Comcast Needs a Culture Shock, Not More People
Colin Shaw
LinkedIn 'Top Voice' & influencer Customer Experience & Marketing | Financial Times Award Leading Consultancy 4 Straight Years | Host of 'The Intuitive Customer' in Top 2% | Best-selling Author x 7 | Conference Speaker
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts vowed this month that the company wants to repair its terrible reputation for “shoddy Customer service.” My take on their latest vow to fix their Customer service problem: A leopard doesn't change it spots. They have been talking about changing for years, but nothing has happened. Talk is cheap.
Just look at the following example. From phone call recordings that went viral of the poor behavior of their Customer Service Representatives to “inappropriate” name changes, their missteps as an organization have reached a legendary status. So legendary, in fact, that they have a Wikipedia page called, “Criticism of Comcast.”
Comcast’s improvement plan involves investing in three new Customer support centers, training, and technology, as well as hiring thousands of new Customer service reps. They want to redesign their billing for “more transparency.” Also, they revealed plans to release a Tech Tracker tool that will allow people to predict better when the tech will arrive. Finally, they had a pledge they will aim always to be on time for Customer appointments.
I have a number of concerns when I read about their plans. First of all, Comcast plans to hire more than 5,500 people for customer-service jobs. On the face of it, this idea sounds good. However, if you simply employ people and put them into a poor environment, what you get is just a lot more people who do a poor job.
Secondly, a couple of the items in their laundry list of improvements strike me as startlingly elementary. What is a bill if it isn’t transparent? No Customer should be wondering what they are paying for from their cable company. And please don’t get me started on “aiming always to be on time for Customer appointments.” It boggles my mind as I wonder, “What have they been aiming for up to this point?”
Just Another Na?ve Company
The culture at Comcast is clearly poor. They don’t have the Customer at the heart of everything they do. In fact, it's not even on the same planet! This type of culture problem comes from the top. When leadership makes it clear what is important, the rank and file reflects those values.
Customer Centricity is a concept we look at when we consult our clients. We developed the Na?ve to Natural model as a tool to assess where an organization is as it pertains to Customer-Centric culture.
Here is a helpful graphic that describes our Na?ve to Natural Model.
The least Customer-Centric organizations are what we call Na?ve. When we train on this tool, we describe the na?ve organization with the example of a proprietor of a shop with his back to the Customers as he goes about his work. A na?ve organization does not consider the Customer’s needs. Most times, they don’t care that they don’t either. In Comcast’s case, the proprietor has his or her back turned while changing a Customer’s name to something inappropriate like the story above.
Comcast is in Serious Need of a Culture Change
Year after year, Comcast finds itself in the number one spot on one of our surveys—for the Top 10 Worst Customer Experiences! The American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), an organization that measures Customer Satisfaction in the U.S., shows Comcast declining in satisfaction for all service areas over the previous year. They find their name on many “Most Hated” lists, including one from January of this year on 247wallst.com (they are #10 of 10). But their Customer Service doesn’t change.
Culture drives the behavior of your employees. For Comcast to change their Customer service levels, they have to change their culture. The leadership needs to recognize their role in broken, not Customer-centric culture and set a better example with their actions for their employees. Furthermore, they need to motivate the team to do the difficult work needed to fix their problems, i.e., change key performance indicators to reflect improvements in Customer Satisfaction or Net Promoter Score and tie incentives to this performance. And for goodness sake, they need their technicians to turn up to their appointments on time!
Hiring more people to do the same bad things isn’t going to help change the Customer service problems at Comcast. Nor will creating new Customer Support centers or adding “training” and technology. Putting Customers first and their needs at the center of everything Comcast does is the way to effect change; and that only happens in the culture from the leadership on down. If they don’t bother with this, then this claim to rethink their Customer service issues is sure to happen--between the hours of 8a.m. and 6p.m. on the 12th of Never.
Do you think Comcast has a prayer of fixing their Customer Service? Why or why not? Please share your insight in the comments below.
