Transcript

Melanie Hannasch:  Hi, my name is Melanie Hannasch.  I’m the Regional Marketing Manager for Mediacom here in Georgia.  And I wanted to spend a little time talking about some industry trends when it comes to cable, and internet, and phone services, and particularly cable as an industry as a whole.  Obviously there’s been a lot of news coverage and media coverage when it comes to cable and its customer service, and its level of customer service and compared to other competitive services that you can find in the market today. 

Some hot topics have obviously been customer service and how cable does not perform as well as some of its competitors in the market, namely satellite.  And cable has really taken notice of that and spent a lot of time, and energy, and effort looking at how we can improve our customer service.  And in any industry today, customer service is obviously the focus and obviously a competitive advantage that many industries can look at and take a close analysis of to see what they can do to improve their level of customer service today.  One of those things that you can do is focus on customer surveys.  Obviously we can see that customer surveys give valuable feedback on how our customers view our business.  And that’s one thing that cable as an industry has done and taken a close look at adding also technology solutions to their ability to track and monitor customer interaction, both from a customer service phone line interaction, as well as a face-to-face interaction that we offer today. 

As a result of that, many different cable companies across the industry as a whole have rebranded their products or they have changed the way they market their products to customers to make sure that they understand that they’ve heard what they’ve been asking for and really made a change to their level of service that they’re offering their customers.  Additionally to that, like I had mentioned, technology has played a big part on that.  Many companies have implemented solutions to better track customer interaction and track their customer relationships on a much more detailed level to make sure that they’re servicing each customer individually.  Some of the cable companies out there, Mediacom included, offer online support through customer service forums or through social media. 

You can find almost any cable company online through Twitter or Facebook nowadays.  So social media has been stepping into the customer service forum as well on how to provide better customer service and support for our customers and as an industry.  So social media definitely plays a part in what we can provide as a solution to customer service needs today.  And I would state that any business today should take a look at how they can reach out to their customer better on a one-on-one basis, and how they can improve that relationship and the back and forth communication that you can have.  And social media is definitely a good step in that direction. 

Being able to offer online services, online interaction is also a great solution that you can offer your customers so that they don’t have to rely on a phone call to get a problem resolved today.  And if you’re interested in anything that we can provide on an online solution basis or through an internet interaction basis, you can definitely contact us through our online website at www.MediacomCable.com.