TCI is short of people to install @Home in Bay area:
Published Friday, April 2, 1999, in the San Jose Mercury News
Help wanted Telecom companies are desperate for workers to fill demand for cable and Internet services
Calls for high-speed access get less-than-rapid response
BY DEBORAH KONG
Mercury News Staff Writer
It was starting to get dark when John Gomez, dressed in olive-green Dockers and a navy blue button-down shirt with a Pacific Bell Data Communication Specialist logo, arrived to check the dead high-speed Internet connection.
It was his 10th hour on the job. It would be another 2 1/2 hours before he drove home to his wife and 1-year-old son.
Inside the Palo Alto condominium, Roger Petersen had spent three frustrating hours on hold with Pac Bell that Monday. The work-at-home software engineer was eager for the same high-speed Internet access a co-worker brags about.
From high-speed Internet access to digital cable TV, demand for telecommunications services is booming in the Bay Area. But delivery of some high-tech offerings is being slowed by a decidedly low-tech problem: lack of blue-collar workers.
Companies such as Pacific Bell and Tele-Communications Inc. are hastily hiring hundreds of people to answer phones and repair and install lines and equipment. How soon Pac Bell can find 1,800 new workers statewide and TCI can find another 800 to 900 in the Bay Area may determine how long customers like Petersen wait on hold, or how soon they get high-speed Internet service.
Years ago, semiconductor companies competed to hire clean-suit workers in their fabrication plants. Now, ''Pacific Bell, AT&T, TCI -- we're all looking for telecom professionals,'' said TCI spokesman Andrew Johnson. ''That's become sort of the hot thing.''
Prospective employees have many choices, said Deeanne Badke, Pac Bell's statewide employment recruiter. Who's Badke's competition?
''I can't even name them all, there are so many,'' she said.
With explosive demand for traditional services -- Pac Bell installed 1.5 million lines in the last two years, and TCI has had a double-digit increase in orders for its basic products in the last 12 to 18 months -- the companies are trying to keep up with their core businesses while rolling out new technologies.
One flash point has been the time customers spend waiting on hold.
Answering calls
At TCI's San Jose call center, more than 200 customer service representatives answer sales, service and repair calls. Mounted high on the walls above the big room are about 15 electronic screens that look like basketball scoreboards. They tally how many calls are holding and the time the longest call has been waiting.
To answer the hundreds of thousands of calls pouring into the center each month, TCI recently added 120 people to this center and 60 to one in Livermore. Pac Bell wants to hire 400 more customer service reps in the Bay Area in the next six months.
Both companies say they meet government standards when it comes to answering calls about basic services -- for example, calls about basic cable TV services are answered within 30 seconds 90 percent of the time. Many of the complaints about long waits, though, concern high-speed Internet access, a far less regulated service.
''We need to get world-class service,'' said Pac Bell spokesman John Britton. ''And that means answering phones quickly and dealing with customers fast and efficiently. We're bulking up with service reps to be able to do that.''
Representatives were swamped with thousands of calls when Pac Bell cut the cost of its high-speed Internet connection from $89 to $49 per month in January.
At first, customers waited an average of 18 days to get the service installed, but that has dropped to about a week. In some areas, though, people are still waiting an average of 10 to 11 days. The company expects another onslaught when it starts advertising.
Pac Bell is still learning about the relatively new technology's quirks, said Jim Callaway, president of public affairs.
''We've got to make sure we've got our arms around it,'' he said. ''I think we'll just get better and better as time goes on. We're rolling it out as fast as we can.''
TCI's competing $40-per-month high-speed service, @Home, has a wait of seven to 10 days, which the company hopes to reduce by half. ''We would like to have a customer call @Home on Monday, have it installed by Thursday and have them playing with it on the weekend,'' Johnson said.
To install high-speed service, it takes sophisticated technicians who blend basic phone and cable knowledge and dexterity with computers.
Gomez is a former computer salesman who left when the margins got too low. ''I used to have baby-soft hands,'' he said.
Standing in Petersen's living room, Gomez unbuckled a tool belt sagging with a phone line tester, flashlight and screwdrivers and let it drop to the carpet. ''Now I go from a phone guy to a computer guy,'' he said, pulling a chair up to the computer.
Gomez's job includes anything from crawling under houses to run wire, to configuring computers and browsers, to installing new phone jacks. ''I like to tinker with stuff,'' said Gomez, who couldn't solve Petersen's problem. ''This is the ultimate in tinkering.''
@Home service technician Andrew Bates Jr.'s job involves a fair amount of that, too. During a recent installation at Fremont resident Lily Zhang's house, Bates determined that there was no cable outlet to deliver the high-speed service to her home office.
Hardware and software
So he used a four-foot-long drill to bore a hole in the floor of an upstairs closet, then threaded the cable through the garage and along an outside wall to a cable box. Upstairs, he reached inside the computer to insert a network card, installed software and configured the computer.
Gomez, a Sunnyvale resident, and Bates, who lives in Oakland, are among the lucky ones. Employers say workers drive from as far as Merced, San Benito and Stanislaus counties and from the Stockton area to slake Silicon Valley's thirst for labor.
And in an area where the median home price is $339,000, it's not easy to attract people when the starting pay per hour isn't even in the double digits. At Pac Bell, salaries for customer service representatives range from $18,460 to $40,000 a year and for technicians from $19,240 to $47,000. TCI officials would not disclose salary ranges.
The employment pinch isn't limited to telecommunications: Between 1994 and 1998, employment grew in Silicon Valley by 16 percent, while the labor force grew by just 8 percent, according to Collaborative Economics of Palo Alto.
The boom also extends to unions whose workers install wiring in buildings throughout the region.
''The good fairy doesn't put this in; men have to put the hard wiring in,'' said John Neece, CEO of the Santa Clara and San Benito Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents about 25,000 construction workers.
Some say the solution is to dip into educational institutions for future recruits. TCI, for example, is working with San Jose City College to design a cable installation course. The college, which already offers three telecommunications courses, may also create a telecom degree, said electronics Professor Bob Reininger.
TCI hopes that many of its employees will move through the ranks to become what are informally known as ''superinstallers.''
The ''superinstallers'' could sell customers local phone and digital cable services as they installed high-speed Internet connections, for example. If the customer wanted the service, they could furnish it on the spot.
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