Todd Hollander Market Research

I recently wrote about a frustrating experience trying to place an order with Comcast for high speed internet and digital cable television (”Ordering from Comcast - Like a visit to the proctologist” - March 12, 2008). Within 24 hours of that post, I received a call from the Comcast corporate office apologizing for the problem and seeking to resolve it (”Comcast admits mistake” - March 18, 2008). Yesterday, the company installed the new services and waived one of the fees.

Here’s what I learned from the experience:

• This blog afforded me an opportunity unavailable to most disgruntled customers: a bully pulpit to publicly declare my dissatisfaction and win the attention of someone who could do something about it.
• When dissatisfied as a customer, I should always consider taking action rather than suffering in silence.
• Although Comcast has much room for improvement in delivering a customer-centric order/upgrade experience, in my case they were willing to acknowledge the problem and take effective steps to remedy it.
• High-speed cable internet access is much faster than DSL. As in: lightning fast ; no comparison; way better.

So at least for today, I have blazing internet access and on-demand television. Life is good. Maybe even “comcastic.”

The latest data by the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) show the perennially low-scoring cable and satellite TV industry had the lowest level of customer satisfaction among all industries measured.

As a whole, the industry dropped 2% to a score of 62 out of a possible 100 points with not a single provider managing to increase its year-over-year customer satisfaction score.

The direct-broadcast satellite companies continued to outscore any of the cable providers in the study, with DirecTV more highly ranked than EchoStar’s Dish Network. But satisfaction scores dropped for each of the providers this quarter: DirecTV’s score dropped 5.6% from the same period last year, while Dish’s fell 1.5% for the same period.

Among cable television providers, Comcast dropped 7% to 56 and Time Warner Cable went down 5% to 58.

The bottom line: Pay television providers are doing a very poor job of satisfying customers.