Panel Session 3

ROB STODDARD: Hello. Welcome to the theater of NCTA, the Internet and Television Association in Washington DC. This is the 31st of July, 2025. I’m Rob Stoddard, former senior vice president of NCTA and a proud alumnus of Continental Cablevision, MediaOne, and AT&T Broadband. This is an oral history segment for the Customer Experience Archive of the Barco Library at the Syndeo Institute at the Cable Center. In just a moment I’ll introduce our guests.

As we record our conversation today, our industry continues to emerge from decades of public perception of poor customer care. From spiraling prices to network outages to unresponsive customer service organizations, we’ve spent many years striving to improve lackluster customer care along with the negative perception that it generated. Today, however, at mid-2025, while our customers may not think of us in the same breath as Apple, Starbucks, or FedEx, we’ve come a long way on customer experience or CX, and we’ve learned more than a few lessons about how to improve the customer journey that can be shared with businesses at large. The saga of improving CX has been a vast industry-wide effort with investments of billions of dollars across hundreds of companies. One key to that progress has been a small but mighty group of customer care executives from across the industry hosted by the Syndeo Institute at the Cable Center. The Syndeo CX collaborative, or CXC, for more than two decades has provided a framework for sharing and collaboration among industry executives. And as our conversation will show today, the path to success has been years in the making with dozens of companies and their CX leaders playing a vital role in lifting the tide of cable CX.

Other parts of our oral history for the Syndeo CX Archive have focused on the history of the CX movement in the cable and telecommunications industry. We’ve also looked at the engagement of industry companies and their leaders over the years. Today we’ll examine another element of industry CX success, the role of trade associations and the trade press in amplifying these CX efforts. And we’ll hear from one iconic industry executive who was here at the birth of CXC and its predecessor, the Cable Center Customer Care Committee, or C5.

I’m pleased to be joined today by several industry stalwarts. Starting at the far end of our panel we have Wyatt Barnett, a veteran of 25 years here at NCTA who at the time of this recording is serving as its vice president for technology enablement. Wyatt currently is a member of the Syndeo CX Collaborative and one of the architects of its initiative, exploring the CX benefits of artificial intelligence. Wyatt also produces a biweekly column on Substack called The Zeitgeist Distilled.

Next to Wyatt is Amy Maclean, the editorial director of Cablefax, which has risen to become the preeminent trade publication serving the cable and telecommunications industry. A Cable TV Pioneer, Amy also has been at Cablefax for 25 years, and she and her team periodically have covered the industry’s efforts to enhance customer care and service.

Next up is Mark Snow, senior VP and general manager for consumer marketing and insights at CTAM, the industry’s marketing association. Mark has been at CTAM for 15 years and before that served as a marketing VP for Cox Communications as well as working as a direct marketing administrator for GTE Wireless, a predecessor of Verizon Wireless. Mark also serves at the time of this recording as a member of the Syndeo CX Collaborative.

And finally, my dear friend and longtime colleague, an industry icon, Char Beales. Char spent 24 years of her career at CTAM, more than 21 of those years as its president and CEO. Char also is a veteran of NCTA along with a variety of media companies. And since her retirement from CTAM she has demonstrated great civic engagement on the boards of several prominent nonprofit organizations as well as in leadership roles in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University here in Washington DC. Welcome all and thank you for joining this discussion today.

Char, almost any story about cable’s efforts to turn around customer care has to start with you. Not only were you pivotal in establishing this great CX franchise for the Cable Center about 20 years ago from the time of this recording. But going back even further in cable history, you helped lead the first true industry-wide effort to improve the cable customer experience. It was called the on-time guarantee, dating to 1994. Can you share a little bit about that with us?

CHAR BEALES: Absolutely. You know, I served on the CTAM board as a representative from NCTA in the ’80s and the industry was going through a time of incredible growth as people wanted our programming so much that they actually were what we called “truck chasers.” They wanted cable and they wanted their MTV, they wanted their ESPN, they wanted their CNN, and we didn’t have as an industry to do anything but hook them up. That quickly changed as we moved into suburbia, and then we moved into the urban areas. We had some outliers in our industry [that performed poorly in customer care which meant] that there were some abuses. So we were reregulated in 1992 with the Cable Act, and that was the first time we really got the CEOs’ attention. We insisted that the industry needed to do something dramatic to rebuild our reputation and our relationships on Capitol Hill and at the FCC. And NCTA of course took the lead.

I credit Bob Miron, who was the head of Newhouse and their associated companies, with persuading his colleagues that it was really important to do something about customer service. And Decker Anstrom, who was CEO at NCTA at the time, who said, “We need this for political reasons,” and that got everyone’s attention. So we put in place this pretty simple on-time guarantee that said, “If we give you a window between 12:00 and 4:00 we will actually come between 12:00 and 4:00, and if we don’t, we’ll credit your account 20 bucks.” Not surprisingly, that was not an easy sell in an industry of mavericks, but the political need was so great that the majority of the industry went along with the on-time guarantee. And [among the companies] there was a lot of discussion and complaints and issues with it.

CTAM’s role was primarily the marketing of it and advertising this to customers, because this was a really bold offer, and getting that word out was really important. And I think it was really a pivotal point for the industry. It worked in rebuilding our relationships and our reputation. And I haven’t had the need to call my cable provider in the last year, but the last time I had them out to my house, they’re still offering the on-time guarantee at Comcast.

ROB STODDARD: It sounds so simple, right? Doesn’t it? I mean if you say you’re going to show up on time you should show up on time. But why was that so difficult for our companies to do during that era, do you think?

CHAR BEALES: Well, the technology for customer care was primitive, and so an install or a service call took longer than expected, and so the guy was late, but he still went. Cable said, “That should count.” Or I remember we had a case where we surveyed all the companies, and we asked, “How are you doing on the on-time guarantee?” Ninety-seven percent of them, I seem to remember, said, “We’re perfect. We’re within the window.” Well, it turned out that they counted if they came early, that should be to their credit. When the consumer said, “Wait, I took off time from 12:00 to 4:00, and you came at 11:00 and now I have to reschedule?” And I remember the NCTA board meeting where everyone was like, “That doesn’t count. We were early.” No, it’s on time. (laughter) So it was more controversial than it should have been, but it was the right thing to do, and it worked.

ROB STODDARD: So even today in July of 2025 when we’re talking with our colleagues on CXC, there are lots of issues about ownership. Who really owns CX? And there was an era when for many years it seemed as though nobody really owned CX, but my vivid memory is that cable marketers felt like they had a real stake in it. You were running CTAM during that era, flashing back again to the ’90s and into the early 2000s. Why was that important to cable’s marketing function?

