20 Years of C5

The Preface, Context and History of the Cable Center Customer Centric Consortium

By Rob Stoddard, CXC Emeritus

At its heart, this is the story of a turnaround.

As cable television came of age in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the ferocity of demand for this new and exciting product was counterbalanced by one big thing – an equally ferocious consumer rage over the lackluster, some said careless and negligent, state of customer care that accompanied the emerging service.

Missed service calls, frequent outages, overcharges, property destruction, corporate arrogance, unkept promises, missing or misleading consumer information, constantly-shifting service packages … all these and more bedeviled the entrepreneurial pioneers who were wiring the nation for cable service, even as millions signed up for the new and life-changing service.

Individual and community “cable horror stories” often were recited, repeated, and amplified by watchdog media, enlarging and perpetuating them for decades. Consumer surveys consistently ranked cable customer service at the bottom of the pile – dead or nearly-dead last in lists of 50 or 60 industries.

Cable customer care was a punchline in the culture, highlighting newspaper comics, late night talk shows, radio call-in programs, and skits on Saturday Night Live. Even Hollywood got into the act, generating $100 million from a 1996 screwball comedy featuring the wild-eyed antics of a cable company installer, “The Cable Guy,” who becomes, according to the film’s description, “a full-fledged psycho stalker.”

Many cable executives believed that a stain this large on the industry, perpetually reinforced by industry behavior, might never be wiped away; that the industry refrain – “they love our product, but they hate our company” – was permanently ingrained in corporate culture.

And yet, flashing forward several decades: An industry that started as a simple service to bring television channels to those outside the scope of over-the-air broadcast signals, has morphed into an irreplaceable global provider of anytime, anywhere connectivity, information, entertainment, and education. And while those customer service horror stories still echo through the years, the cable and broadband industry of the 2020s is much better, if not yet highly, regarded among consumers for its quality customer experience.

An accident of time and technology? A symptom of shorter human attention spans? A break from post-pandemic consumers now addicted to the industry’s products and services? Maybe. But this decades-long turnaround also should be attributed in part to a small group of mostly-anonymous career executives and champions – forged over time, opportunity, and circumstance into an energized corps of customer experience advocates: The Cable Center Customer Centric Consortium (C5).

Why the C5 Story is Important

The story of C5 is, in part, the tale of an idea born of necessity, even desperation. This fragile customer experience movement survived several iterations at a time in which tech and industry leaders were looking to “move fast and break things,” the motto reportedly adopted by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and later embraced as a business book title by author Jonathan Taplin. While cable services and technology were changing the world, however, it was cable’s customer care that was broken, badly in need of repair.

Most cable companies – large and small – have come to terms with their “customer service problem,” and many are spending significant sums every day to enhance the customer experience (CX). Yet the story of C5 represents a collective effort on the part of an industry renowned for its collaboration. The C5 effort has been led over its lifespan by organizations that themselves have undergone dramatic change, and it’s been spearheaded by mid- and upper-level managers often nameless and always far from the headlines. The quiet, noble, and dogged determination of this group has helped build a foundation for reform and a platform for deliberation and progress.

The establishment and emergence of C5 as a force for good in cable overcame a variety of hurdles. It was fueled by intense regulatory concern, marketing angst, exploding competition, and ultimately, multi-billion-dollar investments by companies whose success hung in the balance. It was aided by trade associations, professional societies, technology cooperatives, academics, and global experts in customer experience. It was championed by a small group of visionaries and chief executives who believed, contrary to many of their peers, that a turnaround actually could be accomplished.

C5 offers a lesson in persistence in the face of tidal forces such as financial pressure, market consolidation, and compelling competing priorities. In short, it’s an example of how a good idea championed by motivated professionals and mission-oriented organizations can prevail in the face of towering odds.

In the story to follow, we’ll show how the fight for the cable customer experience has been – and continues to be – hard-fought and precarious. But we’ll also learn how this small group of tireless advocates could swim against the tide and make a difference. As 2023 – roughly the 20th anniversary of the germ of the idea that gave birth to the C5 construct – drew to a close, cable CX remained a work in progress. Yet the hell that was once cable customer service had been relegated to the past – perhaps as nothing more common than growing pains.

The path that has led to the endeavors of C5 – and its stewardship by The Syndeo Institute at The Cable Center – has been long and winding. In order to understand C5’s journey and impact, it’s important to know some of the critical factors that fed its rise and – finally – helped make CX an underlying value of the cable industry during the first quarter of the 21st century.

Cable Customer Service Suffered for Decades

Logic might dictate that quality customer care is intrinsic to any subscription-based business, such as cable, dependent upon subscription renewals by customers. But to many observers, the nascent cable business held customer care as a low priority at best. Early on it seemed that many companies were far more focused on generating revenue than on providing superior customer service. In that sense, the pain points that created a need for a C5 might be considered the result of events related to surging growth.

Consider the cable programming revolution during the industry’s rise:

The service originally known as community antenna television (CATV) dates to the creation of wired systems that transported nascent television signals to resident’s homes in hill communities in Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Arkansas in 1948. It’s an origin story of entrepreneurs across the nation who invested their life savings in wiring communities for television.

As the budding industry prepared to enter its fourth decade, the commencement of satellite-delivered content to cable headends in the mid-1970s created an explosion and growth of cable-only programming networks. Those developments in the 1970s and 80s gave birth to brands that today are household names: HBO, Showtime, MTV, CNN, ESPN, C-SPAN, and many others. American entertainment, news and information were in the thick of a revolution. CATV systems that initially were dedicated to bringing perhaps a dozen over-the-air broadcast stations to residents of communities outside of major cities, felt increasing pressure, from customers and the demands of business, to bolster their offerings with the new “cable networks,” up to 24 or even 36 channels.

Consumer demand for the new content was warmly received by cable pioneers, the investors and founders of the “multiple system operators” (MSOs) that were building out the nation’s wired multichannel video infrastructure. In part, these innovators were looking to differentiate their product from over-the-air broadcasting, to sign up even more subscribers. As consumers cried “I Want My MTV!,” MSO executives aggressively expanded the channel capacity of their cable systems to add the many new program offerings.

The industry was aided by the U.S. Congress in this regard, which enacted the Cable Act of 1984, in part to speed the rollout and delivery of new multichannel video offerings to all U.S. residents. The Act largely deregulated cable industry pricing, generating substantial private investment in both content and delivery systems.

Ultimately, however, consumers would share in the cost. There were expenses associated with all the flashy new offerings, as well as with the services that were born of cable promises extracted by local communities in exchange for community franchises for cable systems to operate: local access programming facilities, and the creation and carriage of public, educational and government (PEG) channels.

After cable had penetrated more than 50 percent of U.S. households in 1987, it was typical of a cable system to increase its monthly subscription fee at least once a year, and in some cases, even twice or more annually, with prices increases spiraling up to 20 percent annually to help fund the rapid expansion of cable’s content and channel capacity.

It stands to reason that cable subscribers would place far more scrutiny on the customer care associated with a new service whose prices only and frequently went up, never down. And so they did.

Growth Exceeded Customer Care Capabilities

Cable providers found themselves under a microscope at a time in which cable systems were expanding beyond small towns and into big cities and their surroundings. A combination of skyrocketing consumer demand and aggressive franchising requirements led many of the new community-based cable companies to pull out all the stops to sign up new customers and wire their homes. These companies built and expanded their delivery infrastructure as fast as manpower, weather, and time would allow. The 1980s gave rise to the era of the “truck chaser,” the eager city or suburban-dweller who, upon spotting a cable installer in the neighborhood, would “chase” that truck, demanding that his or her home be wired for service as well.

With providers’ intense focus on construction, marketing, sales, and the activation of services, quality customer service often was the missing ingredient in any new-build operation.

This era, in the 1980s and early 1990s, breathed life into the “cable horror story” – customer service infractions running the gamut from missed or late installation and service appointments; damage to customer property including homes and yards; community disruption caused by excavation, digging and trenching; power failures resulting from errant construction; and cable system outages inherent in new infrastructure not yet fully tested, adequately monitored, or sufficiently maintained.

The national scope of cable’s build-out – communities, towns, and cities across the nation were being aggressively “wired” for cable from the 1960s through 1990s – served to magnify and amplify customer care and service weaknesses. Combined with accelerated prices for the new services, these developments propelled frequent coverage of customer care problems and mistakes in local and national news media. It was an early version of the news media “echo chamber” that by the mid-2020s typified coverage of political warfare. And it became devastating to the industry’s reputation.

“Flipping” of Cable Systems Added to the Pain

Adding to the cacophony of customer service shortcomings was another, less obvious syndrome of the 1970s and 1980s. As a business, cable TV systems were intended to generate profit for their owners and shareholders. Investment dollars were required to create business entities, obtain community franchises, construct cable systems, acquire content, and ultimately develop and manage cable properties. The surging demand for cable service made a cable franchise – and the cable system eventually developed within it – immensely valuable, with valuations that rapidly accelerated over relatively short periods of time.

Building cable systems became a great investment. Yet with any investment-driven business, investors often set short timelines for financial returns, generating not-infrequent sales of cable system properties. By the mid and late 1980s, cable system “flipping” had drawn regulatory and Congressional scrutiny, as sometimes-rogue investors trafficked in community-based properties with far more concern for the return on their investment than for the people it was intended to serve.

In many communities this syndrome created a trail of broken promises, from investors who, looking to make a quick buck, over-promised on the scope and quality of their systems then significantly under-delivered. Customer care was barely an afterthought in some of these instances, subjecting cable subscribers to even more pain.

The Government Turns to Regulation

As cable swept across the nation, its rising prices, flailing customer service efforts, and frequent transfer of cable franchises and sale of existing properties, helped supercharge consumer concerns about cable television from the late 1980s into the early 1990s. Enough so that Congress decided to re-regulate cable pricing and other operating elements of the business, through the Cable Act of 1992, enacted that year over the veto of President George
H.W. Bush.

Volumes have been written about this catastrophic episode in industry history, when – among many and diverse features of the new statute – the Federal Communications Commission was authorized to regulate the prices that cable systems could charge their subscribers. The “re-regulation” would stall investment in domestic cable television systems and drive many of the biggest MSOs to invest instead in properties outside the U.S.

For our purposes, however, the Cable Act of 1992 might be seen as an inflection point in highlighting the desperate need for improvement in cable customer care and service.

The industry, to its detriment, did not act swiftly in the moment. Neither major investment nor attention to customer care surfaced in the wake of the Cable Act. Serious and systemic attention to the cable customer experience remained decades away. However, two important industry reactions in the early 1990s are worth noting and should be given credit as precursors to the broader march towards excellence in cable customer experience, and ultimately, the rise of C5.

Unable to Turn Away, the Industry Begins to Respond

The first was an initiative spurred by institutional shortcomings. The generation of executives who managed cable systems on the ground in the late 1980s and early 1990s generally had advanced through the industry not through business schools, formal business training, or academic credentials. Many of those managers had risen through the technical side of the business, spending their early careers climbing utility poles, building the cable “headend” technology nerve centers, installing service in the homes of customers, or selling cable service door-to-door. Their skill set often lacked the communications attributes required in community relationship-building, public relations, and conveying key messages to opinion leaders, elected officials, and customers.

