The best phone company in America?

THE OTHER DECISION Cox made at the outset was to invest in creating a single billing and provisioning system and establish a high standard of customer care for voice.

“We were already investing [in customer service],” Esser said. “We got beat up for a lot of years because our margin was always a couple of points different from the rest of the industry. We knew where the money went — it went right back to customers. We believed that if they were happy with our video service then the likelihood of buying telephone service and high-speed Internet service from us was greater.”

When Cox launched its first voice service in Orange County, the company built a state-of-the-art call center, Esser said, and established business metrics around that, creating a professional team that was specifically trained to sell multiple products. It also spun off a team to provide Tier 2 support for more critical problems.

Esser said Cox studied how support teams at companies dealing with high volumes of transactions, like American Express, managed customer care. “We did a lot of customer service training, not just for people in the call center but for people in the field as well,” he said. “Jim Robbins used to say that nothing would disturb him more than for a customer who was a video customer, a high-speed Internet customer and a telephone customer to have to deal with three different repair technicians. So we created a field service organization that is three-product trained.”

Cox's customer support organizations are locally based, but the company works to achieve a consistent methodology for handling customer service from market to market, said Debbie Siek, vice president of customer care.

“We have a local team in each market, and I really believe this is one of the reasons why our customer service excels,” she said. “We don't have to wait for everything to sift back to headquarters. Our employees have the authority and the empowerment to make things happen at the local level, all the way down to the individual customer service rep (CSR). They also are empowered to make on-the-spot decisions.”

For example, a CSR can decide to give a customer credit in the case of a service outage without getting prior approval, she said.

The ongoing challenge is that as new products are added, more CSR training is necessary, Siek said. The company realized that need more than a year ago and has since invested in a new knowledge management system. “Everyone has to be able to have access to information that's only a click away,” she said.

Cox has developed special groups within customer service to handle tasks such as up-selling, she added, and the company is in the middle of reworking its touch-tone Interactive Voice Response systems to be speech-driven.

“We strive for excellence above and beyond our franchise agreements,” Siek said. “We are answering 80% of our calls within 20 seconds.”

Forrester Research analyst Maribel Lopez credits Cox with having done a good job of training its CSRs on the many different types of products and on local variations in pricing so that they “can describe the differences in the bundle,” she said. “Everyone has been struggling with how to do customer care in a multi-product bundle.”

“There is more of a culture here of taking care of the customer and making sure the customer is happy,” Kaish said. “They'll stay on the phone as long as it takes — in the telco world, the tendency was to get somebody off the phone as quickly as you could. I was amazed when I visited Roanoke, a customer service rep was on the phone walking someone through how to use the program guide.”

“I think Cox stands out in my mind as a company that does a good job, is open to new ideas and is researching and analyzing the market,” said analyst Kashoor. “They do have more of a commitment to customer care than other cable companies. They work harder to keep the customer happy.”