CHAR BEALES: It actually started at CTAM before I even got involved. CTAM was founded in 1976, and as I look back in the records, one of the first initiatives they had was in customer service, because the companies didn’t know what to do. When you think about the genesis of our industry in the rural areas it was often the appliance store guys who wanted to sell TVs, and they couldn’t sell TVs unless people could see television. And so they went up to the top of the mountain and got the signal and brought it down. They didn’t know anything about customer care or customer service. They knew in their community if they screwed up their neighbors would talk to them. So they actually had more of a stake in it, but as we moved to more suburban and urban areas, there wasn’t that ownership.

So the marketers cared a lot about it. It shows up in the CTAM records through the ’80s, for sure, when our association was run mostly by the chief operating officers, not necessarily the chief marketing officers, and they couldn’t figure out how to be better at customer service. They wanted to, but they couldn’t figure it out. So we had courses, and we had tracks at our conferences, and we had special conferences and tried a lot of different ways to get information out there, but it was a long slog.

ROB STODDARD: And just kind of a reality check, because it’s easy to forget this all these years later, but CTAM at its origin not only was the marketing association, but it was also essentially the cable operating association, was it not?

CHAR BEALES: Correct. In fact, the original name was The Cable Television Administration and Marketing Society. And we had HR, we had operations. We were everything that wasn’t public policy at that point, because as the industry was growing up, there were so many needs.

ROB STODDARD: Sure. One thing that really resonated with me as I talked with a number of your colleagues a few years ago, as we were looking at the history of this movement and the work at the Cable Center over the years as well, was that CTAM had a very strong arc in the area of cable business services as well. Before there really were cable business services, right, and as the industry was coming of age, again going back 30 or 40 years. And one of your colleagues told me, and I hadn’t thought about it in this context before, that residential customer service was critical to those business services, because people that ran companies remembered the experiences they had as cable subscribers. Could you talk about that a little bit?

CHAR BEALES: Absolutely. So we saw, as an industry, business services as a great opportunity. We had to figure out how to tap it. We did run into the overlay of residential experience, particularly for small businesses. We prioritized our first foray into business services in small business, and [many small business owners] were community residents, so they knew about this issue of customer service based on what they may have experienced.

[In one case] it was exacerbated even further by the company then called Cablevision Systems. I don’t know if you remember, but their marketing strategy for business services was to give the same price for residential and commercial services. So one price got it all, and everybody remembered even more what happened in their own personal experience with customer care. So it was a very big issue for marketers.

ROB STODDARD: And just to stay with this thread for a little while longer, CTAM under your leadership had some very precise and articulate programs aimed at CX. I believe you sponsored conferences, you had a variety of meetings over the years. What do you recall from that period of time? This would be going back to the late ’90s into the early 2000s.

CHAR BEALES: Well, we made it a part of all our conferences. We had a track on customer care. We had separate conferences on customer care, but what we learned along the way was that it had to be a top priority within the leadership of the company, and customer care was not the top priority. That still meant there were a lot of improvements that could be made by middle management who would come to our conferences, who would learn about these things, would learn from other companies in other industries that were doing better. So there was a will, but there really wasn’t a way, until the companies prioritized it.

One of the things that we did that I’m very proud of – as the industry experienced more competition, and customer care became even more important – was that we started an executive management program for the senior leaders of the industry who maybe never had operated in a competitive environment. And although it’s a one-week course and wouldn’t change the world, when we started it, the idea was, you know, we actually named some of the COOs who were our target participants, because they hadn’t really experienced this competitive environment, and they needed to learn what it was about. We called it CTAMU in the early days. Now it’s the Cable Executive Management Program at the Harvard Business School. It’s been going on, Mark, for 25 years?

MARK SNOW: At least.

CHAR BEALES: And it has trained hundreds of the senior executives of the industry, but in those early years, it was all about the customer experience in a competitive environment. So that was a core program to really get our industry ready for competition.

ROB STODDARD: Sure. So I’ve always thought, and I think this is probably an accepted fact among everybody that’s been tracking this over the years, that the work that you did at CTAM was the true precursor to what became C5 and then CXC. The engagement of the Syndeo Institute at the Cable Center really originated with you guys. I know that you took some very firm steps in about 2005, 2006, to essentially hand off to the then-Cable Center the CX function, or at least stewardship of the CX function.

CHAR BEALES: Yes.

ROB STODDARD: What do you remember from that period of time. How did those events occur?

CHAR BEALES: Yes, so the industry companies restructured. They consolidated. You know, when I joined the industry, the cable magazines, trade magazines, published the list of the 100 top cable companies, and they all consolidated. They consolidated into regions, so they traded their systems, which meant customer service got worse. At my own cable system in Arlington, Virginia, I think there were eight different owners in like less than 20 years. And so there was constant change, but the industry restructured. The industry leaders said, “Associations, now you need to restructure. You’re organized to serve 100 top companies, little-bitty companies. We need different services.” And so that caused all of the associations to reflect and prioritize.

ROB STODDARD: So as in the corporate sense, they were driving the industry associations back to their core businesses, right?

CHAR BEALES: Correct. And so we at CTAM looked for what were our essential services that were most important to our members, particularly on the cable side, and what did we have a unique ability to fulfill? So we were launching the cable mover hotline, which we’ll hear more about from Mark in a moment, which was a program to reach people who were going to be moving to a new cable jurisdiction, and no amount of marketing from where they’re moving would ever reach them because they lived somewhere else. We could handle that function uniquely working with CableLabs, who had the database, but not the marketing knowhow. Business services was another core area that needed a lot of attention – it was really a marketing function because the technology had already been developed. So we had a unique advantage there. Customer care was very important to us, but we didn’t have a unique advantage, and the Cable Center arguably had a bigger advantage because they had the relationship with Denver University; they had the Cox endowed chair for customer service. I was on the board of the Cable Center and, to be honest with you, they needed more to do. They had the infrastructure, but they didn’t have as many programs as they needed.

ROB STODDARD: It was still fairly early years for them.

CHAR BEALES: Early on, exactly. You know, I always laughed, I was on the committee that helped raise $75 million in a year to build the building, but we never stopped at that point to say, “What will we do in the building?” It took us a long time. Cable operators completely got, “Oh, we need a building? Okay, yeah, we’ll donate money for the building.”

ROB STODDARD: And I think it’s also critical not to underemphasize the Cox endowed chair at the University of Denver which was huge, right? I’ve been told by Charles Patti, former senior fellow at the Cable Center, that it was the first ever chair, academic chair, in CX.