That gap created huge challenges in responding to the outpouring of indignant emotion flowing from customer care missteps. In short, while the industry was making immense progress in rolling out its services, its front-line community-based managers often were unable to effectively share their story.

The need to address that challenge led the industry’s major trade associations to fund, create, and deploy a training program to help cable system managers better communicate with their community-based constituents. Starting in 1993 and running for about two years, this “public affairs training program” was funded through special assessments charged to the member companies of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA). It was conceived, developed, and executed by the Cable Telecommunications Association (CATA), a non-profit organization representing small and mid-sized cable operators, which hired and dispatched trainers to cities and towns across the country.

Two-day training events in those locations provided education, collateral materials, and practice sessions. These tools equipped system managers and their leadership teams with better ability to talk with local news media, communicate company goals and objectives to customers, interact with local elected officials, and more positively represent their companies to their customers and communities. Through the course of the program, more than 2,500 cable system personnel across the nation were “trained” in the fine arts of public and interpersonal communications.

The second industry reaction to cable’s flagging public reputation generally is seen as the first major, industry-wide initiative designed not only to improve the image of the industry in the minds of consumers, but to actually enhance the behavior of cable providers in fulfilling consumer needs.

We Pledge to Show Up On Time

Debuting in 1995, the “Cable On-Time Guarantee” was adopted by the MSO members of NCTA as well as a variety of non-NCTA-member companies. Companies adopting the guarantee pledged to provide a credit – initially and typically $20 – to any customer affected by the arrival of a cable technician or installer outside of the promised service window. While appointment windows varied among the companies, a typical service window spanned four hours during this era; should a technician arrive 15 or 20 minutes beyond the window – or not arrive on the appointed day at all – under the pledge, the customer in question was entitled to receive a $20 credit on his or her cable bill.

Many companies embracing the guarantee program promoted it in their advertising and marketing efforts. The initiative also was supported through promotional programs run by industry associations such as NCTA, CATA, the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM), and various cable state and regional associations. The program remained prominent for several years, and over time, many cable MSOs incorporated the pledge into their corporate customer care and marketing portfolios. Former CTAM President & CEO Char Beales has identified the On-Time Guarantee as the first major volley in addressing, collaboratively, the cable industry’s customer service woes.

As cable’s on-time guarantee was being unveiled to the public, and during the time it was implemented and maturing, one other business development was coming to fruition that would induce a genuine revolution for the cable TV industry, and the world at large.

Broadband Transforms the Industry But Taxes Customer Care

Less than a decade after the birth of the internet – which is attributed to the U.S. Department of Defense and the launch of its Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) in January 1983 – several cable providers were pursuing the idea of using their national and regional networks of hybrid optical fiber and coaxial cable (HFC) to deliver to consumers high-speed access to the nascent internet. By 1993 and 1994, cable MSOs such as Time Warner Cable and Continental Cablevision were testing this proposition in several of the markets they served. Once tested and refined, the high-speed services – dubbed “broadband” because of the wider bandwidth on the radio-frequency spectrum required to support them – were commercially introduced in several communities by mid-decade.

Within just a few short years of that milestone, what had started as a curiosity would flash across the nation, as millions of cable subscribers signed up for the new service. The broadband era had begun.

Putting aside the profound impact of broadband internet access on the everyday lives of consumers, the rapid escalation of another hot cable product created newfound challenges in cable CX as well. Contact center representatives had to be trained essentially to speak a new language and support a new round of service upgrades and equipment and service installations. The industry’s technical workforce similarly required immense training and education to build out the broadband network. Cable’s network infrastructure needed to be enhanced, refreshed, and expanded, in order to accommodate the bandwidth required to support not only broadband service but further expansions in multichannel video, such as high-definition TV (HDTV) channels and content on demand.

During the same period, the late 1990s, industry companies were developing the “triple play,” additionally leveraging their network infrastructure to launch digital phone service to compete against the legacy Bell phone companies. Cable phone service was being sold to customers together with broadband service and multichannel video in a “bundle” of products that ultimately would at least triple the customer revenue earned by cable providers.

Handling customer needs around all these services was falling squarely into the laps of the men and women who staffed the industry’s call centers, installed and maintained networks in customers’ homes, and built and monitored the wired networks and technology that kept all of it humming. By the advent of the new millennium, the cable customer experience was being tested as never before.

In the flush of rollout, what may have been hard to appreciate at that time was the opportunity the new services offered providers to reinvent the cable customer experience. If the muscularized cable platform could operate smoothly without frequent failure or interruption – and if the products themselves could perform as advertised – consumers might be amazed and delighted with their new always-on, anytime/anywhere/any-device connectivity with family, friends and the rest of the world.

But to get there, cable’s customer care workforce first would have to navigate the rapids of explosive growth, increasingly strident consumer expectations, and a tectonic shift in the ways customers would access, use, and experience entertainment and telecommunication services.

C5 Begins to Take Shape

By the early 2000s, the debut of the broadband era, and the urgency many consumers felt to gain access to the new services – similar to the rollout of traditional cable television in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s – were generating a new and often highly-publicized round of desultory customer experience stories.

Thousands of miles of cable “rebuilds” to expand the industry’s infrastructure were producing new pain in communities where backyards and public rights of way again were being torn up. A new influx in field operations staff – some managed not by cable companies directly, but by companies with which they were contracting – were inducing questions of professionalism and conduct, such as the infamous case of the cable technician who fell asleep on a customer’s couch during a service call (and was captured in a photograph widely shared in news and social media!).

Tripling the kinds of services being offered by the major companies seemed to require customer contact representatives to keep three times as much knowledge in their heads, and some were floundering in responding to consumer needs and answering customer questions. All while the checks that consumers wrote to their cable companies were growing exponentially as new products and features came to market.

Customers who complained to local officials about their less-than-satisfactory customer care experiences were renewing an industry challenge from earlier decades – potential governmental interference in the operations of the business in the name of consumer rights.

NCTA Forms a Customer Service Committee

Early in 2003, word began to circulate in telecommunications regulatory circles that the appointed and elected officials responsible in their communities for the welfare of cable and telecom customers were contemplating a major new initiative. It would be designed to crack down on, and potentially regulate, cable providers to ensure that consumers were being treated fairly and well. The sponsoring group was the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisers (NATOA), which, according to its website, is “a professional association made up of individuals and organizations responsible for – or advising those responsible for – communications policies and services in local governments throughout the country.”

With broadband and digital voice services beginning to flourish, and all the business demands they were creating for cable providers, new and additional local regulation of cable customer service was the last thing cable companies wanted to see.

“We got word that NATOA was going to come out with some kind of report in the fall,” recounts Jadz Janucik, former Senior Vice President, Association Affairs, for NCTA. “We wanted to get out ahead of this. So we formed a committee to look at what we might do to get ahead of the report.”

As opposed to the usual representation of government relations executives from NCTA member companies, Janucik took pains to ensure that MSO-member operations executives – people closer to the companies’ customer care apparatus – would comprise committee membership.

This erstwhile group, comprising companies representing the majority of cable TV providers and meeting collaboratively to address customer service concerns, represented the first official precursor of C5.

“It’s not like we were trying to institute some new kind of customer service initiative, but we were thinking about, what is it we could do?” Janucik added.

The potential threat of more local regulation wasn’t the only potential damage represented by any NATOA effort to call out cable customer care. From the mid-1990s forward, cable’s pole position in providing multichannel video and advanced telecom services to the nation’s homes faced challenges from nascent competitors. Nationally, the launch of direct-to-the-home satellite provisioning of “cable” service – known by its regulatory acronym, DBS, for Direct Broadcast Satellite service – began to sap away cable customers to a major competitor.

And at the community level, telephone operating companies, local telecommunications co-operatives, city and town governments, and start-up independent companies, all sought to “overbuild” existing cable systems, either by leveraging their existing wires to provide multichannel video, or by constructing whole new wired networks to compete with the “incumbent” cable providers.

In addition to investment dollars and operating know-how, there was only one more thing these companies needed, to get started – the approval of operating franchises by local communities, the same approvals typically granted by the NATOA members who comprised local and state regulatory bodies.

“Overbuilding” Becomes a By-Product of Customer Service Failure

Ron Rizzuto, a business professor at the University of Denver who would become a Senior Fellow for The Cable Center, was in a unique position to observe these efforts. Through intensive economic analyses of the concept called “overbuilding” – on which he had become a leading national expert in the 1990s – Rizzuto was aware of the pressure being put on cable providers by a phalanx of potential competitors.

Rizzuto’s work often demonstrated that the potential financial return on competing with cable providers not only was challenging but frequently resulted in financial loss and ruin. Yet it wasn’t just the chase for elusive profits that inspired potential competitors; it was the recognition that a negative customer experience might encourage cable customers to jump ship to any competitor that might offer a similar product at a similar price.

“Poor [cable customer service] was one of the drivers of overbuilds, exactly,” asserts Rizzuto. “I was particularly aware of the poor service record… I was always focusing on the economics of [overbuilds] – why does a community decide to put in their own network? Why does the cable industry create situations where people are dissatisfied with their cable service and would consider investing in their own network?”

Rizzuto’s perspective on how poor cable customer service helped drive competition against cable providers would prove immensely valuable to the industry in the years to come, and it would play a substantial role in critical work done by C5 decades hence. But that still lay ahead.

The NCTA Customer Service Committee met several times throughout 2003 – in person, and on the phone – to discuss potential action. There appears to be no remaining record of the actual conversations – though NCTA groups typically would focus on regulatory or public affairs responses to government relations challenges, not courses of action to create operating plans for member companies. This writer recalls one meeting of the committee in the conference room of NCTA offices in Washington, DC, in which committee members worked more to understand the potential objectives of a NATOA initiative, rather than on efforts to devise an industry response.

During the same period, however, Janucik reports that Cox Communications executives on the NCTA Committee made NCTA aware of a novel notion their company had. It was to endow an academic chair at the University of Denver (DU); the Chair and an affiliated business education initiative at DU would educate business students in a variety of disciplines to improve business operations and strengthen relationships with customers. And despite the single-source funding from Cox, the company hoped this business education approach would benefit all cable providers. We’ll learn more about the Cox Chair later in this dispatch.

NCTA Relinquishes Customer Service Exploration

As often happens when diverse members of trade associations seek solutions to common problems, the work of the NCTA Customer Service Committee produced plenty of deliberation, but little in the way of agreement on an appropriate industry-wide path forward.

“There were always people in the industry looking at what we might do on customer service to try to actually improve customer service and generate some good publicity for the industry,” Janucik recalls, “but it was difficult at best to get any kind of consensus.”

At the suggestion of the Cox executives participating in the NCTA group, the Cox Chair at DU represented a path forward. And lacking a consensus, the NCTA Customer Service Committee eagerly embraced it.

