If you can stand one more, here's a story about a hapless Cox cable modem customer.
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For Many, Cox Sends the Wrong Signal
By Kenneth Bredemeier
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 7, 2002; Page VA14
Clifford I. Cummings, retired aerospace worker and Oakton resident, wanted to join the world of high-speed Internet service. Simple enough, he thought: He'd call Cox Communications Inc., the cable TV company in Fairfax County, and get hooked up to Road Runner Internet service.
That was last August, and since then Cummings has had at least eight visits from Cox personnel trying to install his Internet line properly. At the moment, Cummings said, he still cannot download large files.
"Part of the time, it will be up," said Cummings, 78. "I use it for e-mail and Web sites."
Unfortunately for Cox and many of its 240,000 cable television and 35,000 Road Runner customers in Fairfax, Cummings's experience is unique only in the details.
In high-tech Fairfax, Cox is the company many love to grump about for its low-tech blunders, ill-trained technicians and the difficulty in getting service calls scheduled and completed within a specified time.
Once, Cummings said, a Cox technician connected his Internet line to the wrong underground cable. At other times, Cox workers spent hours at Cummings's house trying to figure out the problem and went away with no solution in sight.
As a backup for the unreliable Road Runner, Cummings said, he has kept his dial-up Internet service. When the Internet connection problems persisted late last year, he stopped paying the Road Runner portion of his combined Road Runner-cable bill.
Cox "punished" him, he said, by cutting off both his TV and Internet service.
Cummings said he retaliated by dumping Cox's cable service and installing a satellite dish at his house. The Internet service was reinstated.
The story doesn't end there. In a final insult, Cox for months kept billing him as Cliffard I. Cummings. That was fixed, but Cummings's Internet messages still arrive for someone named Cliffard.
"They haven't got their act together," Cummings said of Cox. "Different parts of their organization don't communicate well with each other, and their people are not trained or authorized to deal with all problems."
Based in Atlanta, Cox Communications Inc. 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, were forced to take the unusual step of hauling 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.
But while acknowledging major shortcomings in the past, Cox says 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. That improvement, the company says, will offer customers clearer, crisper TV reception; widespread high-speed Internet service; and a systemwide reliability that is currently lacking.
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.
The 42-year-old McCollum, who has appeared in numerous promotional TV ads for Cox since arriving in Fairfax two years ago, likes to tell viewers and county residents that, with the upgrades, "the best is yet to come."
"This system is starting to look like a Cox system," he said. "We're better off than we were two years ago. This will be the premier system for Cox," which operates cable systems in 18 U.S. markets for 6.2 million customers.
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.
As McCollum himself said: "We took a bad situation [an aging cable system] and made it worse. The process [of upgrading] is intrusive and disruptive. This is like renovating your house while living in it.
"We know the faster we go [in trying to finish the wiring of the county for digital television and Internet service], the more interruptions we'll have" in service, McCollum said. "If we had to do it over again, we would have put in an extended period" for completion of the upgrade.
"Is it difficult and disruptive?" he asked rhetorically. "Yes."
In the meantime, the complaints about Cox's general overall performance seem never-ending, particularly from parts of the county where the fiber-optic upgrades are taking place now.
Listen to Daniel Rhoades, a 67-year-old retired D.C. police officer whose property on Tod Street straddles the Fairfax County-Falls Church boundary. Since last September, he said, he frequently has had snowy TV reception, lines across his screen and intermittent audio. By his count, Cox workers have visited his house and his neighbors' homes at least 25 times.
"These guys are out here all the time," Rhoades said -- not to suggest that he was pleased with the technical expertise Cox offered.
"One of the people at Cox told me the war in Afghanistan caused this," Rhoades recalled. "One guy told me it was the underground cable, but everything's overhead here. Another guy couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak Spanish, so we couldn't communicate. The biggest pain is having to call them every day. That's a half-hour every day."
Now, at last, Rhoades said his cable reception has been fine for the last few days, well after the digital upgrades were installed in his neighborhood.