CHAR BEALES: Exactly. So as we looked at our priorities and restructuring, we at CTAM said, “We have a unique advantage we can bring to the industry in the movers, and in the business services, and we should share that — customer care – with the Cable Center,” and so that worked out. The Cable Center staff there was very enthusiastic. They wanted more to do. We had actually had our 25th CTAM anniversary, raised a little bit of money, and we gave them that money to seed it because they obviously were starting from ground zero. And I think, you know, they took it and ran. They were arguably better positioned to run this whole industry consortium than we were. And so it was a win-win.

ROB STODDARD: It proves to have been huge wisdom in that decision, because they have run with it for the past 20 years and done exceedingly well with it.

CHAR BEALES: Exactly.

ROB STODDARD: Just to bring up some old names among friends as well, you worked, I think, directly with former Cable Center CEO Jana Henthorn?

CHAR BEALES: Correct.

ROB STODDARD: Who at that point was a VP of programs for The Cable Center. And it was literally a matter of kind of negotiating the deal, wasn’t it, to make that happen?

CHAR BEALES: Exactly. She was enthusiastic, needed some support, needed a ramp-up period, needed the industry to give them the license to take three years to build it up. It wasn’t going to happen overnight. But what we were doing wasn’t that revolutionary. So she got the time she needed to build the support and to build it around the Cox chair which was just huge. And that academic framework was also really helpful for the whole industry to learn from other industries, to learn theories and put them into practice.

ROB STODDARD: Indeed. Well, that’s a terrific oral history, kind of a sprint through what happened during those years, again, going back to the first decade of the 2000s. Always of great interest to me, because I was fortunate to work here at NCTA for 20 years, was that from the outset of C5, the Cable Center made the decision to include cable associations in the customer experience work. It wasn’t just corporate executives. The theory at the time, which was also proven to work out and to have worked with great benefit, was that the associations could amplify the CX work being done by the Cable Center back through their own constituencies. In the case of CTAM it would be marketers. In the case of NCTA, it would be the people that stay on top of public policy. In technology, there’s been a great relationship with CableLabs over the years as well. I regret that they can’t be with us today, but they played a pivotal role in all of this. And more recently, in the past year prior to this recording in July of 2025, there’s been a renewed relationship with SCTE, so that cable engineers again can collaborate more closely on CX issues.

So to that point, I would love to turn to our other panelists now and just as kind of a preliminary baseline, ask each of you how you see your relationship with CXC, what role you play in its work. And, particularly with Wyatt and Mark representing associations, how you make that work, how it works for the Cable Center and how it works for you guys. Wyatt, why don’t we start with you?

WYATT BARNETT: Sure. So I think first it’s a really long story for me. My first steps in this industry when I was but a lad at NCTA was working on the on-time guarantee database that Char helped craft back in the day. But you know, beyond that our role with CXC is really important. It’s the pointy end of the industry. You know, we’re your man in Washington, and at the end of the day that politician, that policymaker’s relationship with their cable company, happens through a lens of their customer service.

ROB STODDARD: And if I can interrupt you just for a moment to add a small aside here, it is fair to point out that NCTA itself, for a brief and glorious period of time around 2002, 2003, had a customer service committee. Our then colleague Jadz Janucik pulled together a number of public policy executives to focus on customer care for precisely the same issue you’re describing. It was beginning to have a serious impact on the industry’s relationship with public policy.

WYATT BARNETT: Yes. And then moreover, another huge issue that customer care brings into public policy, is workforce. You know, a big part of our story is, we have workers in almost every Congressional district in the country, and these are real good jobs, the kind of thing people can build careers and families around, and many of them are customer care workers. So from a kind of industry standpoint and a political standpoint, it’s really important. As for what I do for them is I help ferry this work between the two organizations. I also help do some political updates and help inform our customer care people about, A, the effects they’re having in Washington, and, B, what’s coming down the road for them in terms of policy concerns.

ROB STODDARD: What do you find is the benefit to NCTA of participating in a group that focuses on CX? Consumers specifically are not an identifiable constituency of NCTA which focuses much more on public policy. So what good does it do for you to spend this time? What do you bring back to NCTA from it?

WYATT BARNETT: A huge part of it is, it’s easy to be in Washington to get stuck inside the beltway and not see out, so a huge part of it is, it really gives us eyes into the real world — the end of the business, the place where you’re dealing with your customers. We can understand what they’re seeing, which helps our folks on Capitol Hill go out and tell the right things to their constituents, and we can understand where some of this feedback is coming from. So it’s an amazing way to have a window into our businesses that you just don’t get when you’re talking to Washington offices.

ROB STODDARD: That’s great, Wyatt. We’ll come back to you in a few minutes. I’d love to talk with you a little bit more about how public policy itself has an impact on the consumer experience and on the work of the people on CXC as well.

But sticking with this line of questioning, Mark, we’ve heard a lot from Char, your onetime boss and longtime friend, about CTAM’s engagement. Bring us current to July of 2025. What’s the relationship now between CXC and our friends at CTAM?

MARK SNOW: Well, it’s very strong. Marketers have a huge stake in sort of the co-creation of customer experience because customer experience is sort of the horse in front of the cart that is all the marketing and messaging and promise-making that we make as marketers. And it’s been really fun. I think I turned 15 years old on the committee so far, starting with what we now lovingly refer to as C5. And it started off as very care oriented. Efficiency; average handle time, etcetera. How do we get calls out of the system and get people what they need more efficiently?

But in the last five to seven years, it has evolved into being truly CX, full spectrum, not just the customer care function, but service delivery and design. And that’s really exciting. And as marketers being in the room where that’s being crafted with these executive — I would say that the level of the participants at CXC continues to get higher and higher. We’re now at VP and SVP level people – we’re able to engage in a very real dialogue about, you know, if we want to unlock the right to make a service claim, we have to be able to deliver that in terms of customer experience.

It’s been interesting also watching the marketers play a larger and larger role within the companies. For instance, at two of our companies, the head of brand and the person in charge of brand experience now have a role in service delivery design within their company. They’re actually now outside the marketing department helping design a process that will prove the promise they’re trying to make about whether it’s life unlimited in the case of Spectrum or whatever, living your best-connected life in the case of a couple of the other companies. So for CTAM being in the middle of that is vital, because our mover program really can’t work well if somebody’s customer experience blows up and then they move. Even though that’s not the new company’s fault, the memory of what happened where they were is huge, and people’s memories of bad things are a lot longer than they are of good ones. And so we’ve always had a stake in this. I find this relationship – between the associations and Cablelabs, with the technology and policy and marketing – it’s all so interconnected that you really need everybody in the room together.

ROB STODDARD: Mark, some of your comments have addressed what felt to us like a gradual transition, but an important transition, from good old customer service – the blocking and tackling of taking care of customers – to what we now call the consumer experience, CX. In your mind, what does that transition look like? What’s the difference between customer care and what we think of today as CX?