“At the end of the day, after a number of meetings,” Janucik recounts, “we decided that really the most we could do was to say, that because this Chair was formed… we’d make some sort of announcement [that it] would be looking at customer care and what other things we might do as an industry to improve customer service. [We’d say] we were aware customer service was a very important issue, so we would be looking into it, but more in a public way, and tied to the Chair.”

Consensus having been achieved at the committee level, ironically neither an NCTA announcement nor a NATOA initiative were forthcoming. When the proposal for a public announcement on this customer service focus was presented to the NCTA Board of Directors in late 2003 or early 2004, the Board-member CEOs of NCTA companies opted not to engage NCTA directly in customer service. Then-Cox President and NCTA Board member Jim Robbins reiterated to the Board Cox’s commitment to DU through the Cox Chair and signaled he wasn’t in favor of any further NCTA initiative. The Board concurred, effectively concluding the work of the NCTA Customer Service Committee.

“That really is the beginning and end of that story,” Janucik says. And while a lack of NCTA action may have disappointed customer service advocates in the moment, that decision had no apparent negative impact on the industry. Because the awaited NATOA offensive on customer service also failed to materialize.

“As it turned out, NATOA didn’t really do anything,” says Janucik. “I don’t know what happened at NATOA and why, but that was the beginning and end of it.”

The presence of the Cox Chair at DU not only offered a convenient out for NCTA leaders worried that the industry wasn’t taking seriously its own customer service challenges. It would lay the foundation for the highly effective efforts to address cable customer experience – and produce key players who inspired a new vision for the field – led by The Cable Center into the early 2020s. But not before cable’s marketing community would try its hand at harnessing an industry response to desultory customer care performance.

Marketers Take Up the Customer Care Cause

Though NCTA in the early 2000s no longer felt a need to tackle head-on the impact of shaky customer service on the customer experience, the issue hadn’t disappeared. While a NATOA reversal may have created some relief in the cable regulatory world, cable marketers were finding a wide variety of compelling reasons to grow increasingly concerned about the industry’s troubled track record in this area.

The direct effects on cable marketing of unsatisfactory customer service were easy to see: difficulties in stemming subscriber churn; challenges in upselling customers to higher and premium tiers of multichannel video; public relations problems causing ruptures in provider relationships with policy makers and opinion leaders; and immense downward pressure on the all-important Net Promoter Score reflecting customers’ willingness (or unwillingness) to recommend their cable provider to other consumers.

But in the early 2000s, additional and critical factors were in play that could determine the long-term viability of the cable business. Would a cable customer angry about problems with her video service be willing to pay double or triple her fees to her cable company to sign up for high-speed internet and digital voice services from that company? Would a negative customer experience in linear video – be it billing problems, network reliability issues, equipment challenges, or confusion over service windows – stop a subscriber from buying burgeoning on-demand content? And a new issue loomed as cable providers looked to displace telephone companies and other entrenched incumbents in serving small and mid-sized businesses: would a small business owner be willing to commit to cable for her business telecommunication services, if she or her employees had endured customer service foibles in dealing with their residential cable service?

These issues weighed heavily on the minds of cable marketing leaders as the cable business transitioned in the early 2000s from providing a single residential product (cable TV) to offering a wide range of telecommunications services (internet, phone, TV, and on-demand products) to homes, businesses, schools, communities, and public institutions. And they were bubbling up regularly to the leaders of the industry’s marketing society, the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM).

“We were doing a lot of work with the MSO marketing people who expressed a lot of concern that our customer service was not at the level it should be,” recalls Seth Morrison, former SVP and General Manager of Corporate Initiatives at CTAM who also became a charter member of The Cable Center’s C5 group. “The request [to launch a CTAM customer service initiative at that time] came from a few of the marketing people.”

The problem of cable customer service wasn’t new to CTAM, as its then-CEO Char Beales reports, gaining traction well before her own arrival at the helm of the group in 1992.

“It was interesting that starting in 1984… CTAM started identifying customer service as an important issue in the industry. And by ’86, we had created a committee [and] we had created a customer service handbook. That was back in the time when we had chief operating officers leading CTAM… They all thought marketing was fine, but they were even more interested in operational issues.”

Beales recounts that CTAM began providing its members with training and education in cable customer service in 1990, through an on-staff training team; that it offered its members a “service management master course” in 1990; and that it conducted a national case study in 1992 focused on how to improve customer service. The organization’s commitment to cable customer care gave way to a major role in the creation and deployment of the cable on-time guarantee in 1994-95, in which CTAM directly engaged cable marketing executives in driving that campaign into local markets.

As the prominence of the on-time guarantee began to fade in the first few years of the new millennium, CTAM further promoted the importance of customer service by holding several large-group conferences for CTAM members in several cities around the country – with that effort led in part by Morrison.

“It was a time when there was a lot of change going on,” recalls Morrison of the early 2000s. “Some of the MSOs were using overseas call centers and felt that they could share best practices.”

“It was also a few years later when the broadcast world would be transitioning to digital,” says Morrison, of the plans for the “Digital TV (DTV) Transition.” In a long-planned upgrade from analog to digital technology, broadcast television stations – in concert with the FCC and federal government – were plotting the DTV transition to switch off their analog transmission systems and switch over to digital transmission. Such a move would dramatically improve the spectrum efficiency of over-the-air television, enabling a single station to transmit up to six TV channels over the same chunk of radio-frequency spectrum they had been using to transmit the signal for a single TV station.

The DTV Transition, which ultimately was completed in 2009, risked leaving without television the millions of U.S. residents who were still watching TV on their analog-only TV sets. “There were a lot of concerns about how that would be handled and how it would affect cable customer care,” Morrison says. Meeting the challenges of the DTV Transition by leading the industry in a national customer care effort would provide a seminal moment in the history of The Cable Center’s commitment to customer care – but that part of our story still lies ahead.

Churn Motivates Customer Service Efforts

Morrison, already a three-decade veteran of senior marketing and customer care positions with five cable operating companies when he arrived at CTAM in 1997, became deeply engaged in customer care on a national level in his roles there as a VP and SVP for corporate initiatives and marketing. Importantly, he led the highly successful effort to create a national clearinghouse to ensure that cable customers could retain cable service when they relocated from one cable service area to another – whether it was just across town, or across the country.

The CTAM Cable Mover Hotline, launched in 2003 and known colloquially as the “movers program,” leveraged a national database of communities and their cable service providers assembled by Cable Television Laboratories (CableLabs), the cable industry’s research & development consortium.

The idea was that a cable subscriber planning a geographic move, upon calling her local cable provider to disconnect service before the move, would be linked with the cable provider in the community to which she was moving – “saving” that subscriber for the industry, and ensuring a seamless transfer for the subscriber from provider to provider, based on geographic service areas. The program targeted roughly 20 million households each year, and its initial success rate at establishing contact with an incoming cable provider exceeded 50 percent.

Demonstrating an unprecedented level of cooperation among peer cable providers serving 95 percent of U.S. homes, the movers program became a key engine for cable retention in the early 2000s as well as a CTAM tentpole which survives and thrives to the present day. The program later expanded to target every moving household in the U.S. through the Change of Address Program of the U.S. Postal Service.

Among its many moving parts – including software, marketing, advertising, fulfillment, and broad collaboration among the many participating companies – the program’s backbone was customer care. The ability to execute the program rested firmly on the proposition that customer service representatives from one cable provider could adequately receive, process, and refer a customer’s call to the provider in her new community. Then a similar proficiency in customer care was required of the receiving company, to process and execute installation of services at the customer’s new address, based on her move-in timeline.

“One of the things we realized as we got that program going,” says Morrison, “was that it depended on the call centers, because when someone would call the call center, and say, ‘Disconnect me because I’m moving,’ [the customer care representative who received the call] needed to be trained to say, ‘Hey, we can help you move to your new cable company.’”

Through the customer care initiatives, first at CTAM and later at The Cable Center, “We were able to educate the heads of customer care to then work with their systems and add that to their priorities,” Morrison says. “So many different parts of the industry pulled together… to solve problems. I’m definitely very proud of that.”

Efforts to promote and cultivate the movers program, as well as to reveal its progress, would be a staple of CTAM’s customer service initiative in the early and mid-2000s, and its profile remained prominent even as The Cable Center created and assumed management of C5, where CTAM representatives (including Morrison, until his departure from CTAM in 2010) would continue regular and periodic reporting of program results – and field questions – at virtually all of the C5 meetings through the 2010s.

Meanwhile, as the Cable Mover Hotline was beginning to make its mark in 2003 and beyond, CTAM broadened its focus on cable customer care out of concern for new cable services that had nothing to do with residential cable customers. The build-out across the U.S. of the powerful broadband infrastructure ignited dreams among cable marketers and their operating companies that the industry could compete vigorously in the “business services” market, providing the kind of institutional and corporate telecommunication services that until then primarily had been the province of Ma Bell and later the Bell Operating Companies.

Customer Care Becomes a Factor in Business Services Success

By the 2000s, it was becoming clear that cable had the infrastructure, technology, imagination, and competitive pricing, to be able to provide video, data, and voice services to small and ultimately large businesses. But the industry’s bad rap for customer care in the residential market was generating headaches for cable marketers and operating executives looking to grow business services into a major revenue producer for cable providers.

In the same year the CTAM Mover Hotline was launched, CTAM recruited industry programming and MSO marketer Joan Wilson as its VP of Industry Initiatives. Her job, in part, was to develop an industry-wide marketing effort in support of business services. CTAM formed a Business Services Council of cable marketers to track the business market and collaborate towards increasing cable’s share of it.

Wilson recalls that, initially, independent studies were projecting that the market for voice and data services among small companies alone – those employing less than 100 people – would exceed $30 billion by 2011. Research also forecast that cable’s share of that market might grow to 45 percent by the mid-2010s. Additional business “verticals” such as education, in which schools had access to millions of dollars in government funds for broadband infrastructure and services, could further broaden the market.

“It was just sort of an explosive opportunity that we had to really take a close look at and decide where the low-hanging fruit was from there,” Wilson says. But small business owners who had survived for decades with phone company providers needed good reasons to move away from their established relationships – and cable customer service was unlikely to build confidence in the cable product.

“Somebody’s opinion is very real to them,” Wilson says. “You know, there’s a business customer that goes home at night, and of course there’s a [cable] outage, or they can’t get the [cable] remote to work, or whatever the issue is, and they say, ‘Well, am I really ready to give my business connectivity over to a [cable] company?’ The cable industry was really going against some very solid legacy providers like AT&T and Verizon.”

Additionally, Wilson points out, “We had to keep in mind that the business services leaders within the MSOs were relying on their existing customer service personnel … to develop those [customer care] strategies on the business side as well,” putting more pressure on cable customer service to enhance the public perception of its performance.

The confluence of ongoing customer care issues in cable’s residential market and expanding worries about their potential impact on growth in the business services market, created an interesting crossover in CTAM in which the association’s business services efforts tapped its customer service initiative to better understand the dynamics of customer care.

