Award Winning Blog

Sunday, May 29, 2016

It's Still the Cable Company, Part 711

A video on demand service glitch provided me an opportunity to see whether my cable television provider Comcast has made any progress on its customer service.  The result: it's GOTTEN WORSE!

How can a company with $74 billion dollars in annual revenues not understand the need to invest in both plant and personnel? 

That's not a hard question.  Senior management realizes that it can squeeze out even more revenue by sponsoring researchers, hiring attorneys and employing lobbyists to reframe the issue of investment.  Rather than confront the matter of obsolete plant, postponed investment and plain awful customer service the company can claim that "regulatory uncertainty" and network neutrality, etc. has caused it to lower it capital and operating expenditures.

So when customers encounter outages and a 20 minute audition with a computer before reaching a live person, it's the company responding to regulatory blunders.

In reality--or at least the one I experience on a holiday weekend--I cannot access any of Comcast's much touted video on demand content.  The reason: Comcast does not invest in plant and personnel, because it perceives the opportunity to blame somebody else.  The reward: even higher margins.