people better served going online instead to answer their questions?” he said. “Customer experience is more about blueprinting the design of the service delivery itself, so you don’t even have to call.”
Barnett, NCTA’s VP for Technology Enablement, noted that regulatory issues are especially important to CX execs. “The customer care people really are at the pointy end of the industry. They’re the ones who are dealing with the customers,” he said, noting that today’s political culture is more pop-culture focused on the right and left. “A lot of that is things like the ‘click to cancel’ initiative which has kind of come in [through federal government action], faded away, then might be coming back again.”
How is the industry doing with CX these days? “I think we’re in a big state of change right now. We’re seeing it with all these price guarantees that are going out there. We’re seeing it with this promise of simpler and more transparency which is partly brought about by some of the regulatory pressures that they’re facing. I think we’re also in a state of uncertainty with AI,” Maclean said. “But there’s also one very big positive, to Mark’s point about how customer experience means so much more than the CSR on the end of the phone. There’s been huge, huge, huge work done on reliability of the network.”