CTAM’s Beales, Morrison, Wilson, and its Communications VP, Anne Cowan, recall panel discussions at several CTAM group meetings in cities such as Atlanta and Philadelphia during the mid-2000s, in which the association’s Business Services Council took a deep dive on cable customer service. The discussions were held in part to explore the industry’s image among consumers and how it could be enhanced to benefit all the industry’s lines of business. Vendor companies providing services in support of customer care and network infrastructure also were present for the discussions and even at one point participated in table-top displays. Vendor involvement in the CTAM discussions proved something of a precursor to Cable Center efforts to engage vendor support for, and participation in, C5.

CTAM also turned to focus group research to “bring the voice of the customer” into association deliberations, Wilson points out, and to better understand the opportunity in the business services marketplace, as well as the dynamics affecting cable customer care. Videos of focus groups featuring cable customers, and conducted by CTAM in major and mid-sized markets around the country, were shared at CTAM member meetings as well as at general sessions at CTAM’s national marketing conference, which was held annually for thousands of cable marketing executives until concluding its 37-year run in 2012.

Not all of the focus group material was inspiring, Wilson says.

“Some of it you wouldn’t want to share; it wouldn’t be productive, let’s say, in terms of posing a session around a particular series of customer comments… We shelved quite a bit of video from those focus groups, which was not what we anticipated, but we gained information anyway,” Wilson recalls.

As the industry’s major companies were rapidly expanding their commitment to data and voice services as well as to the business market, and the 2000s were giving way to the 2010s, Wilson remembers that companies were growing more skittish about sharing data and information at CTAM’s group meetings. Information sharing among peer cable companies and even content providers – which were always competitors – had been the key to the collaboration that had in part made the cable industry unique throughout its history of more than 60 years by that point. A constriction of information sharing – which also would affect the work of C5 in its early days under The Cable Center leadership – began to put pressure on CTAM’s inclination to conduct conversations around industry strategies at group meetings, Wilson believes. That drove an increasing reliance on smaller, more intimate discussions on conference calls. Teleconferencing, then, became a major tool in ongoing deliberations among MSO executives about cable customer care and service, from the mid-2000s moving forward into the C5 era with The Cable Center.

Consolidation Begins to Drive Change

Through acquisitions, mergers, system swaps, and other forms of corporate consolidation, by the mid-2000s the cable telecommunications industry was maturing rapidly. Growth of the then-major providers – such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Cablevision Systems, Charter Communications and others – was enabling cable providers to better centralize activities and strengthen core operating disciplines such as sales, marketing, technology, and corporate communications. One result was a diminishing need for industry-wide collaboration and consultation that groups such as CTAM had been offering for several decades.

This trend would have a pivotal impact on developments leading to the ultimate creation of C5. In 2007, several of the industry’s major CEOs – representing MSOs as well as major cable programmers – reached the conclusion that the industry’s professional associations and societies, and their many meetings, conferences, and events at the national and regional level, were consuming corporate resources that might be better spent on the acquisition of customers and viewers and other critical operating activities. Forming an ad hoc committee, and working under the umbrella of the NCTA Board of Directors, the group “recommended” to many of the industry’s associations and societies, a wide variety of efficiency-based steps to lessen corporate expense, strengthen focus on core objectives, and consolidate and reduce some association activities – such as big meetings and conferences – nationally, regionally, and locally.

Over the course of ensuing years, and in conjunction with other consolidation drivers within the industry, this somewhat subtle contraction had major ripple effects for the societies and associations serving cable. Within about a decade, for instance, the Society of Cable & Telecommunications Engineers had been merged into Cablelabs. The industry’s foundation dedicated to research and public education about HIV and AIDS – Cable Positive -was closed following a 25-year run. The Association of Cable Communicators was assimilated into CTAM.

CTAM had folded its national marketing summit, eliminated its nearly two dozen market-based chapters, and transformed its business model to drop membership by individuals in favor of corporate memberships. Perhaps a culmination of the trend was the shuttering of the industry’s premier and storied annual trade show – known in its final iteration as the Internet and Television Exposition (INTX) – by NCTA, after a run of 65 years following the 2016 event in Boston. Emerging relatively unscathed by the association consolidation activity were the principal groups comprising women and people of color that were advocating for industry advancement in diversity, equity and inclusion. But even those groups – now known as The WICT Network and the National Association for Multi-ethnicity in Communications – were persuaded to make a long-term commitment to co-locate and co-schedule their annual conferences in New York City, as anchors of the industry’s “Diversity Week” each fall.

Among the immediate impacts felt by several of the industry groups in 2007-8, however, the association consolidation exercise and its outcomes led the CTAM Board and leadership to reevaluate their programs and activities, and to narrow the scope of their objectives. And that meant bidding a formal farewell to customer care as a major CTAM initiative.

CTAM’s former CEO Char Beales suggests that CTAM leadership began the drift away from customer service as a focus, several years before the actual decision to approach The Cable Center about assuming leadership of the industry-wide initiative – a course of action that started coming together in 2007.

“We decided that we should pare back and only work on projects that were considered essential to the [cable] operators,” Beales remembers. “And customer service wasn’t considered essential. Partly, it was the old-line operators for whom it literally was not essential. But partly, the bigger companies had their eye on becoming Fortune 500 companies. [They] said, ‘There are all these new tools out there, and [we should] use the best thing to improve our customer service – tell consumers when we’re coming to their house [and so on].’ So they started investing in that, and they didn’t want kind of the old-fashioned advice that I think CTAM was providing. And those information-sharing meetings kind of fell off along the way.”

The CEO recommendations in 2007-8, targeted at more finely focusing industry associations and restructuring some of their activities and meetings, were the spur that brought The Cable Center into the limelight on cable customer care.

“It was somewhere around that time that CTAM made the conscious decision to ‘gift’ C5 to The Cable Center,” Beales says.

Which wasn’t as easy as it sounds. CTAM approached The Cable Center with its proposal at a time when The Cable Center had neither the budget nor the human resources to manage such a program.

However, there were more than a few things working in favor of the arrangement. One was the presence of Beales on The Cable Center Board of Directors. Another was the sympathetic ear that Beales found in Jana Henthorn, then Senior Vice President at the Cable Center (who later would ascend to Cable Center CEO), and who had enjoyed a long and distinguished career in cable system management and customer service. And finally there was the close relationship of The Cable Center with the University of Denver, on whose grounds The Cable Center then resided, and does to this day. A central intersection of all these interests was the presence of a new academic chair at DU’s Daniels School of Business – The Cox Chair, endowed by Cox Communications, as mentioned previously.

The Cox Chair Launches Customer Care Efforts

Early in the autumn of 2001, as reported in the Denver Business Journal, Cox Communications announced it would provide to the University of Denver a gift of $2 million to establish the James M. Cox Customer Service Academic Chair, in partnership with The Cable Center.

Jana Henthorn recalls that the $2 million gift was to be paid in installments of $500,000 over four years, before the Chair could be formally established within the Daniels College of Business. Ultimately that endowment would lay the foundation for The Cable Center to stake its claim on customer care as a major initiative.

The Cable Center’s website says today:

“The Cable Center’s support of CX extends deeply into the academic and professional communities. The Cox Customer Care Initiative was launched by The Cable Center in 2005 and includes the establishment of the James M. Cox Endowed Chair for Customer Experience Management (CXM) at the University of Denver and Syndeo Institute.

“The Cox Endowed Chair-working closely with Cable Center and the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver-launched the first CX management concentration at the MBA level. This unique program continues to influence CX curriculum throughout the world through collaborations with leading universities, conference presentations, articles in academic and professional journals, workshops, and short courses.

“According to former Cox Communications President Pat Esser, ‘The CX MBA program is a home run and exactly what the Cox family gave (The Cable Center) money for.’”

By the time NCTA had convened its initial Customer Service Committee in 2003, planning for The Cox Chair already was underway with the enthusiastic support of Cox Communications’ leadership team. It was that scenario that enabled NCTA to demur from making a major thrust into customer care.

Then by the time CTAM had concluded it needed to relinquish its initiative in customer care in 2007-8, The Cox Chair had been firmly established at DU, leading CTAM’s Char Beales to suggest to The Cable Center’s Jana Henthorn that the leadership of an industry-wide committee on customer service was a natural fit for The Cable Center.

It was also The Cox Chair that provided continuity for C5 that existed through the time of this writing in 2023. Dr. Charles Patti, a leading business educator and global expert in customer experience, had been recruited by Jana Henthorn and the leadership of Daniels College of Business in 2005, to serve as the inaugural Cox Chair. Patti would become a Senior Fellow for The Cable Center in 2006 and would lead the activities and work of C5 along with other Cable Center Senior Fellows Ron Rizzuto and Maria van Dessel from 2018 to 2023.

But by 2005, Patti already had built a formidable resume in business and academia, from his years working as an executive in advertising in the U.S., to his time serving as Professor and Head of the School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations, at Queensland University of Technology, in Brisbane, Australia.

Along the way, Patti had engaged in a variety of consulting and academic appointments in Europe, Australia and Southeast Asia. He brought with him, as his bio says, “extensive experience in building, delivering, and evaluating curriculum in a wide range of settings, including doctoral seminars, MBA and other specialized postgraduate courses, undergraduate programs, and professional and corporate learning.”

Patti also had engaged in extensive research on customer service management, return on investment, and metrics. Once ensconced in The Cox Chair, and enjoying a burgeoning role on the faculty at DU and Daniels – including a stint as Interim Dean at the Daniels College of Business – Patti, working with Henthorn and other Cable Center colleagues, gradually would become more deeply involved in the management of C5.

Recalled Henthorn from 2005, “I had called [Patti] up in Australia and said, ‘I heard you’re coming back to DU. Can I talk to you about this [Cox Chair assignment]?’ And I kind of got it in early, because he wasn’t even back in the States yet. He started working with me, consulting on how we would put all this together, from Australia.”

While Henthorn hadn’t known Patti prior to his work in Brisbane, “We had a group of professors from Daniels including Ron Rizzuto, and they interviewed several people and hadn’t yet found the right fit,” she says. “And they said, ‘Hey, you should talk to this guy in Australia. He’s coming back to teach at DU, and he’s fantastic. But don’t wait until he’s back in Denver. Call him right now!’”

“So that’s how I got to know him, and we put together the Chair. Then Charles developed four courses on customer experience, including one that he taught with Ron Rizzuto on the financials of customer experience. So that was one of the things that we and the Cox Chair did.”

“Jana contacted me in 2005 and made me aware that there was this Chair, and would I be interested,” Patti concurs. “I said, ‘Yeah, possibly.’ She decided to start by asking me to develop a graduate-level curriculum in customer experience, which I did – basically a proposal that has to be passed by the University to have a concentration at the graduate level. These would be MBA and Master of Science students. A concentration consists of four courses. I did quite a bit of research and developed four courses. They went through the process of being approved at the University … and we started offering them. I moved back to the United States in July of 2006. And I think we started offering the courses in the fall, September, of 2006.”

Patti adds that one key ingredient in the composition of the Cox Chair, was to look at examples of customer experience not just in cable, but throughout business in general.