Asked if the problems had been rectified, Rhoades laughed and said: "Oh, don't say that. I'm afraid it'll go out again."
Stephen A. Saft, a technology trainer and professor at George Washington University who lives nears Fairfax Circle, said he finally got the reliable Road Runner service he wanted, but not before what he described as "a very frustrating experience" in dealing with Cox personnel. "They promised they'd come to the house and didn't show up," he said -- "and then when they did, used a contractor who simply wasn't trained well enough."
A customer in Vienna, who declined to be identified, said: "In nine months, I've had five cable boxes replaced, but it was always two hours of my time. In 10 years [with a different cable company in California where he used to live], I never had any problem. I'm most unimpressed. All I want is some respect for my time, and they don't give anything."
Several local politicians said these stories are not new. Supervisors hear so many complaints that Cox has assigned two people -- Lyn Ganschinietz, its director of government and community relations, and Scott J. Broyles, its vice president for public and government affairs -- to try to resolve consumers' beefs passed on by the supervisors.
Two supervisors, Gerald E. Connolly (D-Providence) and Penelope A. Gross (D-Mason), have been particularly critical of Cox's operation, but by no means are they the only public officials unhappy with the firm's performance.
"We end up being unpaid troubleshooters for Cox," Connolly said of his office's calls to Ganschinietz. "Unfortunately, Cox's entry into Fairfax County was ill-starred from the beginning. They grossly underestimated this market, just sort of plowed ahead and sort of dismissed the consumer concerns in this community.
"It seems arrogant, but this is not Sheboygan, Wisconsin," he said. "It's a unique market. You are in the shadow of the nation's capital. If you screw up, you do yourselves incalculable harm."
Gross added: "Their performance has been pretty miserable, not up to expectations. I think they bit off more than they could chew. They underestimated the sophistication and demands of the people of Fairfax County."
Fairfax residents, Gross said, "understand construction" and the disruption it causes. "They don't understand why they can't get the phone answered" for a service call. Nonetheless, she acknowledged that constituent complaints have dropped in Mason District as the upgrade nears completion there.
Supervisor Sharon S. Bulova (D-Braddock) said she heard county residents complain two decades ago about Media General's initial construction of the cable system, so she knew Cox's upgrade would be difficult.
"I knew this was going to be a huge job," she said. "Cox is a good organization, but I think they underestimated the job they had to do."
Bulova's overall assessment of Cox's performance: "I've been very disappointed. Sometimes their technicians are not very skilled."
McCollum said that complaints related to the installation of the fiber-optic cables will drop markedly once the work is done. He points to the firm's experience in Fairfax City, where except for one neighborhood on the southwest side of the community, the upgrade to digital has been completed.
In Fairfax City, 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.
Moreover, he said, the callers now almost entirely are asking questions about operating their remote controls, not complaining about outages.
Fairfax Mayor John Mason said the number of complaints received by city officials has indeed dropped. He noted that the digital cable service at his house is excellent.
"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," Mason said. "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."
So, is Cox's performance measurably subpar?
The county's Department of Cable Communications and Consumer Protection thinks so.
Department officials 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. We're absolutely confident with the way it was presented."
McCollum's view is simple: "A totally flawed analysis."
Whatever disagreements exist, McCollum said the company is headed in the right direction.
He noted that 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.
In addition, McCollum said, the firm has sharply cut the number of outside contractors it uses, from 16 to three, and those firms now handle only new service installation calls, not repair calls.
"We didn't have the trainers on board when I came here two years ago," McCollum said. "Now we have six trainers working six days a week," giving new technicians nine weeks of training in class or working with other experienced technicians before they are sent out on their own.
Moreover, he said, service will improve after Cox opens its headquarters later this year near Dulles International Airport, which will allow the company to add a dispatch center for repair personnel by converting its existing Chantilly headquarters. Its Springfield office now serves as its only service call operation. But mostly, McCollum said, the completion of the fiber-optic upgrade will make the system more reliable in customers' homes.
"We're going to get it done," he declared.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company |
