Nowhere to Go But Up

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How hard could it have been that when they finally did do it they did it in a day?"

Charter has the distinction of being the company with the highest number of complaints in the area covered by the St. Louis Better Business Bureau. In the last 36 months, the St. Louis Better Business Bureau has received 3,200 complaints about Charter, the highest of any company the office tracks. "Sometimes, due to the size and scope of the company, one hand often doesn't work with the other," says Scott Thomas, who works as a trade practice consultant at the St. Louis office.

Where do customers say Charter has gone wrong? Charter, which provides service in 29 states, often couldn't resolve an issue in one phone call. On top of that, it had problems with hidden charges, erratic billing, and technical innovation. For example, it was one of the last cable companies to offer phone service and thus was behind rivals when it came to offering bundled services—cable, Internet, and phone.

Worse Than the Rest of Cable

It's no secret that the cable industry rarely gets high marks for its customer service. Part of the problem, says Craig Moffett, vice-president and senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., is that historically there have been very few competitors in any one region, so companies haven't had to compete aggressively for customers. That may be changing with new players entering the game, like telecoms AT&T and satellite and digital cable networks such as DirecTV (DTV) and Echostar (SATS).

"A whole body of psychographic research shows customers will tend to be more satisfied with industries where they made a proactive choice," says Moffett. "The cable industry suffers from its reputation as a quasi-monopoly."

Charter's problems, however, go well beyond those of the industry, says Moffett. These days, cable customers harp mostly about poor programming options or lengthy commercials. The industry rarely suffers from complaints of erratic billing and surly reps—both among Charter's woes.

"Customers vote with their pocketbooks, and they have choices, and we recognize that if they don't get the service they need they'll go to another provider," says Stackhouse. "Our agents and technicians recognize that every day."

The Road to Improved Response

Charter is taking steps to improve its customer service. It built a new call center that lets the company route customer calls to the most qualified agent based on skills rather than geography. The company also shrank the time it takes for a technician to reach a customer's house for service from 8 hours to 2 by making an investment in technology that routes the closest service operator to the house.

That investment may be starting to pay off. The St. Louis BBB office says there are currently no unresolved complaints. Charter works closely with the BBB to resolve customer issues as soon as possible. The company has set up a system whereby complaints to the BBB from anywhere in the U.S. are funneled to one Charter location where agents specifically trained to handle those matters can process them. That allows Charter to address several complaints on a single issue at one time, speeding up the resolution. In this way, complaints that are sent to the BBB are sometimes fixed in the same day.

Says Thomas of the St. Louis BBB: "Charter has more complaints than any other company in our system, but they have been good at working with us." That's a sentiment Charter is hoping customers will soon share.

Lehman is an editorial assistant for BusinessWeek in New York.

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