The Bumpy Road Through Upgrades

Cable World, July 15, 2002

Byline: SHIRLEY BRADY

Announcing rate hikes. Switching to an in-house ISP. Changing hands and rebranding. Cable operators' headaches are many, but the most migraine-inducing has to be upgrading the plant to fiber optic.

It's a necessary, often messy and always expensive investment in launching new services. But the road to broadband is also fraught with peril: toe-tapping local officials waiting to play the heavy if deadlines aren't met; letters to the editor from cranky customers; and overloaded call centers buckling under the weight of outage complaints. Still others will demand their high-speed Internet access now.

If the folks being upgraded aren't sensitively handled, the resulting foul tempers and bad press can push them to another provider, one only too eager to take advantage of those digital teething pains with competitive offers.

Operators can't simply announce "Our upgrade is complete - come and get it!" Advance - and targeted - local marketing is critical to a successful digital launch, says Maro Casparian, VP of account services for Looking Glass Inc., a Denver-based market research firm.

"Launching service as you announce outages and [tell subscribers] 'just hang with us,'" doesn't cut it, says Casparian. "There's a huge difference between basic and one-pay [service subs], for instance, so you need to customize the message. The older population won't care about high-speed access or the hundreds of new channels coming their way, so for them you might focus on improved picture quality. But you would emphasize high-speed for an affluent couple with kids, as broadband increases their educational and entertainment resources."

Still, sophisticated subscribers can be tough customers. Consider the case of Cox Communications in Northern Virginia. With one-third of Congress plus Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell living in the area, the path to the broadband superhighway has proved bumpy - and stretched all the way to Capitol Hill.

Whenever the influential populace expressed outage outrage in the press, the system's VP and general manager, Gary McCollum, spoke openly with reporters and officials to address problems head-on. McCollum keeps an open-door policy with the Fairfax County board of supervisors, which threatened to revoke the system's license for its failure to complete an upgrade by the end of May. He hosts frequent customer appreciation events and broadband demonstrations and "will often visit customers in their homes," says the system's VP of sales and marketing, Clara Long. Outreach pays off, says Cox corporate SVP of operations Claus Kroeger. "Where digital is rolled out the consumer acceptance is extraordinary," he says. "We communicate the benefits and let customers know it isn't just more of the same."

That's a philosophy shared by Charlie Bartolotta, SVP of field operations for Mediacom Communications. "The primary customer relations goal during an upgrade/rebuild project, especially with churn as a consideration, is for our customers to genuinely comprehend, appreciate and support the purpose of the project," says Bartolotta. "If we are successful, customers will be more anxious to experience the results of the project.

"Good external communications is key," he adds. "Whether it be by providing prior announcements on temporary outages, activation schedules, programming changes, equipment needs or price changes, setting clear expectations and honoring them will decrease arbitrary disgust."

A smaller operator such as Patrick Knorr, who runs Lawrence, Kan.-based Sunflower Broadband, was able to relieve upgrade woes with a personal touch. "We went door to door apologizing in a neighborhood that was out for two days because of technical problems," Knorr explains.

Throughout the rebuild of his 34,000-subscriber system, Knorr and his team maintained a high profile. "We talked to the city leaders, [hung] door hangers in the neighborhoods we were working in and ran lots of spots explaining what we were doing," he says.