MARK SNOW: That’s a great question. And it’s nuanced. They’re very, very different things. So in customer care, it’s do I have enough people to answer the calls? Do I have enough people that have been trained well? Do I have the right training, the right information? Am I taking too long on the call? Are these people better served going online instead to answer their questions?

Customer experience is more about blueprinting the design of the service delivery itself, so you don’t even have to call. There’s a book out: “The best customer care or best customer service is no customer service.” To Char’s point — she hasn’t had to call in over a year. I haven’t had to call my folks at Spectrum in two or three years. That’s the best experience, if you don’t have to call in. So the people in the room and the suppliers that orbit around the group have evolved as well. So instead of a company that is very expert at helping you improve how your IVR (Interactive Voice Response) works, now we have somebody who’s expert at what’s called service blueprinting, how you design a service A to Z that starts and ends with the customer in mind. And it’s a very big change, and a good one.

ROB STODDARD: That’s a great description, Mark, thank you.

Amy, you’ve been playing the role of the esteemed journalist remaining quiet during most of this conversation so far, but we’d love you to jump in as well. You’ve had the opportunity for a quarter century to cover a lot of this. How have you observed that all of this has changed over the years? What’s your sense of the perception of cable and telecom service today, compared to what it was when you started on the beat that quarter century ago?

AMY MACLEAN: It’s funny listening, especially to what Char was saying. It’s like a movie playing in my head of all the things we’ve seen over the years, and the cable mover hotline was a big thing, there are so many big things. When I started, I felt like it was the excuse industry. There were a ton of excuses, right? Nobody likes paying this big bill, and it’s going to keep going up, because the programming rates go up and they’re just going to hate us. That was sort of the attitude. We started to see a change. There was not just the on-time guarantee, but then we started to see the service window shrink, right? That was also a really big pivotal moment.

In my time I really think 2015 was the year. When we were at the Cable Show in Chicago and Brian Roberts took us to an Xfinity store — I think it was called Xfinity then, it might have been a Comcast store — and it felt like an Apple store. As a reporter I was like, what is this place? Where’s the bulletproof glass with the customer care rep behind it, right? (laughter) That was a relatively new thing.

ROB STODDARD: Just to be clear, this was INTX (the Internet & Television Expo) in 2015. And Brian, who was then CEO of Comcast and very involved in cable operations during that era, made an announcement that Comcast was going to commit, as I recall, $300 million to invest in the customer experience, in customer care. It involved a big investment in those retail stores. It involved hiring additional people, hiring up. And it also involved, which is an episode that Comcasters still like to talk about to this day, engaging Comcast’s corporate C suite in direct conversations with consumers and participating in CX. So you’re recalling for us that particular episode. Why was that so important during that era? What difference did it make?

AMY MACLEAN: Cable, Comcast in particular, and Time Warner, had just been walloped. There was a consumer survey during that period. They basically did a March Madness kind of thing, to identify the worst companies in America. I know you guys remember that. The Consumerist I think is what it was called. And it was constantly Comcast and Time Warner Cable finishing in the final four, maybe “champions.” It was embarrassing. So Comcast took on a very public role at that point. They put an executive named Charlie Herrin in a customer experience leadership role. They wrote blogs. They were very involved in social media. You would see them out there on Twitter at the time like, “oh, you have a problem?“ You know, just stepping in so that they could show that they had some compassion. That was very, very different. They were the largest players, and I think it set a bar, and obviously there was the work they were doing with C5 behind the scenes, but I think it helped set the bar for others when they led.

ROB STODDARD: Amy, I was fortunate to be a trade reporter many years ago, for a few short years, and I remember feeling that it was a little challenging. I felt a little ambivalent because I was supported by the industry, but I was also a journalist and wanted to report on the industry. So what I’m coming around to is, in your role as a trade journalist, how does that role impact this work on CX? How do you look at your relationship to the CX movement? Are you here merely to cover what the industry is doing, or do you feel like you have more of a stake in it? How would you describe that?

AMY MACLEAN: I think we’re here to show the good, the bad, and the ugly, and that’s not just within the cable industry. It’s to show what your competitors are doing. T-Mobile has definitely been something everyone’s watching. Even your fiber providers. We just did a story about Hotwire Communications, and they created this diagnostic tool for Wi-Fi which is kind of like what you would have when you’re evaluating where you’re losing heating and air conditioning at a house with the red spots and all of that. We need to show that, and we need to show who’s doing it, whether it’s a cable company or something else. And to some extent we’re a hammer. We can only know what people tell us, but we just keep pounding the pavement, making those calls. We’re here to tell it all, and that includes when you’re the worst company in America according to the Consumerist.

ROB STODDARD: Here in July 2025 when you write about CX, are you writing more positive stories or more negative stories today? What’s your take on it?

AMY MACLEAN: I think it’s really interesting, because I think we’re in a big state of change right now. We’re seeing it with all these price guarantees that are going out there. We’re seeing it with this promise of simpler and more transparency which is partly brought about by some of the regulatory pressures that they’re facing. I think we’re also in a state of uncertainty with AI. For so many years, cable — especially some of the smaller operators — took so much pride in that local community feel, and how do you keep that human touch as you move toward AI? So I think there’s a lot of question marks.

But there’s also one very big positive, to Mark’s point about how customer experience means so much more than the CSR on the end of the phone. There’s been huge, huge, huge work done on reliability of the network. Comcast has storm-ready Wi-Fi so that when there’s a power outage you still have internet. I think the reliability has been up here, and maybe some of that traditional customer service has kind of maybe not been as quite as high of a priority, and I think we’re going to start to see that shift a little bit with competition.

ROB STODDARD: The quality of the network is a direct component in CX as well, right? To Char’s earlier point, the fewer calls the better, and when the network is operating well, it’s a good thing for CX.

Wyatt, NCTA has tracked a lot of the work on infrastructure improvement in recent years. How would you summarize the way the industry’s been looking at that? What kind of advancements have been made in the last five or 10 years?

WYATT BARNETT: It has been a sea change. It’s still a hybrid fiber coax network underneath it all, but that fiber keeps going deeper and deeper and deeper. Something like 90% of the time your internet traffic starts at your home. So yeah, 98% of that traffic’s going over fiber nowadays. This is not your grandfather’s cable network, and a lot of this has to do with building something reliable enough where you don’t have these calls and that also works with all this instrumentation that people like Comcast or others are building. So I get a text message saying, “Hi, your cable’s out” rather than a ping from 42 devices saying I can’t talk to the internet. And that text message also has, “Hi, it’s going to be back in a couple of hours,” and you can’t do that without a very solid network investment.

