Everyone’s heard them, ‘sometime between 9 today and 3 o’clock next Thursday.’ The classic “cable guy” jokes. They’ve been around longer than even the classic Seinfeld episode in which Kramer turns the table on one such company. While that focuses on arrival time, phone answering services of such companies has been a thorn in consumers side as well.
It appears after all these years at least one of them has finally heard the calls and is actually doing something about it. Time Warner Cable has started a new advertisement campaign based around this very concept, according to the local Ohio news site Cleveland.com.
“We hear you loud and clear,” the company wrote in the advertisement. “We also know that your video, phone and Internet services are critical to your daily lives and deserve our highest investment and very best effort.”
They’re right about that as 91% of all U.S. citizens have their mobile device within reach 24/7. But it’s also true that U.S. brands are losing approximately $41 billion each year due to poor customer service. One of the biggest things they’re implementing is one-hour arrival times.
No more having to block off an entire afternoon (day?) to wait around for the cable guy. The addition of a call answering service, which allows you to have them call you back if the wait time is over 90 seconds is another welcome change for many customers. The number one thing customers are looking for when they call contact centers is to have their problems resolved quickly.
A commitment to restoring service within 24 hours of an outage and new online options to support their new answering services are also being added. While the option of handling matters online will probably be popular with the younger Millennial generation, 79% of consumers prefer to interact with companies by phone compared to other options.
It remains to be seen if the new changes will have any affect on the recent trend towards cutting the cord and using services like Hulu and Netflix, but in a world where two-thirds of consumers would be willing to spend more with a particular company (13% on average) following an excellent customer service experience, it’s certainly worth trying.
