Comcast has announced a new, multi-year plan to reinvent its customer experience. The plan aims to look at every decision through a customer lens and make measureable changes and improvements across the company.
As part of the plan, Comcast will create more than 5,500 customer service jobs over the next few years and set a goal to always be on time for customer appointments by the third quarter of this year. The company will make major investments in technology and training and will simplify billing and create better policies to provide greater consistency and transparency to customers. Finally, hundreds of stores across the country will be renovated and new technologies developed so can customers can interact with the company how and when they want.
The new customer jobs will begin with the addition of three new state-of-the-art customer support centres in Albuquerque in New Mexico, Spokane in Washington, and Tucson in Arizona. More than 2,000 new employees will be hired at these centres. The first new centre, which will open in Albuquerque, will be staffed with bilingual employees who will support Spanish-speaking customers across the country. Sites for the two centres in Tucson and Spokane will be operational later this year.
The company is also tripling the size of its social care team to serve customers more quickly on Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms, and hiring 250 team members to serve in its Xfinity Stores across the country. It is hiring hundreds of additional technicians across the country and strengthening Comcast dispatch teams and operations. If a technician doesn’t arrive on time for an appointment, Comcast will automatically credit the customer USD 20.
Regarding new workforce tools, the company is currently rolling out a new, cloud-based platform that will give employees a better, holistic view of customer account histories. Starting this year, all employees, from senior management to frontline representatives, will be required to participate in additional customer experience training every year. In addition, new smart network tools have been developed to proactively diagnose issues in the network and enable Comcast engineers to solve them before they reach customers.
The new store experience will mean a store redesign and new capabilities, including intelligent queueing that allows customers to reserve a place ‘in line’ from their mobile phone, to cut wait times. The company has opened or built 125 new stores to date and plans to reach all 500 locations over the next few years.
Regarding new technology, the company’s My Account app, launched last year, has been downloaded more than one million times. Another new feature, called Tech Tracker, is being trialed in Boston and will be launched by the end of the year. The tool allows customers to track the location and arrival of their technician in real time on their smartphone and then rate the experience after the appointment. A partnership with The UPS Store will make returning equipment easier and more convenient.