ROB STODDARD: In that regard, it’s been, at the time of this recording, a number of years, almost a decade, since the industry looked ahead and indicated that it was going to be building systems out to the level of 10G, ten gigabits. How’s that work going? What progress do you see in that area? How close are we, as an industry at this moment in time, to achieving that goal?

WYATT BARNETT: I think a lot — you know, 10G has really been DOCSIS 4.0 in a lot of ways, and they’re still in the midst of getting that out to the world, but it’s here. Comcast is talking about multigigabit symmetrical links all over the place. Your greenfield development is especially built to this kind of 10G standard. And again it’s a key part of the customer service story because at the end of the day, it’s about better, faster, and cheaper, and that’s at least better and faster and hopefully becomes cheaper at scale.

ROB STODDARD: So, Char, in the course of this discussion, we’ve kind of settled on the fact that it’s been about a decade since there seems to have been a major sea change in the industry. I’m just wondering, with your many years of experience as you look back on it, do you feel the same way – that the last decade made a big difference compared to what was there previously?

CHAR BEALES: For sure. But I think we might even need to go back a decade prior because — I’d kind of forgotten this, but I think, preparing for this, I started thinking about, in the early 2000s, how did you get the CEOs and the C suite executives to change their mindset about whether it’s customer service or it’s the customer experience? And for the marketers, we had had a relationship with Frederick Reichheld who was a Bain executive, who in 2003 wrote a seminal article for the Harvard Business Review introducing the concept of the net promoter score. We had a leader at CTAM who had worked with Fred, so we brought him to our customer care track [at CTAM conferences] several times. As you may remember, NPS was a very controversial score, because it was one question: would you recommend to a friend or colleague? It was a 10-point scale, very simple. All the research companies in America attacked it. The academics attacked it. So there was a lot of conversation about it.

ROB STODDARD: NPS, net promoter score, ended up at the end of the day with an actual figure. There was a measurement involved. And the idea was, that if you were a customer of a certain company, to what degree would you recommend that company to friends and family.

CHAR BEALES: Correct. And the other thing that was very controversial about it is you had to score a nine or a 10 to be positive. Everything else was neutral or negative. Very controversial. I had CEOs tell me, “We always count a six. That’s positive.” So Fred and a colleague wrote a book at the end of the 2000s on the net promoter score, and I was invited by the publisher to a breakfast here in Washington of people who hire speakers. And Fred and I reunited, and he told his story again, and at the end of the breakfast I hired him to come to CTAM to be a keynote speaker. Not a customer service track guy, but a keynote speaker. And it was unusual. It was the first deal I’d seen like this where you paid him a small fee, but then I had to buy hundreds of books. He was trying to get on the New York Times bestseller list. (laughter) So I of course gave the books to every speaker, everybody who spoke at the conference, all our boards, all our committees. I still had a lot of books. So I decided to send them to the MSOs to all of the C suite executives. And by then we were down to about 20 companies, and so it was the CEO, the COO, CFO, CMO, head of customer care, and so on. We sent these books out, and it was again controversial in the industry because people said, “What do you mean? If I get a six that’s good. I don’t need a nine or a 10.” And the research companies were attacking it. And I’m proud to say that it took a couple of years, but literally every company in our industry adopted the net promoter score. Not exclusively, but it was so simple to understand, it’s so intuitive, and it broadens your view from, is it customer service to, is it customer experience? And I think that played kind of an unheralded role, and I was so pleased in preparing for this that I talked to Mark, who told me they’re still using it and have taken it much further.

MARK SNOW: Yeah, in fact, because the companies using the NPS score were doing it themselves, they weren’t all of them exactly doing it the way that Fred had originally intended. It was one to 10 and it was maybe seven, eight, nines, and 10s [for everybody]. Or eight, nines, and 10s. So we sat back and said, “Okay, why don’t we do the measuring for you, and we’ll share it with everybody, and we’ll also include competitors, so we all have one yardstick and one way of measuring.” And since about 2019 I think we’ve had a unified, exactly the way Fred intended, net promoter score, nines and 10s minus zero to six. And that’s now published quarterly, and there’s a CSAT and an NPS, customer satisfaction and NPS combination. And we share the information with CXC twice a year when we meet. And now it’s actually driving part of the Cablefax customer service lists that Amy and her team are publishing every year. It gives us all one measuring stick, and it’s been nice watching that score rise. We used to have folks that said, well, I didn’t realize there was such a thing as a negative NPS score. Well, (laughter) guess what? We found it. (laughter)

ROB STODDARD: You didn’t have to look far.

MARK SNOW: Yeah, everybody’s above zero now, which is wonderful. But the thing about competition is, so do the other guys, right? You have Google Fiber and you have T-Mobile and anybody new is going to come on sort of high, but even the telcos are higher. And it’s something about that customer service focus that kind of only comes with competition. It’s a natural — everybody sort of thinks, what’s wrong with these cable people that all these years we were not wonderful? It was more about operations and execution and delivery because there wasn’t a lot of competition yet. And as competition rises, the sort of maximum point where customer service scores stop helping you, that line goes up as competition increases. I give credit to the industry for focusing on what was important at the time. Maybe we waited five or 10 years too late to start, but we’re well on our way now, and these measures in common are nice because then you don’t have to worry about comparing apples to oranges. We’re all the same.

ROB STODDARD: Amy, you’ve talked about how you’ve observed the industry changing over the years in this regard. What’s your take on what impact, as Mark was saying, competition has had? You talked a little bit about fiber providers. Are you seeing CX ratcheting up on all sides of the equation based on that competition?

AMY MACLEAN: For sure. I think whenever there’s a new shiny toy that comes into the market — it’s also, you know, it can go both ways, right? It can be oh, we have to get better, we have to be able to compete with them. But sometimes that new player is ripping up a neighborhood with fiber and making a huge mess, and it’s a chance to say, “Hey, look, we’re not doing this, we’ve got your back, we haven’t messed with your yard.”

It kind of goes both ways, but the competition is fierce, and now you even have satellite-delivered broadband, you have Elon Musk up here who’s telling you he can serve everybody. So I think that competition just makes things better, it just does. You know, if you’re the only game in town, then it’s my way or the highway, but it’s not that way anymore.

And there’s been some really cool things, like we were talking about some of the smaller operators, such as Buckeye Broadband. We were talking about the excuses that could be made about why things aren’t working, and one of the things I would hear sometimes is, it’s not our service. It’s that they have an old laptop or something. Well, Buckeye Broadband said, “You know what? Let’s make our own geek squad.” And they come in, they will do — they get paid, but there’s a fee for it – but they come in and they just don’t deal with the broadband and the cable parts of the equation. They look at everything [in the home], and I just think that sort of creativity comes with competition.

