Comcast plans to move ahead with plans to transform its customer experience, a part of its business which hasn’t always received glowing reviews.
Three months ago, Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast Corp., the largest broadcasting and cable company in the world by revenue, vowed to significantly improve and prioritize customer experience.
“In short, we want customer service to be our best product,” Roberts said in February. “We have not always lived up to that. But if we can reinvent and improve customer service, we can make it easier for our customers to experience what we are confident is the best platform and the best content on the fastest network.”
As a result, this month Comcast announced a new, multi-year plan to reinvent the customer experience and to create a culture focused on exceeding customers’ expectations at all levels of the company. The plan focuses on looking at every decision through a customer lens and making measureable changes and improvements across the company.
The core elements of Comcast’s strategic plan include:
Creating more than 5,500 customer service jobs over the next few years and setting a goal to always be on time for customer appointments by Q3 of 2015.
Major investments in technology and training to give employees the tools they need to deliver excellent service. The company will also simplify billing and create better policies to provide greater consistency and transparency to customers. Additionally, the plan includes the renovation of hundreds of stores across the country and the development of new technologies that will enable customers to interact with us how and when they want.
“This transformation is about shifting our mindset to be completely focused on the customer,” said Neil Smith, President and CEO, Comcast Cable. “It’s about respecting their time, being more proactive, doing what’s right, and never being satisfied with good enough. We’re on a mission and everyone is committed to making this happen.”
According to the Comcast website, the company will be successful when its customers see and feel this change in every interaction.
“We won’t stop until we get there, and we will never be ‘finished’ delivering a better experience to our customers,” said Charlie Herrin, EVP, Customer Experience, Comcast Cable.
Comcast’s multi-year commitment to create more than 5,500 new customer service jobs will begin with the addition of three new state-of-the-art customer support centers in Albuquerque, NM; Spokane, WA; and Tucson, AZ.
More than 2,000 new employees will be hired at these centers. The first new center, which will open in Albuquerque, will be staffed with bilingual employees who will support Spanish-speaking customers across the country. Sites for the two centers in Tucson and Spokane will be operational later this year. The company is also tripling the size of its social care team to serve customers more quickly on Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms, and hiring 250 team members to serve in its Xfinity Stores across the country.
To meet the goal of never being late and respecting customers’ time, Comcast is hiring hundreds of additional technicians across the country and strengthening Comcast dispatch teams and operations. If a technician doesn’t arrive on time for an appointment, Comcast will automatically credit the customer $20.
What’s more, Comcast is making significant investments in its workforce tools. The company is continuing to develop cutting-edge technology that will help its technicians and call center employees deliver excellent service. It is currently rolling out a new, cloud-based platform that gives employees a better, holistic view of the customer’s account history so they have everything they need to help customers faster.
Starting this year, all employees, from senior management to frontline representatives, will be required to participate in additional customer experience training every year. New smart network tools have been developed to proactively diagnose issues in the network and enable Comcast engineers to solve them before they reach customers.
This reinvention of the customer experience will also involve major changes to the in-store experience, according to a release on the Comcast website.
Comcast is redesigning all of its stores, adding staff and introducing new capabilities, including intelligent queueing that allows customers to reserve a place ‘in line’ from their mobile phone, to cut wait times. The company has opened or built 125 new stores to date and plans to reach all 500 of its locations in the next few years.
“Comcast is also building new technology so that we can be available for customers where and when they want,” according to the website. “The My Account app, which launched last year and has been downloaded more than one million times, puts customers in the driver’s seat giving them the tools to troubleshoot problems and fix issues. Customers with questions or issues can also use the app to schedule a convenient time for a Comcast representative to call them – with no waiting on hold.”