“I think a key aspect was that the Cox Chair request for curriculum was supposed to be industry agnostic. In other words, this is not supposed to be about the cable industry or any other particular industry, which I think was quite insightful from the Cox family,” he says. “So that broadens students’ view of what customer experience is.” It was a valuable lesson that also would come to the fore as The Cable Center took the reins of C5.

CTAM Passes the Baton to The Cable Center

As Patti, Henthorn, and others were laying the groundwork for DU’s focus on customer experience at Daniels College, CTAM and The Cable Center commenced serious discussion about bringing a cable-industry-wide customer service committee under the wing of The Cable Center.

While The Cable Center was successfully running its flagship and high-profile program – the annual Cable Center Hall of Fame – by the mid-2000s it seemed ready to make forays into other areas. So shopping C5 to The Cable Center seemed like a “win-win,” says Char Beales.

At the time of CTAM’s 25th anniversary in 2001, Beales recalls that the association raised about $100,000 for a marketing endowment to The Cable Center, funds she believed could help offset some of the expense of running a customer service committee.

She found a willing partner in Jana Henthorn, then serving as Senior Vice President of Programs at The Cable Center. In the mid and late 1990s, Henthorn had been serving as Vice President of Operations and Service Fulfillment at Jones lntercable, and before that, as a consumer research manager at Time Warner Cable. Not only had she led the implementation of the industry’s on-time guarantee for Jones, but she also had been active in the CTAM initiative on customer service. Which helped make her highly receptive to the idea that The Cable Center should assume leadership of the industry customer care committee.

Says Henthorn, “Char and I had a conversation about it, and she said, ‘Well, would you like to take over the CTAM Customer Service Committee?’ And I said, ‘Well I don’t have the plan worked out yet, but absolutely.’”

With development of The Cox Chair with DU top of mind, the incorporation of the customer care group into Cable Center activities seemed like a good fit, Henthorn says.

The Cable Center Gives Birth to Today’s C5

With the hand off from CTAM to The Cable Center of the industry-wide customer care initiative starting in 2007, the group also officially assumed its new moniker, “Cable Center Customer Care Committee,” or C5.

The newly-reconstituted C5 was energized by a Cable Center team eager to expand its profile and influence in industry leadership circles. It was welcomed into a new entity whose glamorous and prestigious building on the campus of DU, in the one-time “cable capital” of Denver, also could serve as a physical “home” for the group, hosting hours-long or days-long meetings. And, it would benefit from the academic expertise, business acumen, and research proficiency of leaders on or near the site, such as Henthorn and DU’s Charles Patti and Ron Rizzuto. The stars seemingly had aligned to ensure that customer care and service would remain a cable industry priority.

Initially, however, not everyone agreed that The Cable Center was the ideal vehicle for a commitment to customer care – or so says Diane Schieman-Christman, who joined The Cable Center staff in 2006 and ascended to CEO in 2022.

“How are you, TCC, going to be additive to this?” Christman remembers some industry leaders asking. “You’re not going to be able to solve issues in customer experience, or at that time we were calling it ‘customer care,’ and so we kind of repositioned our thinking in talking about it.”

“It was never our intent that we, The Cable Center, were going to solve the issue of customer care… Our philosophy always was, and is, that we’re giving people a tool to put in their tool belt, and our members are finding value in this… This was 15 years ago, and people felt a little differently about the whole concept of customer care,” said Christman in 2023.

Jana Henthorn remembers that the customer care initiative arrived at The Cable Center with little or no industry funding. The Cox endowment had been made to University of Denver, and not The Cable Center. So while C5 could benefit from The Cable Center’s alignment with DU and the Cox Chair, initial support would have to be provided by existing Cable Center staffers and slivers of time from Dr. Patti. It was a scenario that Henthorn would correct nearly a decade later once she had become CEO, when endowment funding was re-directed to The Cable Center, allowing Henthorn to recruit Dr. Maria van Dessel – Adjunct Professor and Research Scholar at DU – to join the ranks of Cable Center Senior Fellows and assume a large chunk of C5 management along with her husband, Patti.

The Cable Center Seeks Sustainability for C5

A major development in the sustainability of C5 was initiated by Diane Christman, then serving as The Cable Center’s development director, in 2010. Lacking substantive funding to support C5 activities and meetings, Christman, working with Denver-area Cable Center partners, championed the idea of vendor-company sponsorships as a mechanism to generate revenue for the group.

“I realized early on that there was a good potential there for vendor involvement,” Christman says. “I just thought early on that if that were me, and my business were to serve this specific big area within the industry, I would want a seat at that table, and I would want to be a part of that discussion.” With an initial sponsorship by customer experience pioneer Amdocs, corporate sponsorships from multiple vendors would support and strengthen the activities of C5 throughout the course of its work.

Several years later, Christman and her team would further enhance the C5 revenue stream by initiating modest annual membership fees for participating companies and organizations. These funding enhancements ensured a solid level of sustainability for the group. And, “It got us away from the concept of selling coffee breaks, breakfasts, lunches, etc., at C5 meetings. And it set the stage for more of a partnership,” Christman says, who added that the small fees provided participating companies “buy-in” to C5 activities.

Other early decisions by The Cable Center about how to manage C5 would set the tone for the portfolio of the group and how it would operate for the ensuing 15 years. One decision was to keep the group small. Henthorn says she had learned from the CTAM customer care initiative that it was hard to maintain support and momentum for large-group industry meetings on customer experience – and that customer care executives were more prone to share information when they participated in intimate, small-group gatherings. While industry MSOs were invited to provide representatives for membership in C5, no more than two or three representatives of each participating company would serve on the committee and take part in regular meetings.

“I recruited people personally, and called them up and asked them to be part of it. And of course the Cox folks were right there” because of the importance to The Cable Center of the Cox Chair endowment, Henthorn says.

“I remember thinking, we’ve got this group of executives who are committed, and why don’t I, with the Cox Chair, basically start the meetings, and it would be for the enhancement of those executives, rather than the greater mass. The idea was, if we can exchange information and create educational opportunities, then [C5 members] can go back to their companies, and we will have fulfilled the mission of the Cox endowment,” Henthorn says.

The frequency of C5 meetings also was regularly up for discussion. Corporate practice regarding travel for executives limited face-to-face meetings to about two annually. So during the early years of The Cable Center’s stewardship of the project, committee members met monthly for an hour by teleconference, beyond their semi-annual face to face sessions. This gave C5 members the opportunity to compare notes in real time on then-current customer care challenges.

Henthorn also says The Cable Center intended to host face-to-face C5 meetings at its facility in Denver. Yet C5 members early on expressed an interest in visiting the headquarters or customer care operations of peer companies to see and hear first-hand how their industry colleagues were addressing customer care challenges. Taking the face-to-face meetings “on the road” generally once a year seemed liberating for most C5 members, who relished the opportunity to experience the inner workings of their peer companies. This highly successful approach led to C5 meetings hosted over the years by companies such as Bright House Networks, Bresnan Communications, Mediacom, Comcast, Cox Communications, GCI, CableOne/Sparklight, and organizations such as Cablelabs and NCTA. The “pandemic years” of 2020 and 2021 featured semi annual meetings of the group done virtually, hosted by The Cable Center and its Senior Fellows.

Call Centers Become the Focal Point

Rizzuto, Patti, Henthorn, Christman and others vividly recall that at the time the customer care initiative moved to The Cable Center in 2007, and discussions commenced among the two dozen or so industry executives recruited by Henthorn to participate, it was the work of the industry’s contact or “call” centers that riveted the attention of the group.

Prior to the 2010s – and with the spotty exception of interactive websites – cable customer service and customer care were managed almost exclusively through the medium of telephone calls from customers or potential customers, to the companies that were serving them. Digital communication channels such as social media, chatbots, Artificial Intelligence, and other “cloud based” solutions were only specs on the horizon at that point. So C5’s early obsession with the operation of industry call centers was only natural.

“I remember attending some of the early meetings and thinking, oh my gosh, what are these guys talking about” Christman says.

“It was pretty focused in the early years, on call centers and call center management,” Henthorn adds.

Says Patti, “When she was running C5 [in the late 2000s, Jana] started inviting me and Ron [Rizzuto] to come over [to C5 meetings at The Cable Center], because they were talking about customer care… So Ron and I would show up most of the time. We basically… sat in the room and listened to what was going on, presentations by various C5 members. We walked away, both Ron and I, thinking, wow, this is really granular, because most of the conversations were about call center operations, and the deep interest around all the metrics that are in call center operations.”

C5 meetings in that era dwelled heavily on how to improve the operations of company call centers, under the rationale that seamless and consumer-friendly call center responses were the key then to the customer experience.

Hours-long C5 conversations ensued around issues such as how to resolve a customer’s problems on the “first call;” how to improve companies’ interactive voice response (IVR) systems to ensure customers wouldn’t drop off of calls they had initiated; effective training and adequate tools for the customer service representatives who answered customer phone calls; and ways of improving the plethora of customer experience elements that generated calls and complaints to call centers, such as customer billing, the reliability of cable’s network infrastructure, and sales and marketing campaigns that frequently surprised customers with shifting cable pricing and evolving product packages.

It was painfully evident during many of those conversations, that companies were using many different terms and measures to address common problems, which made it hard for C5 members to identify common solutions. Discussions bogged down in the definition of terms and measures the companies were using in areas such as “first call resolution,” “speed of service,” “call distribution,” and customer “saves.” Tiring of frequent digressions into definitional terms, the Cable Center Senior Fellows and C5 leadership realized the quandary might actually pose an opportunity for C5 members to constructively address real-life problems in their industry’s customer care processes.

C5 Hones in on Data Collection and Analysis

The result was one of the more collaborative projects in C5’s 20-year history – the design and execution of longitudinal research that over a six-year period, from 2012 through 2018, tracked corporate and industry progress on a handful of core call center metrics.

Managed by Rizzuto with additional guidance and input from Patti and van Dessel, the study required the creation of a “common scorecard” where C5 companies would agree on precise definitions of terms and measures – KPls, or Key Performance Indicators.

“The problem was there were no common definitions for things,” Rizzuto recalls. “When you talk about… ‘first call resolution’ [for example], there was no standard definition that companies use. And similarly, everybody had their own metrics, and there was no agreement on the definition of those metrics and which ones are the most important. So we spent that first year where we plowed through a lot of stuff- members sent us their metrics – and then, in the process of working on it, we got to 8 or 10 metrics that we could agree on that we would then measure against. There was no common language, no common definitions.”

The process itself never seemed perfect, as companies occasionally took exception to measurement and its results. And the composition of C5 itself exacerbated the work, as the Senior Fellows and The Cable Center had begun to recruit companies from outside of the U.S. to participate in the committee, from regions such as Europe and South America.

Yet the outcome of the exercise was an agreed-upon list of 14 KPls and their definitions, against which companies could measure and report. Compiled and reviewed annually, the project gave participating companies the opportunity to compare their own performance with that of peer companies. At a very high level, an impartial observer could draw from the analytics a sense of how the industry as a whole was performing in managing customer relationships through its call centers.

