OT...story about Cox. Maybe a good short.
___________
Cable Upgrade a Bumpy Road for Cox
Monday, February 11, 2002; Page E03
In high-tech Fairfax, Cox Communications Inc. is the cable company many love to hate because of customer complaints about low-tech blunders, ill-trained technicians and difficulty in getting service calls scheduled and completed within a specified time.
Atlanta-based Cox bought the Fairfax cable TV franchise, the Washington area's largest, from Media General Inc. for $1.4 billion more than two years ago. Since then, it has endured a rocky relationship with many customers and local politicians.
Members of the county board of supervisors, besieged by complaints, hauled Cox officials before the board Jan. 7 to demand better service. Cox, which has been fined $35,600 for customer service violations stemming from poor telephone response times and construction errors, made a peace offering, pledging to freeze cable TV rates this year.
Officials say the company is halfway through a $500 million upgrade of the 20-year-old system that will bring digital cable television and Internet service via fiber-optic lines throughout Fairfax by the end of 2003, resulting in clearer, crisper TV reception; widespread high-speed Internet service; and system-wide reliability.
Gary T. McCollum, Cox's vice president and general manager in Northern Virginia, said the company expects to have 80 percent of its vast construction and installation work completed by the end of May, when Cox is required to have the upgrade "substantially complete," according to the terms of the sale.
But the path toward technological innovation and customer satisfaction has been arduous for Cox, something akin to a series of summer storms blowing through and knocking your favorite television show off the air.
"We took a bad situation [an aging cable system] and made it worse," McCollum said. "The process [of upgrading] is intrusive and disruptive. This is like renovating your house while living in it."
In the city of Fairfax, McCollum said, there were 507 calls to request service or complain in October 2000; 1,424 last March at the height of the transformation to digital service; and 242 in December, when the work was nearly done.
Fairfax Mayor John Mason said: "We were pleased and excited to be the first area to be upgraded, but frustrated by the technical difficulty and learning curve Cox Cable had to go through to upgrade. Cox did a poor job of communicating with its customers. They painted a good picture of what the result would be but not the technical difficulty in getting to the endgame."
The county's Department of Cable Communications and Consumer Protection studied the number of complaints lodged against Cox in Fairfax, comparing them with the number of complaints against other systems that have been rebuilt or are under construction: the cable system in Reston, other Cox systems outside the Washington area and cable operators elsewhere in the United States.
In all three instances, the consumer office found that Cox fared worse in this area, even compared with other Cox operations, with "dramatically more" complaints, said Ron Mallard, director of the cable and consumer office.
"It's not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison," Mallard said, but "we tried to be as fair as possible."
McCollum said the assessment was "a totally flawed analysis." Moreover, he said, the company is headed in the right direction.
He said Cox's staff has grown from 350 people when the company took over in October 1999 to 835 people, with the customer service staff in Chantilly rising from 85 to 200 people.
The company gets 250,000 to 300,000 calls a month, including complaints and requests for new or changed service. About 20 percent of those calls are farmed out to call service companies in Toronto and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that have Cox's customer lists but whose employees mostly are clueless about the byways and highways of Fairfax.
McCollum said the firm has sharply cut the number of outside contractors it uses, from 16 to three, and those now handle only new service installation calls, not repair calls.
He said service will improve after Cox opens its headquarters later this year near Dulles International Airport, adding a dispatch center, in addition to its Springfield office, for repair personnel by converting its existing Chantilly headquarters.
"We're going to get it done," he declared.
-- Kenneth Bredemeier
© 2002 The Washington Post Company |
