Deep in the Heart Of AT&T Dallas

Cable World, Oct 7, 2002

Byline: SHIRLEY BRADY

Texas pride. That's what first struck Paula Trustdorf when she moved from Seattle in September 2000 to become SVP of AT&T Broadband's system to Dallas. "The history here is so much about fighting for freedom," she says. "I see why we've had so many presidents from Texas."

That spirit, Trustdorf explains, was evident in the system's 1,500 employees. "The surprise for me when I arrived," she says, "was the excitement and pride of the staff."

Customers were of a somewhat different mind-set. In fact, Trustdorf's biggest task since taking over the system, besides continuing its upgrade (now 65% rebuilt), has been communicating the company's own pride and values more clearly to the community. So she and her team have been hard at work improving service.

"It takes a while to change customer perception, and we had some service issues in this market," she admits. "We've been turning that around. We've had two independent customer satisfaction surveys completed. Each quarter we see incremental improvements in how our customers rate us from a call center perspective, from a field technician in the home perspective, on the price and value of our products. We've seen improvements across the board, so we know we're on the right track."

Her smartest move may have been to lure Lucy Noonan away from her job as executive director of national sales strategy for AT&T Broadband corporate to implement a new customer service strategy for Dallas. As the system's VP of customer care and sales, Noonan has brought a can-do attitude and a whirlwind of ideas to her new job. She has championed what she calls a "dramatic change in culture from an inbound sales perspective to absolutely insuring every home becomes a broadband home."

In only seven months on the job, Noonan is already starting to see a payoff. "From a customer care perspective we weren't doing a really good job," she says. "Our goal of answering 90% of phone calls within 30 seconds wasn't being met - we did a pretty poor job of that for two years. Customers want immediate service, because holding on a line instead of being with the family is not fun for any of us. Since really working on better valuing the customer for the past seven months, we've achieved 90% consistently in meeting our target."

Trustdorf says employees now feel more empowered. Call center reps, for instance, don't merely answer the phone and handle queries; they are more assertive and focused on the value of the system's products, responsiveness and services to the customer.

Part of that is due to Noonan's listening tour of the customer care operations and hearing firsthand experiences from the front line. She learned that with the market's move to offering more products - analog and digital cable, two tiers of Internet and telephony with video-on-demand, HDTV and home theater packages and home networking looming on the horizon - the staff felt overwhelmed.

"Our employees just said 'Help! This is way too complex, we're trained on three things and we need help!'" Noonan says. "So we've made it simpler for them. We broke it down and let them master one product at a time. Once they've been trained on video cable they get to go to the next level and master high-speed. And only until they master that can they then sell telephony."

Employees graduate to the next level once they receive a certificate of mastery. "We establish very clear and specific performance measures so we can recognize their contribution or coach them on how to improve their performance," says Noonan.

Noonan also revamped the sales approach from a generic "do you want fries with that?" mind-set to listening to customers in order to better satisfy them. "We're now doing needs-based selling to really identify the customers' need and really match our product to that need," she says. "We are more consultative and find out what they're really looking for instead of simply up-selling them."

The system is also stepping up its "instant installs" campaign with a new marketing push this month to let customers know they can order and receive service for one or more products the same day. The quick turnaround time is powered by two key factors. The system's VP of operations, Tony Speller, oversees new broadband service training that - like CSRs - allows technicians to master each product level for both installation and repairs. The market's executive director of communications, Angel Biasatti, refers to the system's souped-up technicians as the "Texas Rangers" for the militarylike focus of the training.

Speller also developed the software (code-name: Project Lucille) to streamline the back office and administrative systems to enable same-day installs, which is now available to AT&T Broadband systems nationwide.

The system also offered tiered pricing. Dallas recently introduced the Ultralink residential service to allow customers to surf the Web at 3 megabits per second downstream and 384 kilobits per second upstream for $79.99 a month (or $82.99 including modem leasing). A lower-speed offering later this year will join this higher-speed Internet tier.