Knight Ridder Newspapers

PHILADELPHIA – High-definition television? Cool. Pausing and rewinding live TV? Wow.

Getting that stuff to work as promised? Good luck. Paying the bill? Ouch.

Those gee-whizzy new video products offered by cable- and satellite-TV providers may be compelling, but for some customers they’re also confounding.

That two-sided coin may be one reason a yearly survey to be released today by the University of Michigan shows that cable- and satellite-TV providers have the worst customer-satisfaction scores of any service-providing industry.

Wireless phone service providers, who also sell increasingly complex technology – with complex pricing plans to boot – were just above them in the survey.

“Rising prices, the complexity of the plans, the complexity of operating the stuff – it all contributes to consumer frustration,” said Allan Tilullo, a telecommunications analyst with Probe Research in Cedar Knolls, N.J. “And it’s only going to get worse.”

He said wireless phone firms, already putting still and video cameras, television reception and MP3 players in their phones, “would put a Mr. Coffee in there if they could.”

Competitors in both industries, he noted, are under relentless pressure to drive new products to market and, more important, to increase the amount of money they collect from their customers, a performance measure that analysts call RPU, for revenue per unit.

“I think the bigger source of dissatisfaction is that the rates never go down,” he said. “When the key metric is RPU, that doesn’t leave customers with warm and fuzzy feelings about these companies.”

On a scale of zero to 100, where zero is worst and 100 is best, cable- and satellite-television service providers got a score of 61, unchanged from last year.

The best scores went to companies in the express delivery business – such as Federal Express and United Parcel Service – which got scores of 77 to 83.

The American Consumer Satisfaction Index asked consumers three generic questions relating to their level of satisfaction with products and services they purchase.

The same three questions were used for 15 industries and more than 77 individual companies studied, according to David VanAmburg, managing director of the index, which is a product of the National Quality Research Center at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business. A 250-person sample was used for individual businesses; 500-person samples were used to measure satisfaction across industries, VanAmburg said.

As a group, the cable and satellite firms did worse than airlines, which tallied 66 points, and the U.S. Postal Service, which actually didn’t do so bad, scoring 74. Just behind the cable and satellite firms, tied with wireless phone service companies at 63, were (yikes!) newspapers.

The survey questions were so generic, said James Conaghan, who heads market and business research for the Newspaper Association of America, that it is hard to tell what the score says about consumer satisfaction with the industry. “You can’t tell from this if people are unhappy because their newspaper was delivered wet or not on time, or because there are too many stories on the front page about bombings in Iraq.”

Still, said Joe Natoli, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, “we know we have to do better on customer service, and we’re working hard on it.”

Philadelphia’s Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable-television provider, says it commenced a “Think Customers First” program in 2003 that made customer satisfaction levels – as measured monthly by the company at each of its business units – a factor in determining bonuses for thousands of its managers.

Its scores suggest the effort might be paying off. Comcast raised its individual score to 58 from 56 in last year’s report. But it still scored lower than the industry as a whole.

The two dominant satellite firms, DirecTV and Dish Network, which took millions of customers away from the cable industry by stressing lower prices, then raised their prices in January and March of this year, saw their scores drop from 71 each to 67 and 68, respectively.

“We’re pleased to see the gap” with satellite companies “closed,” said Dave Watson, who heads Comcast’s cable and Internet-access business. “But we know without a shadow of a doubt that we have a lot more work to do.”

The company’s customer service improvement effort has included hiring and training 3,000 additional service representatives for its call centers and service counters, reducing the window for service calls to two hours, and expanding service appointment times into the evening and on weekends.

Still, customer experiences with Comcast remain uneven.

Bob Nance, a Comcast customer in Montgomery County, Pa., says “on those rare occasions” when he has had minor glitches with his digital-television and high-speed Internet access, “Comcast’s tech support group is available within a reasonable wait time, and they are knowledgeable in terms of troubleshooting and getting problems solved.”

Gloucester County, Pa., resident Scott Richards, on the other hand, said that when his digital television picture broke up consistently, Comcast sent a technician to his home. The first one who came showed up for a 10 a.m.-to-noon appointment at 8:45 a.m., while Richards, who works nights, was asleep. The appointment had to be rescheduled.

Another technician came by his house, declared the signal adequate, and left, leaving the problem unfixed. After a third visit, a technician determined that a power booster needed to replaced – and fixed the problem.

“I’m thinking to myself, why didn’t the guy who installed the digital service know that it needed that?” Richards recalled.

Try as it might, a company as big as Comcast may find it impossible to stamp out all uneven responses.

Watson said the company handles 175 million customer phone calls and makes 35 million service calls to customers’ homes each year. If only 1 percent of those customer encounters go badly, Comcast could have 2.1 million unhappy customers.