WYATT BARNETT: To build on something like that, it’s really interesting. We are basically the world’s computer help desk, right? We’re the only people — like when you’re sitting at home and your computer doesn’t work, everyone else in that chain does not have a phone number you can call. Like you can’t really call Google, can’t call Amazon, can’t call the people who made your laptop, but you can actually call your cable company and tell them your Wi-Fi doesn’t work. And it is highly likely nowadays that they can’t help you with that problem. Which is an opportunity and a bit of a danger.

MARK SNOW: If we’re going to get blamed anyways, you might as well take ownership, right? And one of the things that we talked a little bit about regarding reliability, was that these guys have said it doesn’t stop at the modem. It stops where the Wi-Fi touches the antenna or in the device. And so every room every time, leave no room left behind, and all these things about owning the Wi-Fi experience and even the device. I think there aren’t that many companies that have an invitation into the home, and there aren’t that many companies that offer that kind of connection. I think it’s smart for them to take advantage of that opportunity. There is a long chain of providers in the middle, but if we’re the end point, the buck stops here, we might as well take ownership and become their best friend on it.

ROB STODDARD: Absolutely, Mark. I heard a new buzz phrase not long ago prior to recording this conversation, that I had not heard before. We used to say, it’s the last mile, it’s a last mile problem. Now it’s “the last 15,” as in 15 feet. It is literally the connection coming through your wall into your computer or into your other devices.

MARK SNOW: That’s right. And it used to be just one access point from the router on the modem, and now there are pods and there are extenders in the home, and now those are mesh and not just the prior generation. So it continues to evolve and get better, and that delivers more of what you pay for. And if you get a gig, you’re getting six, seven-plus hundred megabits over the air onto your device. That’s miles ahead of where we were even three or five years ago.

CHAR BEALES: I just had an experience where we had — we were always a test home for those eight different cable operators who served Arlington, and so we would always have the first —

ROB STODDARD: Because you were a “friendly.”

CHAR BEALES: I was a “friendly.” And so we were always testing the early generation of our technology. But we got a note from Comcast recently saying, “We’ve upgraded our Wi-Fi and internet and modems, and it’s going to be this much faster and this much more — but you can’t see it because you have an old modem. So we’re going to send you a new modem.” They sent it to us. The instructions were easy. We plugged it in, we got it working, all we had to do was return the old one to the Xfinity store. And it all happened like within like two days. That was so professionally handled it was absolutely amazing. It was new, bright, shiny Xfinity, not that old Comcast.

ROB STODDARD: And that’s a sea change over —

CHAR BEALES: That’s a sea change.

ROB STODDARD: — having 20 years ago to pick up the phone and call a customer call center to try to bug a rep to help you out.

CHAR BEALES: And you’ve got a customer talking about it in public saying “this was a great customer experience.”

AMY MACLEAN: That same — I mean my father passed away a couple of years ago, and he was a longtime Time Warner Cable customer, and then it eventually became Comcast. At one point I had to help him as he was moving into an assisted living home. And despite my job in the industry covering things, I was a little apprehensive when I called to arrange the move get everything taken care of. And when I called, I was ready to defend why we were leaving and why he couldn’t take his service with him. But it was such a pleasant experience. They said, “Oh, I see your father is a platinum customer. Thank you for the decades of service, and good luck with his next journey.” It was very nice.

ROB STODDARD: Amy, that’s a great prompt. I want to come back to Mark and Wyatt and talk a little bit about their specialties and their interaction with CX and the CXC group at the Syndeo Institute. Mark, Amy’s story is very reminiscent of the mover program that we touched on previously. I used the word icon early on, but this is an iconic program as well that you and Char have been personally engaged with making successful over these last couple of decades. Could you take a big step back for a minute and tell us about the program? In industry circles you hear the phrase “mover program” thrown around a lot. Could you explain what that is, and what impact that’s had on CX overall?

MARK SNOW: Absolutely. Well, the mover program started off as what was then called the cable mover hotline. There’s even a predecessor to that for those who remember the LA Cable Co-op and the New York Co-op. They had a 1-800-49cable number. It was a predecessor to that. But this idea was when you were on the phone disconnecting service with one provider because you were moving, that representative could warmly transfer you to the provider that is in your new area.

ROB STODDARD: Warmly transfer?

MARK SNOW: Warm transfer is, the rep stays on the phone, punches in the zip code for the customer, introduces the customer to the other rep on the other end. Not everybody follows that. Sometimes they say, “Well, if you’d like to — I’m going to transfer you to the hotline” and the customers can take themselves to the IVR (interactive voice response system). We have both. In fact, Comcast and Charter and Cox had been testing returning to the warm handoff again as you see a better result, better close rate.

The idea is you don’t know who the provider is on the other end if you’re moving out of town, because we’re in these different footprints, whereas if you’re AT&T or you’re Verizon you’ve heard of them no matter where you live. And that was always our challenge – how do we act collectively as a large national cooperative, right? That’s the idea of a classic opportunity for us to work together because of the way we’re structured and the way the industry’s structured. So the hotline was the original co-op approach, handling a couple million calls a year at its peak. And then slowly but surely we added on the national mover program with the postal service, where folks who fill out the change of address, either the little slip that’s in the booklet or if they go online now there’s a whole online process, that captures about 85 to 90% of all movers, And we used to bid in an auction against the telcos for that.

ROB STODDARD: So you had to fight tooth and nail to keep that program.

MARK SNOW: We did. We had our friends at the consulting company Sand Cherry come in, and we actually had war games. We had red team exercises and sort of simulated auctions to see what our bid strategy should be, which ought to be reminiscent to a lot of folks who have been involved in spectrum auctions in the past. And so at the end of the day we would win certain markets and not others.

That program has evolved, and now we’re basically wherever we want to be. We were able to negotiate that. And then we added direct marketing where we were mailing on behalf of the new company by sending a note to the old company’s customer saying, “Thank you for being a customer. Good luck in your move.” And when you open the envelope the new MSO’s materials were inside like spring-loaded, and the response rate on that tended to be two to three times higher than the average for non-subscriber response. Non-subscriber response in those days was maybe point three to point six percent. We were getting two, three, and four percent response rates, which in direct mail is — those are like numbers from the 1970s. And then we added digital and that’s where I joined the program in 2010, and digital was a sea change for us. So from 2010 to sort of our peak, if you don’t count Covid because 2020 was a gonzo year, we’ve gone from one million leads to seven million leads. Well, there are 13 million household moves a year, and that’s actually down, so we’re capturing a fair chunk of the mover universe, and it translates into hundreds of thousands of sales, and we’re actually able to measure down to the sale now. And so that program has become important because even today, between 30 and 50% of all the connects and disconnects that happen in this industry of broadband are the result of people moving.