Among the data collected was a look at

  • First call resolution, the percentage of customer calls that were resolved, meaning there was no additional follow-up from the customer within seven days;
  • speed of service, meaning what percentage of phone calls were answered within 30 seconds;
  • success rate of customer service representatives for completing the sales of products and services;
  • call transfers, meaning the percentage of calls that were transferred to additional customer service representatives in order to address a customer’s problem;
  • “rescues” and “saves,” meaning the percentage of customers who were dissuaded from dropping at least one product;
  • churn, meaning the percentage of the customer base disconnecting service each month; and
  • satisfaction with call agents, meaning the overall customer satisfaction rate with customer service representatives, as gathered in post-call surveys.

From the study, “we tried to draw conclusions with respect to trends and everything,” Rizzuto reports. “We got some good information [for instance] where we knew that the churn rates were declining… For a period of time, [the research project] helped focus C5.” The data also led to some deep and introspective discussions among C5 member companies about the progress of customer care.

Rizzuto concedes, however, that after several years of pulling and analyzing data from C5 members, “I think we all got to the same point, because it was a very difficult process to pull the data together. You saw the frustration when we would present the results. People would have very different takes on it – Did you look at this? Did you look at that? And you could see that we were spinning our wheels in trying to share data that was not timely and was very different for everybody.”

Though the project wound down in 2018, it represented arguably the first time in the industry’s history that multiple and significant industry players, on the basis of data and fact, had compared and shared their performance in key areas of the customer experience. And it was the existence of C5 that made the work possible.

What was becoming evident from the start of The Cable Center’s run with C5, based on this and other projects, was a growing hunger among industry senior customer care executives to band together in their efforts to champion customer care and the customer experience. The group was building a community around the notion of excellence in customer care, and the need to convince their own companies to embrace the urgency around it.

C5 Supports the Digital TV Transition

Under its new Cable Center leadership, the presence of a stable and ongoing forum for cable customer care executives – and its opportunity to share learnings, best practices, challenges, and opportunities in the space – would pay a variety of dividends for cable operating companies and their efforts to better serve customers. In addition to that critical work, C5 made a substantial and significant contribution to the welfare of the cable & telecommunications industry early in its tenure as a Cable Center initiative.

By the early 2000s, the rapid evolution of technology dramatically had changed the television viewing experience. Cable had experienced an explosion in original content in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and massive infrastructure improvements strongly bolstered the bandwidth of cable television systems. The result was cable channel line-ups featuring scores and even hundreds of channels that opened the world for cable subscribers to immense swaths of entertainment, news, sports, and information. New on-demand technology was enabling cable subscribers to watch movies and special features at the touch of a remote. And starting in 2003 and 2004, broadcasters and cable providers began to roll out HDTV with its eye-popping images, intensely sharper resolution, theater-quality sound, and striking colors.

Television broadcasters, however, found themselves increasingly limited by the same analog transmission system they had been using since TV had found its way into American homes starting in the 1940s. The coming of digital technology, however, offered a way for broadcasters to reach a new plateau in transmission opportunity and signal quality. As discussed previously, by converting from analog to digital transmission, broadcasters would have the opportunity to transmit as many as six TV signals over the same radio-frequency spectrum they had been assigned by the federal government. That development would enable a single TV station to offer several TV channels, many in high definition, and each featuring different programming, along with high-quality sound and a variety of data opportunities.

The only catch was that the vast majority of American consumers owned and used analog-only television sets. That wouldn’t be a problem for cable TV subscribers; their cable systems already were doing the work of processing over-the-air television signals and delivering them via cable to subscriber homes, where analog sets could be hooked up to cable and continue to work just fine. But for tens of millions of U.S. residents still watching TV over the air on analog television sets, their television sets would become obsolete, and future television viewing would become dependent upon their willingness and ability to buy expensive new TV sets with digital tuners.

The federal government was supportive of a digital upgrade for broadcast TV stations, and the Federal Communications Commission and other federal agencies devised plans to accomplish a cut-over to digital television. It involved the national, simultaneous cut-off of analog TV transmission, and switch-over to digital transmission, on a precise date and time.
Over-the-air households could buy special converter boxes to “downgrade” the new digital TV signals back to analog, so their existing TV sets would continue working. And, the federal government would offset most of the cost of those converter boxes through special coupons it would make available to citizens.

To have any chance of success, the conversion from analog to digital broadcasting, known as the DTV Transition, would require an enormous public education campaign, involving public service messages via TV, cable, and government and community entities. Starting in 2007, and leading up to the switch-over that ultimately occurred on June 12, 2009, the federal government and private enterprise collaborated to stage a multifaceted public service effort to ensure that no American would “lose” access to television because of the DTV Transition.

Shortly after the election of Barack Obama as U.S. President in November 2008, the incoming Administration realized with a jolt that there was something big lacking in the already elaborate federal plan for the DTV Transition. Missing was a place consumers could go to have any questions answered about the cut-over – or, after the transition had occurred, to call with requests for help or information. In short, what was needed was a national call center to handle issues among consumers as they arose.

What became clear to the transition team working for President-Elect Obama was that none of the other parties in the television supply chain – such as broadcasters, TV networks, or consumer electronic manufacturers – nor the federal government, had the experience, ability, or resources to “stand up” a national call center in the few short months remaining, to manage consumer questions and concerns.

The cable industry’s principal trade association, NCTA, had been deeply involved in discussions with the FCC and federal government throughout the years the DTV Transition was being planned. NCTA and its member cable companies and programmers already had provided hundreds of millions of dollars worth of advertising time to convey public service messaging to consumers about the imminent transition. And engineers throughout the cable universe had worked tirelessly for several years to ensure that their cable systems seamlessly would handle the transition from analog to digital broadcast signals.

When representatives of the incoming Administration put out a red-alert call for help from its transition partners in November 2008, NCTA realized that only cable had an industry-wide resource capable of meeting the demand for a national call center to handle consumer issues. It was C5.

The Cable Center, in concert with NCTA and CTAM, quickly galvanized cable’s customer care community through C5. By the Holiday season of 2008, marketing and operating executives of Time Warner Cable, in partnership with project management consultant Sand Cherry Associates, had stepped up to lead the effort to create a virtual national call center that could be operational by the spring of 2009. Companies represented on C5 contributed personnel, insights, and significant time and resources to organize the effort. It required substantial recruiting, creation of technical infrastructure, drafting of large amounts of information – including language and tools for customer care agents – that also could be shared back to participating companies, along with intense project management. The same companies and organizations banded together to generate adequate funding for the effort. The DTV Transition hotline launched in March 2009, offering a toll-free number that any American could call to seek answers to their questions about the DTV Transition.

Precise metrics on the operation of the hotline and virtual call center have been lost to history. But participants in the project recall that tens of thousands of phone calls from consumers were handled. And importantly, the federal government, and especially the new Administration, learned that cable could be a credible and trusted private-enterprise partner in heading off a potential crisis of great magnitude.

C5, The Cable Center, NCTA, CTAM, and the industry’s major operating companies were able to bask in the glow of a winning effort. And as Kyle McSlarrow, then President & CEO of NCTA remarked, “We have gained years of goodwill from the FCC and federal government because of these efforts.”

C5 was on the map.

Culture of Sharing Defines C5 Deliberations

The early days of The Cable Center’s leadership of C5 put a strong and enduring emphasis on sharing – the sharing of successes, hopes, frustrations, even failures, by the hearty core of operations executives who comprised the group. The Cable Center’s profile as an industry gathering place, convenor, and archive of its history and stories, provided the ideal setting for C5 to thrive with deliberation and culture-building.

“It was kind of think tank-y; it always has been a little bit,” recalls Diane Christman. “[There was] the opportunity to troubleshoot together, and to have awesome conversations … This has always been a really close group… It’s a really close, collective community, which I love.”

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the day-long C5 meetings typically involved round-robin discussions where the executives shared and compared notes on their enterprise-wide challenges. Among the many issues generating intense discussion were:

  • Consolidation of multiple billing systems;
  • resolving issues with Interactive Voice Response and other automated systems;
  • recruiting, hiring, and training customer service representatives;
  • coordinating between technical operations and customer service personnel;
  • addressing the disruptions caused by frequent corporate mergers and acquisitions;
  • dealing with the expiration of promotional pricing for customers;
  • recovering from weather disasters and natural emergencies; and
  • the ongoing system upgrades and rollout of new broadband, video and voice services that, while sought after by consumers, typically can play havoc with stability in the customer experience.

In addition to the in-person sessions at The Cable Center and, over time, in some corporate headquarters and field locations, during this era the Cable Center team helped coordinate monthly conference calls. These audio-only calls offered a chance for CX experts to address the group and, more importantly, for C5 members to check in regularly on new and pending challenges. They served not only as working-group sessions to focus on specific problems, but also as an early warning system for common issues the industry might face as a whole. Each call ended with a brief discussion about what the CX executives could see around the bend, and what they thought would be useful to tackle in future meetings.

The in-person and teleconference sessions – frequently intimate and deeply detailed – also formed something of a team-building culture, where executives from different companies would jump in to make suggestions and offer advice and resources to help solve a colleague’s problem. Strong partnerships – even lasting friendships – arose from the interaction.

“Those are the people we had in C5 [at that time]. And they needed each other,” recalls Jana Henthorn, who shepherded the group through much of that period. “They needed to be told that you’re trying really hard, and here’s a better idea; here’s some research. They were so sincere and really fighting that battle. And I think that camaraderie, that rising tide, was so prevalent in the early days of C5. And to me, a big win out of this whole thing was, that [any member of the group] could call anybody, and the exchange of information on a confidential basis was so helpful to these men and women who were fighting this battle.”

C5 and the Industry Begin to Turn the Tide

By the 2010s, the industry’s large operating companies began to signal that they were getting serious about trying to “solve” the industry’s customer experience problem. Thanks to billions of dollars of investment into network infrastructure – including sophisticated new software and hardware dedicated to “plant monitoring,” that is, understanding in real time conditions throughout a company’s physical distribution networks – cable system performance was markedly improving.

Companies such as Comcast, Charter, Cox, and Mediacom – and even companies serving smaller numbers of subscribers, such as Alaska’s GCI – were growing more assertive in actively reaching out to customers to notify them of service issues, plant improvements, and service upgrades. And through C5 discussions, U.S.-based companies were benefiting from learnings of major operators in overseas markets – such as Liberty Global in Europe and Latin America, Telecom Argentina in Argentina, and Brazil’s Claro Brasil – as those companies enhanced and bulked-up their networks and expanded their reach in their own service areas.

The greater scale of the larger companies, many of which had spent previous decades acquiring and consolidating properties, was starting to pay big dividends in the customer experience through greater centralization of purchasing, equipment, and technology efforts. A seminal moment in the cable customer experience in the United States occurred in May 2015, when Comcast Corporation Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts used the opportunity of a keynote appearance at the industry’s annual trade show – the Internet and Television Expo (INTX} in Chicago – to announce a whopping new commitment to customer experience by the largest multiple system operator in the U.S.