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- Ryanair: The Start of the Decline?
- Employee Culture: Why Amazon is On Top and Bank of America Isn’t
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Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world's first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author of four bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.
Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX
Technology Advisor / Cloud Product & Software Solutions Specialist
9 年I agree with this. My testimonial with Comcast that it has take to almost a week to resolve anyone's billing account and service issues They are way overpriced after your promo runs out. Thanks for writing this Colin!
Project Manager, Marketer, and Merchandiser
9 年They don't stand a chance at fixing themselves... because in many places there is no competition so they don't have to. Because they can't be held accountable by the customers, they are therefore lawless and can do whatever they like without real consequences.
Forretningsudvikling & v?kst - theView Agency & Ventures - Relations in Business - Design Thinking
9 年No, they have no chance. Allow me to explain, in what's also a comment to Rick's assertion that at least they care: - it seems to be nothing but politics. If you've been around even sort-of large'ish companies, you quickly realize that management will say whatever sounds good - no matter if it's even tenuously connected to the real world or not. This is a major problem in management, and it's rooted at least partially in management people looking out for no. 1 just a wee bit too much. Anyway, simply put, when a company reaches a certain size (and it's not that big), a schism appears between what goes on in the day-to-day, and what management thinks is going on. I'm not trying to harp on managment here, I'm just stating an observation on the state of affairs - and I believe this is at the heart of many of the business world's problems. And this is why Comcast has no chance. The issue in-house that a company like Comcast would need to come to terms with and fix is the "consolidate into larger entities" factor. In what is essentially the opposite of their current strategy, the company should be fragmented into much smaller, more-or-less selfgoverning "nodes", and the support framework should be set up to accomodate this structure, including giving them direct control over assets that directly affect their day-to-day (as opposed to have to refer to "the head office" or whatever for minor, but customer-relations-important decisions). As I hint at this goes for quite many big companies - we need to realize that the commonly-held belief that bigger is better simply isn't true. Not from the point of view of the customer value chain, anyway.
Product Designer & AI Advocate | SOF/SOCOM Veteran
9 年Well, in any situation, the first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have one. If higher leadership in Comcast didn't care to fix it, they would not continue to recklessly draw attention to the core issue of their business and remind everyone of their reputation. I think it's a crucial step for them. Yes, they may be solely attempting to keep the media happy, but I am sure their outreach and media wing is tired of being tasked to sweep up the mess circulating concerning their horrific customer service, so I am sure there is some truth there that they will eventually fix it, but any change within a large company will be a slow moving train. They definitely have to step it up though with Netflix, Hulu, and other media providers dominating the on-demand 2.0 market. On the flip side, any attention or exposure, whether positive or negative is still beneficial to the brand and its advertising effort (i.e. raunchy Miley Cyrus or "A $60-a-bottle Tuscan wine enjoyed a 5% spike in sales after a popular online reviewer likened its aroma to “stinky socks.” as noted on Harvard Business Review. @Colin Shaw - Another great article. Beyond Philosophy's blog is a normal stop for me. Human behavior, social psychology, and how it relates to product design and marketing. Super relevant stuff.
Asst. Manager at NAPA AUTO PARTS
9 年Comcast is doing what many companies do when they confront a problem. A bunch of well paid people, who don't have to go through the steps for ordering, installing and contacting customer service and being inconvenienced are putting their heads together to figure out what is wrong and how it will be addressed. How can anyone who doesn't know or have the problem find a way to fix it? Because they don't go through the problem, they don't CARE and that is the name of the game. If they cared this would never have become a problem to begin with, and until they care it will never be fixed. That's where the emotion comes in. They need to feel for their customer by going through what their customer does. Then they will be able to emphasize with the customer, take their side and get the problems addressed. When my customers call I tell them I will fix any problems, or find the right person to fix it for them. Shadow the leader really exists... The entire company from the CEO down must have this belief. When was the last time the Comcast CEO took to the phones and helped customers with their questions/problems? No plans are going to help until the culture from the top down changes.