I laughed out loud when I heard the press report that the Roberts family, which controls Comcast, is concerned that customers are not giving them credit for their attempts to improve service.  On virtually any metric you’d care to choose, and for as long as I’ve been watching the company–both as an investor and as a customer–CMCSA has consistently ranked at or very near the worst in customer satisfaction.  It’s the only reason TWC isn’t in last place.

Hence the legislative and regulatory concern about consolidating the bottom of the pile into one low-service mega-company.   …and, I presume, the claim that customer service is now a priority for CMCSA.

I have only limited experience with TWC.  My impression is that no one is in charge.  This contrasts with CMCSA, where I don’t think incompetence is the issue.  Instead, I believe the profit-maximizing strategy of the firm is to:

–find the line where customer dissatisfaction turns into revolt and make the minimum investment necessary to stay just above it.  I’ve never discussed this with CMCSA management–in fact, I can’t recall ever having spoken with them.  But companies all have personalities.  And that’s the way CMCSA acts.

CMCSA wouldn’t be the first to do this.  Marriott (MAR) had  similar thinking at one time.  It built its hotel rooms with the ceilings an inch or two lower than other companies and the rooms, say, 10% smaller in total area.  The hot water was never really hot.  MAR managment argued to that these deviations from the norm all saved money and were too small for anyone to notice.  People would, at worst, only be vaguely uncomfortable.  And then they wondered why they were never able to attract (lucrative) business customers.

Eventually, the lightbulb came on for the Marriotts. The family ousted the management that thought up this approach.  (Those guys decamped to Disney, where then created the Eurodisney fiasco, and, after being pushed out the door again, went on to severely clip the wings of Northwest Air.)  MAR began to build more comfortable hotels and built a thriving corporate business (by the way, I own MAR shares).

The difference between MAR and CMCSA is that the latter is a semi-monopoly.  Customers have very few other choices.  That’s why a customer-unfriendly strategy continues to work.  It’s also why the question of whether regulators should encourage this behavior is coming up.

I’m not a CMCSA customer any more.  I use FIOS now.  Superstorm Sandy did me in.

The week after the storm, Verizon (VZ, another stock I own) trucks were all over our neighborhood, repairing their mobile and wired internet infrastructure.  CMCSA trucks didn’t arrive for a month!!  Nevertheless, CMCSA continued to charge for the service it was not delivering.  The customer service representatives I spoke with on more than one occasion explained that I could get a refund for the time the service was unavailable.  To do so, however, I would have to submit proof that my electric power had been restored.  And I would not get a refund for any time (a week, in my case) that the electric power was out.  Yes, CMCSA cable and internet weren’t available for a month after the storm.  But for CMCSA that was irrelevant.  Their argument was that without electricity I couldn’t receive the service CMCSA couldn’t provide.  So I had to pay for the non-service anyway.   Talk about through the looking glass.

Anyway, like most everyone else on our street, we switched to FIOS.

It will be interesting to see how the regulators treat the possible merger of CMCSA and TWC.