The multi-pronged offensive to, as Comcast described it, “reinvent the customer experience and… create a culture focused on exceeding customers’ expectations at all levels of the company,” attacked customer care challenges on multiple levels. “The plan centers on looking at every decision through a customer lens and making measurable changes and improvements across the company,” Comcast said.

Among its many parts, the plan called for:

  • The creation of 5,500 new customer service positions within the company
  • A commitment to “always be on time for customer appointments” by the end of that year
  • Adding three new customer support centers in the western half of the U.S.
  • Tripling the size of the company’s “social care team” engaging with customers on social media
  • The rollout of a new cloud-based platform to provide employees a “holistic view” of customer account history
  • A requirement that all cable employees participate in additional customer experience training annually
  • A redesign of hundreds of the company’s retail outlets, and
  • Launch of a new app designed to put “customers in the driver’s seat giving them the tools to troubleshoot problems and fix issues,” including the ability to schedule conversations with customer support personnel.

News organizations reported that the value of the company’s commitment was $300 million. The announcement earned headlines in major news outlets across the U.S. and in many ways galvanized the industry to – once and for all – resolve its customer experience issues. As Roberts was reported as saying, in his typical understated fashion, “We’re going to get at this.”

While the nation’s largest cable operator was throwing major resources at the customer experience, The Cable Center and C5 were further focusing and refining the efforts of the group to, similarly, improve its effectiveness.

The Cable Center’s Senior Fellows Take the Reins

The mid-2010’s was a time of additional transformation, not only for customer care as a discipline, and for C5 as a group, but for C5’s institutional parent, The Cable Center, as well. Cable Center CEO Larry Satkowiak was approaching the end of his decade-long tenure, which had been marked by financial stability and industry support for the institution he led. As Satkowiak moved into retirement – following publication in 2015 of his succinct and well-received history of the cable industry, The Cable Industry: A History Through Three Generations – The Cable Center’s own Jana Henthorn was elevated to the CEO post.

Henthorn’s career-long commitment to customer care and her personal stewardship of C5 in her previous Cable Center position, would bode well for the prospects of the customer experience group. Yet she knew her management of C5 would be difficult to sustain while running and ultimately charting a new course for The Cable Center.

At about that time, “I saw [the mission of C5] as evolving,” Henthorn says. “from being tactically focused and operationally focused, to more strategic customer experience for the whole company, as opposed to just the folks working in that area.” And to help keep C5 on that path, Henthorn believed she could lean more heavily on the customer experience experts – Cable Center Senior Fellows Charles Patti, Ron Rizzuto, and over time, Maria van Dessel – with Patti and Rizzuto having been engaged in C5 events for nearly a decade already.

With Henthorn’s CEO duties beginning to stack up, “I saw that Jana was getting very busy doing other things” beyond C5 stewardship, Patti recalls. “So I said, ‘How ‘bout I take that over? And take on responsibility for finding sponsors, building the program, etc.’ So that’s how I got involved in a more hands-on leadership role in C5.”

The arrangement had Patti taking on more day-to-day management of the group’s activities, with Rizzuto providing substantial support and consultation, particularly on research projects. Maria van Dessel would become integral to the group’s activities starting in 2018, when Patti and Henthorn agreed that the additional management and administrative resources she could provide would be helpful.

And so from 2016 through 2018, the stage was set for further development and enhancement of C5’s mission and purpose, including the transformation of its name. Cable industry executives were acknowledging that “customer care” and “customer service” were perhaps too narrow for their ultimate objectives. A newfound dedication to “the customer experience” was emerging. The Cable Center Customer Service Committee became The Cable Center Customer Centric Consortium, elegantly adapting its broader purpose to its shorthand name, C5.

The leadership of The Cable Center’s Senior Fellows brought new motivation and discipline to the work of C5. Elements of the semi-annual meetings became more formalized and carefully managed, and a stronger emphasis was placed on research as a tool in advancing the customer experience agenda. Additionally, the Senior Fellows established a stronger link to the customer experience movement across all industries, as well as globally, for a far broader perspective on the cable industry’s strengths and weaknesses in this area.

Robust Two-Day Meetings Drive Success

One of the innovations brought by Patti, van Dessel, and Rizzuto was to broaden and strengthen the industry volunteer leadership of the group itself. C5 traditionally had identified two of its MSO member representatives to serve as co-chairs. The Fellows would expand that leadership group to include five co-chairs, dubbed “Executive Chairs.” The Executive Chairs would represent, variously, large domestic cable operators, small and mid-size domestic cable operators, and large cable operators from among its international membership.

The Executive Chair group was solicited for content, research, and meeting agenda ideas, both formally and informally: a dinner with the Fellows, Cable Center leadership, and Executive Chairs became customary on the night before each C5 conference, while the Executive Chairs also were consulted informally between semiannual conferences as well. The terms and responsibilities for Executive Chairs were codified by Patti, van Dessel, and Rizzuto, to strengthen the infrastructure of the group.

Furthermore, the Senior Fellows worked to retain insights provided by institutional talent that had served C5 for many years. They did so by creating an Emeritus group of executives, former C5 members who had recently retired from the industry or moved into roles as consultants, vendors, or into CX positions outside of cable. (For full disclosure, this writer is privileged to serve in such a role.) The Emeriti help maintain institutional perspective from executives steeped in the history, activities, and initiatives of the group.

The twice-a-year meetings of C5, always the lifeblood of the group, were fashioned with a cadence that became comfortable and familiar to its members. Two full days were set aside for each conference. Day one commenced with breakfast and ran a full business day, followed by a cocktail hour and dinner, which provided substantial time for business-to-business networking among C5 members and with representatives of corporate sponsors and The Cable Center. The evening events gave way to a popular trivia contest – often featuring questions pertinent to the market in which the meeting was being held – as well as other gamified activities at several of the conferences. Day two also would get off to an early start and run through late afternoon, followed by more reception and networking time for C5 members who cared to stay on before returning to their offices.

The twice-annual conferences became immersive experiences during which participants exchanged ideas, discussed problems, and assessed their business both formally and informally, creating among C5 members sustained professional relationships and, in many cases, bonds of friendship.

Patti and van Dessel indicate their mission was to create an environment for the exchange of ideas that was as safe, welcoming, and robust as possible. Take, for instance, the freewheeling roundtable of updates and reports from C5 members christened “Egg Timer Sessions.” Limiting presenters strictly to five minutes – governed by a metaphorical “egg timer” – enabled wide-ranging sharing of dozens of initiatives, projects, ideas, and challenges among C5 members. The practice often gave way to much lengthier discussions of customer experience enhancements, over meals and cocktails later in the conference.

Additionally, the Senior Fellows took pains during the conferences to expose the group to C-suite executives from companies and organizations throughout the industry. The list of industry heavy-hitters participating in these “fireside chats” included Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries; GCI President & CEO Ron Duncan; CableLabs President & CEO Phil McKinney; President & CEO of NCTA – The Internet & Television Association, Michael Powell; Cable One Chief Operating Officer Mike Bowker; then-President and Chief Operating Officer of Liberty Latin America, Betzalel Kenigsztein; and then-Vice President of Customer Experience for Cox Communications Jonathan Leepson. Mediacom Chairman Rocco Commisso also had participated in one such session before the fireside chat format officially was introduced.

Just as valuable to C5 members was the Senior Fellows’ focus on exposing cable industry customer experience executives to peers from companies outside of the cable operating environment, opening new avenues for thought based on how blue-ribbon companies in other industries had overcome CX hurdles. Keynote sessions at C5 conferences offered wisdom from executives representing prestigious brands such as Alaska Airlines, IBM, American Express, Charles Schwab, J.D. Power, Deloitte, Bain & Company, Lippincott, Medallia, Forrester Research and the closer-to-home ESPN.

Finally, the industry vendors contributing to the success of C5 through sponsorship packages also were offered exposure to the group during the semiannual conferences, often featured as “Spotlight On” segments. The vendor presentations – a staple of the business world – nevertheless generated often-intense discussions on CX-related topics running the gamut from Net Promoter Score, to voice recognition technology and analysis, to customer service representative performance, to Artificial Intelligence and beyond. Companies engaging with the group through presentations or displays included Kore.ai, Amdocs, Statflo, Netcracker, Nexidia, Nuance, ASAPP, Qualtrics, CallMiner, TechSee, Blitz, DeviceBits, Adrenaline Technologies, and Blue Prism.

Deep Relationships are the Backbone

By the late 2010s, so much was occurring at each C5 conference that the production of a conference booklet – featuring agenda items, presenter bios, background documents, and C5 meeting participant contact information – became a necessity. It also preserved for posterity the profile of each meeting. Even “goodie bags” became a feature of each conference, to provide sponsors and participants a stronger opportunity to capture mindshare from C5 members, and to make the meetings themselves more memorable. Likewise, each presenter would receive a gift from C5 and The Cable Center, to help keep cable industry CX top of mind.

Of the Senior Fellows’ many efforts – large and small – to embellish each C5 conference, Maria van Dessel said, “They really kind of break down the ice, and it gives people things to talk about [that are] familiar. They don’t necessarily have to be talking about work stuff, they can talk about fun stuff, and that makes those connections. Those deep relationships are really what C5 is all about.”

“We developed the mission,” added van Dessel, “through keynote speakers, vendor presentations, and other conference highlights. We developed a learning model of inside/outside… and we kept kind of reinforcing that, so everybody knows the importance of the connections that they have with each other. They’re learning from within C5 as a community of organizations as well as learning from outside the cable industry. That was all very purposeful.”

In reflecting on the Senior Fellows’ tenure in managing the group, which concluded in the fall of 2023, Charles Patti acknowledged the cable industry’s decades-long CX challenges, but asserted that the work of C5 had made a real difference in tackling those challenges.

“My take is that the people who come to C5 have very significant responsibilities,” Patti said. “These are people that are working to the beat of the organization [they serve]. Are they in a position to completely turn around something? That’s rare, to have the opportunity … They could make, and probably have made, what I would call smaller, incremental changes. But they’re very busy… and they’re very varied in the details of what they do. And so our challenge has been, can we elevate that a little bit without beating them over the head about it?”

“We never say, ‘This is what you should do. Stop doing this and do that.’ We don’t do that,” Patti adds. “We present ideas, either ourselves or primarily by the way of guest speakers from companies that know what they’re doing about customer experience in a very different way, in many cases, than the cable industry does. And we hope that penetrates; that people at least stop for a moment, and think, ‘Maybe there’s a different way. Maybe we can modify something.’”

As it enters its third decade, has C5 begun to right the ship for the cable industry in CX? “Our experience primarily with the C5 people, and the questions they ask, indicates a deeper embracing of customer experience,” Patti says. “Our experience just as [cable] subscribers is, they’re not perfect of course, they make mistakes… but we’ve experienced improvement in what they’re trying to do as an industry. I’d say it’s positive. Is there a long way to go? Yes, and that’s what will take even more time and insights and courage from these [C5 members] in their companies.”