ROB STODDARD: How do you define the universe of companies that can participate in the program?

MARK SNOW: That’s a great question. So any MSO that is a member of CTAM can be a part of that program, and the CTAM membership is set by bylaws as far as what kind of technology and what kind of company you are.

CHAR BEALES: Do they still have to be a member of CableLabs?

MARK SNOW: Not any longer because not every MSO uses the serviceability solution. So CTAM had to develop a supplemental serviceability solution. Since we were starting from scratch, we decided to go all the way to the present and we’re using a GIS-based solution. So even if you’re at an address that isn’t in someone’s homes passed, if it’s within a certain distance, we will go ahead and send it over, because it may be that’s a split lot or infill, or it’s right on the edge. So it’s really improved, and now we’re actually ingesting new builds – data that has address information and even isn’t in postal yet because the houses are still being built. So we’re very on sort of the bleeding edge in some ways. The program is a big enough deal now where if the site trips up in the smartmove.us — that’s the new name of the program, Smart Move, by the way. Like a lot of us, we took the word “cable” out of the name, but you make a smart move in a lot of ways beyond just TV and internet. It’s mobile now and other things — they will tell us before we find out that something’s down, because they notice the difference in the flow of inbound traffic, the lead track.

ROB STODDARD: Coming kind of all the way to the end of the arc, Mark, as I’ve participated in CXC meetings in recent years, to this day you still stand in front of that group and you report out on the movers program. Why is it instrumental to that group of executives? Why is it important to the CX experience in general?

MARK SNOW: Well, because we’re in this sort of co-creation space, right? We are invested in the CX development that’s happening, and they’re invested because they’re in charge of the call centers that take all the sales or all the websites that take in all the traffic, and so they want to know what’s going on with movers, because as goes movers, so goes connects and so goes the business in a lot of ways. And if 13% of the population is driving 50% of the connects that’s a segment to pay attention to for sure, from the care and sales perspective.

ROB STODDARD: Char, you were there at the inception of the program. What do you remember about its founding and why was it important to the companies at the time?

CHAR BEALES: Well, competition had come in, and so getting more connects was more and more difficult, and the marketers were frustrated that they couldn’t reach the customers who were going to be moving into their area. No amount of marketing would ever reach those people, so how could they use this unique structure of our industry to develop this co-op? So we saw clearly the opportunity. The execution was harder, and we didn’t see what Mark and his team have turned it into. It’s really remarkable. And millions of connects are coming through it. And that was the idea from the beginning and, again, what we saw was that CTAM had a unique opportunity to develop something that no other association in the industry could. And that was the reason for CTAM to survive and thrive.

ROB STODDARD: It’s been a huge gift to the industry indeed. Wyatt, I’d like to come back to you now. We’ve been focusing on hardcore business issues here for the last few minutes. You dwell in the world here at NCTA and in Washington DC of public policy, regulation, legislation, the actions of the FCC, the acts of Congress, yet you have a pivotal role in CXC. Why are regulatory issues important to CX executives, and what kind of information do you take to that group that is useful to them?

WYATT BARNETT: In reflecting on this I first realized I picked a really interesting time to kind of be the political guy there. I happened to start these updates right around the beginning of the first Trump administration [in 2017] so we’ve been running from the Trump administration through a very different Biden administration to the current Trump administration. But I think overall the main point is, the customer care people really are at the pointy end of the industry. They’re the ones who are dealing with the customers. And now that we’re dealing kind of with what are fundamentally more populist regimes, where they’re running to the right or the left, doing things that are very much popular-culture focused. By popular demand, a lot of that is things like the “click to cancel” initiative which has kind of come in [through federal government action], faded away, then might be coming back again, we’ll see.

ROB STODDARD: Click to cancel was originally an FCC mandate?

WYATT BARNETT: It was the FTC (the Federal Trade Commission). The frontage has also increased. It used to be you just talked about the FCC here. Now you have the FTC and we’re worried about the NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration in the Commerce Department) as well for BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program) things.

ROB STODDARD: And in “click to cancel,” the idea was to make it easier for a consumer to cancel the service as it was to sign up for the service.

WYATT BARNETT: Yeah, so the marketing side has done a lot of great work, and done things like these mover programs to make it really easy to sign up for service. And exactly to your point, the FTC said you have to be able to cancel your service just like you signed up. Which if you’re an online streaming outfit, that’s not really that much skin off your back. If you’re a gym, you should be able to do that, but if you’re selling a complicated broadband service that’s in somebody’s home, it’s really a huge challenge to enable customers just to cancel their service. Especially when you’re like, okay, we cancel your service, and then you can’t tell us, oops, we didn’t, because you’ve just cut off your connection with the outside world. So that was a major sticking point, and fortunately that set of rules didn’t come to pass, but they’re probably coming back again in a slightly different form. But again, we’re dealing with this point where popular culture and the populace is kind of pushing a lot of these policies, especially on the surface, and we’re kind of be ruled through regulatory fiat in some ways, and many of these things will come affect the customers and therefore the customer care folks.

ROB STODDARD: So who is driving CX now more vigorously, the companies themselves, or the government that’s regulating them? What’s your take on that?

WYATT BARNETT: That’s an excellent question. I think fundamentally the companies are, right? At the end of the day this is their business. I always tell these folks that, do your business, don’t focus on doing your business for regulators, do your business for your customers. But I think the regulators are playing a bigger role at times.

ROB STODDARD: And has CXC been really vested in the regulatory and legislative world over the years? What other kinds of information do you typically bring to the group?

WYATT BARNETT: So I give a good Washington update. I also usually come in with a bit of an AI update. I spend a lot of time working on AI.

ROB STODDARD: We’ll come back to that, very shortly.

WYATT BARNETT: Gotcha. So yes, mainly it’s kind of the updates on regulation and NCTA programs, but mainly what’s coming around the corner that you don’t quite see in your briefings yet, that your legal team hasn’t told you about will be coming.

ROB STODDARD: It’s always been an issue, I think even to this day, about the companies within their corporate structures connecting the dots, so that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing, and everybody’s playing by the same rules.

Well, Wyatt, you’ve been gracious enough to throw out that term “AI” which is dominating here in mid-2025 so much of our conversation. Issues around whether this is a good thing for humanity or a bad thing for humanity, but my memory is that CXC latched onto AI as a critical issue going back probably to 2021 and 2022.

WYATT BARNETT: That’s right.

ROB STODDARD: And Wyatt, you’ve been key to that conversation so far. I have a couple of core questions about it. The first is, what are the benefits of AI to the consumer experience? What is it that CX executives think they can get from this new wave of technology that’s going to help them do their jobs?