Added Rizutto, “I would just observe that the C5 effort has helped focus the attention of the industry on cable care… There was a lot of focus [already]. But C5 helped raise the visibility of the care professionals and the importance of what they’re doing, and it gave them a venue. You had marketing people, you had finance people, who had meetings and things, but not the care people. So I think it helped with that.”

Research Becomes a Tentpole

Not to be overlooked in the history of C5’s second decade was the impact of research commissioned by the group and executed under the tutelage of the Senior Fellows. C5 leaders were careful to fashion research in response to member needs and to do so in a way that could enable C5 companies to leverage the work’s outcomes.

In addition to the group’s flagship research project mentioned previously – the six-year study of call center metrics – six other identifiable research-based projects were carried out under the leadership of the Cable Center Senior Fellows. The C5 research efforts during this period represented a unique blend of original and secondary research combined with real-world application of the results by many of the companies that supported and engaged in the projects. The nature of some of the initiatives also was bolstered and informed by the career work of the Senior Fellows in areas such as Design Thinking and CX measurement. The work included:

  • A white paper examining many dimensions of “self-service” – the practice of empowering customers to service their own on-premises infrastructure and home network. This project’s goal was to provide context and understanding around the strategic use of self-service to improve operating efficiency and enhance CX. It offered C5 members guidance on how to strategically develop self-service as a tool for customers.
  • A unique follow-on to the self-service white paper was a project using Design Thinking research methods to examine the use of self-service in “onboarding” new customers. The Senior Fellows conducted research among new and existing customers to examine how self-service could create better user experiences for customers during the first 30-90 days of their subscribership. The research gave rise to three alternative solutions for enhancing the customer onboarding experience which were evaluated by a panel of cable experts. The study was conducted in the Design Thinking laboratory at The Cable Center in Denver.
  • Collaborating with a third party, the Senior Fellows conducted a survey of more than 2,000 U.S. households on company and subscriber use of digital communication channels (e.g., text, chat, chatbots, online communications, etc.) and their impact on the customer experience.
  • Options for measuring CX – 23 in all, then comprising every known measure – were analyzed in a literature review conducted by the Senior Fellows, with an eye toward evaluating the relevance of CX in “the customer journey.” The work was published in the European Journal of Marketing in 2020 and distributed to all C5 members for their use and consideration.
  • The Senior Fellows refined the CX Maturity Audit, a tool to identify a company’s maturity level in customer experience through a 50-item self-administered questionnaire, and which they had developed through their own work with dozens of companies engaged in CX. The Maturity Audit was used by 10 of the C5 MSOs, and it led to a variety of new strategic CX initiatives among C5 member companies.
  • Responding to the need expressed by C5 members to understand the relationship between CX and network performance, case histories relating network performance to various CX measures were presented by six C5 MSOs. The findings were shared during several C5 meetings and through a presentation and report authored by the Senior Fellows.

The Senior Fellows worked hard to run the research “in a way that makes sure it [held] up,” Patti said, noting he had seen too many reports across industries in the CX space that ignored social science standards.

Is it possible that the research, combined with the collaboration and shared learnings of C5’s members, could provide findings for other industries that are also chasing excellence in customer experience? Could an industry once beleaguered with customer care horror stories, now offer lessons for others?

Says Patti, “I think that our industry, despite all the complaints and the low rankings that it typically gets, has a lot to offer other industries … The contact with customers in the cable industry has almost always been reliant on a call center or a contact center… Most industries have gravitated to a subscriber-based model. People subscribe to everything today. So the lessons that the cable industry has [learned] should be transferable to other industries that might be struggling about a subscription economy. And the enormous amount of data and experience that our industry has about contact centers – there would be very few industries that would be larger contact center industries than cable. That would be huge… Are [C5 companies] interested in sharing that knowledge in some way? I don’t know… but there is that potential.”

What Lies Ahead for C5

By mid-2023, The Cable Center and its newly-christened Syndeo Institute were eager to push the boundaries once again on the 20-year vision of C5 and its predecessors. Having firmed-up the foundation of C5, brought game-changing innovation to the committee’s mission, expanded the reach of the group to several continents, and forged a culture of connection and collaboration, The Cable Center Senior Fellows – Patti, van Dessel, and Rizzuto – would relinquish their management of the group to a new generation of Cable Center leaders, and they earned warm thanks and appreciation from Cable Center leadership for their stewardship of the group.

Following extensive outreach to, and conversations with, C5 members and supporters, Cable Center President & CEO Diane Christman declared the industry’s CX group ready for further evolution. Syndeo Institute at The Cable Center was ready to take “a deeper dive into the CX arena,” Christman said.

Changes would include developing a CX-centered thought leadership program that would feature a new annual CX Report. The initial report would be edited and produced with help from Patti, and it would include contributions from C5 members.

“Our topline finding [also] included broad support to change the current conference model,” Christman said, “and that industry perspective is needed from a facilitator and planning perspective. Everyone agreed that the ‘community’ and relationships of C5 members is important and must be preserved… There is also overwhelming support to leverage the C5 Association members to assume a more active role in disseminating information and providing depth and understanding of C5 and CX efforts.”

Additionally, Christman indicated that C5 would expand on its efforts to explore the CX potential and challenges of Artificial Intelligence, which had arisen as a major new topic of interest for C5 members from 2021 through 2023. A C5 working group on Al would meet monthly to help the cable industry chart the course in utilizing Al to enhance the customer experience.

Still Mountains to Climb

In the 20-year span of C5 and its predecessors, the customer experience became front-and-center for cable and broadband providers in ways never imagined as the industry was maturing in the late 20th century.

During that time, billions of dollars were invested in infrastructure, monitoring, digital channels, training, customer education, and other key elements designed to enhance the customer experience. C5 at the time of this writing provided a platform – through its face to face meetings, video and audio conferences, personal and professional relationships, and ongoing informal communications – for industry companies in the United States and globally to share CX challenges and solutions. And disseminating key learnings back to its member companies and associations had informed a wide variety of CX enhancement initiatives across the industry.

Additionally, an industry once urgently in need of CX learnings from other industries outside its own ecosystem, was in a position going forward to share its own lessons and success stories with the rest of the business world.

A turnaround story? Perhaps, and in part, yes. Yet opinion research and consumer surveys in the late 2010s and early 2020s showed that despite measurable and significant improvement in cable customer care since the dawn of the 21st century, the industry continued to lag behind most other major industries pursuing excellence in CX.

Some of this could be attributed to the changing face of the industry. A subscription-based business offering a single class of products had transformed itself into a high-tech, high-touch delivery system for information, communications, and entertainment. Multichannel video delivered via satellite through cable headends had morphed into broadband, digital voice, and video streaming services delivered not only through the traditional HFC cable network, but also through countless apps available on wired and wireless platforms.

The industry itself was feeling challenged in even defining itself in the minds of consumers. Who, then, could adequately measure the customer experience across this new multitude of platforms, products, and services? All of that was making the cable customer experience, more than ever, a work in progress.

As The Cable Center and its affiliated companies, associations, and institutions charted the course for the future of C5, there was widespread consensus on one point: the customer experience had become the competitive differentiator among the hundreds of companies offering advanced telecommunication services around the globe. Cable industry progress and leadership in CX remained there for the taking.

Lessons from C5’s Success

What can we learn from the workings of C5 over the lifetime of the Cable Center group and its predecessors? While we leave it to the reader to glean nuances from its work, several findings seem self-evident, and they are attributes that can well serve any organization in any pursuit.

  • Collaboration pays off. The group’s progress appears to firmly endorse the proposition – shared by other cable industry trade associations and professional societies – that like-minded companies working toward common goals can have great impact. The inclusion in C5 over time of mid-sized and small cable operators, as well as companies outside of the U.S., strengthened the work of the group and led to more creative and broad-based solutions. The willingness of group members to share information from their own experience, or the experiences of their companies, has accelerated CX solutions exponentially.

  • Relationships forge success. Though it’s common to view relationships through the prism of emotional bonds, the simple existence of sustained interpersonal connection and interaction has greatly influenced C5’s progress. From casual cocktail and hallway conversation, to extended email threads throughout the year, the ability of cable CX executives to participate in an informal personal network has further facilitated CX solutions and strengthened the sustainability of the group. It also has led to creativity and innovation in the customer experience.

  • Allies amplify progress. One may be hard-pressed to imagine roles in C5 for industry organizations such as CableLabs, CTAM, and NCTA. Yet inclusion of these groups in C5 deliberations enables C5 and The Cable Center to amplify CX messages to much larger networks of executives engaged in a wide variety of other disciplines. The ability of NCTA to marshal C5 and the industry’s substantial CX resources for the success of the Digital TV Transition, for instance, generated years of goodwill for the industry from the federal government – and helped key government officials comprehend the depth of the industry’s commitment to customer care. The continued involvement of industry groups seemingly unrelated to CX carries word of the industry’s CX improvements to constituents far and wide, beyond the customers directly served by the industry.

  • Fact-based discussion has real impact. The use of fact-based research succeeded in focusing C5 on the issues of most importance to its members and generated data critical in understanding problems and potential solutions. Well constructed and collaborative research that generates concrete and relevant findings saves time and creates templates for critical deliberation. It also anchors deliberations in reality, as it has done for C5.

  • Structure breeds sustainability. While the developmental years of C5 were useful in building community and identifying common issues, the group’s effectiveness really took off once structure was imposed on the committee’s regular meetings and activities. The creation of standard segments for discussion and articulated expectations for outcomes allowed C5 members to define and champion the work of the group among their own companies. It also focused C5 members on a precise mission and set of objectives.

  • We can learn lessons from other industries. Cable associations have been oft-criticized for comparative analysis solely through the lens of intra-industry achievement. C5’s outreach to industries and communities outside of its own, bred a fuller understanding of CX in a broad context and encouraged cable’s CX leaders to look beyond homegrown solutions for excellence in customer experience.

  • The industry needs its vendors. The forward thinking of CTAM and The Cable Center in inviting vendor participation in customer care deliberations reinforced the truism that CX – like many other disciplines within the cable industry – is a robust ecosystem. Providers are dependent on the expertise and quality of their vendors, just as those vendors depend on client companies for their own success. Vendor participation through financial and in-kind support of C5 also enhanced the group’s sustainability and further strengthened it as a community.

  • Leadership matters. Dedicated resources from third-party groups such as The Cable Center and other industry associations have made the difference between identifying challenges, and collectively addressing them. The C5 experience has reinforced the power and effectiveness of industry organizations in helping build and sustain progress.

  • CX is everyone’s concern. The deep exploration of CX by C5 and its predecessor bodies – coupled with the group’s research efforts over the past decade – have demonstrated the breadth of factors that create and inform the customer experience. Not surprisingly, C5’s work has highlighted vital contributions to CX by such disparate disciplines as science & technology, network operations and monitoring, human resources, employee recruitment and retention, product development, marketing, sales, communications, and public policy, among others. Embracing this learning, and designing industry companies to leverage it, may be the greatest impact of C5’s initial 20-year adventure.

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