WYATT BARNETT: So I’d say first, our guys, you know, there was the big AI explosion was at the end of ’22, and we were in front of it. It’s fundamentally a data problem, and at the end of the day these customer care representatives spend a lot of time looking at data and textual data, so just the clear line between, now we can process this a lot faster and a lot more accurately —

ROB STODDARD: And that’s not new, right? That’s an issue that I can recall easily for the entirety of the last 20 years.

WYATT BARNETT: Yeah, but now you’ve kind of gone from, well, we can kind of pull this out, to we can get very accurate information, you don’t need to go hire a machine learning scientist to do this anymore. You can kind of do it in your browser on an odd weekend. So that’s been a huge jump. And because you’re dealing in this world of data and this world of what people think, it gives you the ability to accurately measure it. The first CXC meeting I walked into, I realized these are people that measure things. They took Peter Drucker’s lessons to heart in a lot of ways. And they’re trying to measure hard things to measure, so AI has really given you this ability to measure things that are hard to measure. It gives you the ability to communicate with a lot of people more effectively. You know, your IVRs, we’ve all had this experience of trying to talk through one of those talking IVRs. I don’t know about you, but I basically refused to use them for years and would just mash zero till I got a human. But now those talk to you a lot better, and as the world turns, we’re starting to see these voice AI things that understand customer emotion that you can put on the line with an angry customer and have it do the right thing. So it’s becoming a very exciting world.

ROB STODDARD: But so much of CXC’s success has been based on collaboration, just as Char and Mark have been explaining about the collaboration that was really behind the mover hotline. What does collaboration look like in the AI era? Are industry companies still talking to each other and sharing information about it? Or has it become more challenging to do that? What’s your experience?

WYATT BARNETT: I mean there’s always been a curve of when you’re talking about customer data, you obviously have to be very careful about what you expose to other folks. It’s a very important thing to keep private. But beyond that I think it is such a fast moving wild world that it kind of goes back to the core value prospect of CXC, which is, this is a room of people who are doing a very complicated and important job at similar companies, who don’t have a lot of people to talk to about this. But when you put them into the room together under some kind of NDA, and with the kind of trust this group has built over the last few decades, you can have a lot of frank conversations about that. You can compare notes and people can be like, “Hey, are we ahead? Are we behind?” Because there is so much hype in that AI world at this point and it’s really —

MARK SNOW: A lot of snake oil.

WYATT BARNETT: Whole lotta snake oil. But you know, gallons and gallons of snake oil. So kind of understanding what you’re being sold and what the other guys are doing has been absolutely crucial. So that kind of alignment has helped a lot of folks. There are huge companies in that room, there are companies from around the world in that room, and then there are some tiny companies in that room, and kind of seeing the note-comparing is amazing.

MARK SNOW: To just hop on that real quick, one of the reasons why CXC likes to meet at member offices alternating with Denver is to get out there and be in a world where these folks are working day to day, and whoever the host is will often bring in executives. And when we had this event — the CXC at Comcast about a year, year and a half ago — the head of AI came from Comcast and spoke to CXC about everything they’re doing and why they’re doing it this way versus that way, and how they’re using the several hundred people they’ve hired to do AI development by helping the other 1,800 that don’t know AI to come along with them, because there’s no way they can just go hire everybody fresh. They’ve got to train the people they have in some way. And also, like you said, sharing who the vendors are that seem to be having traction versus the ones that may just be putting AI in whatever it is they do as a sales pitch.

ROB STODDARD: Mark, is there an AI impact on the interplay between industry marketing and CX?

MARK SNOW: One hundred percent.

ROB STODDARD: Is it an enhancement, is it helpful?

MARK SNOW: I think so. I mean obviously with AI you can do things in terms of customization. I mean you think about it from the beginning of marketing: from creative to offer to when they come to the website, what landing page they would see as a result of the combination of what they responded to, when they responded, what device they’re on, and what kind of customer segment people think they are. All of those things can customize the experience and improve the yield, but in terms of service and customer experience, in a similar way, understanding the kind of customer who does not want to talk to you on the telephone or who does not want to come into a store versus the ones that do. And I think with AI, you’ll be able to sort of understand that maybe Mark wants to come into the store and have a conversation with a human, whereas Wyatt might prefer to just text me. We’re actually doing a lot of marketing customer experience work with SMS, with texts now. It isn’t just email. It used to be when we were younger, knocking on the door before you called was considered a little rude, and now calling before texting is considered rude. And so AI, I think, helps us understand who’s who. There’s still a long way to go. There’s still a lot of ground to cover, with that intersection between service delivery and service design and service execution and marketing and the promise making and the promise keeping. And we all have to stay close together on this, because one of us is going to this way, and one of us is going to go that way, and that wouldn’t be good.

ROB STODDARD: To that point, Amy, from your perch, you kind of ride atop all of this and see how the companies are looking at this. What’s your sense of this industry’s approach to AI at the moment? And any other learnings you have that might relate back to CX.

AMY MACLEAN: I kind of think it’s the wild west in a lot of ways right now, in terms of everyone trying to figure out who they can trust to work with, who’s going to do the best job. There’s a lot of, especially maybe the smaller companies. The impression I get is they feel a little bit lost, a little overwhelmed. So I think someone can put that flag in the ground and lead there for sure. Personally, I just want someone to fix my problem when I call, and I maybe sigh, and it [the IVR] thinks I’m talking, and then we have like a back and forth about why, no, I wasn’t talking. So that. (laughter)

WYATT BARNETT: Beyond that I think there’s really interesting problems you can fix with AI at the end of the day. It’s kind of this core customer complaint, which is, I understand my context, so every time you call your cable company, or anybody else but especially your cable company, you go through this thing where you get one person, you get to explain the problem. Then you have to reauthenticate when they hand you down the line to the next person to explain the problem again, and you’re just sitting there thinking I just talked to this company, why can’t they remember what I was saying? And why can’t they remember what I said to them last week when I called? So I think AI, you know, some of the things Comcast was showing they’re doing, actually gets to the point where as a customer, the person on the other side can see the whole context. And you no longer have to repeatedly explain the same thing, which if you go back to core customer frustration, I think that’s a big, big part of it.

MARK SNOW: To that point, and this is where it gets a little bit into society, is that there’s the sum total of those experiences over time, which could be remembered by agentic AI, right? And that of course gets into labor and will there be less and less need for human customer care if you’ve got these agents that never forget what you said last Tuesday or three years ago. And it can absorb all the different customer experiences you’ve had and the outages. And “well, whenever it rains, I always lose my internet,” and they never forget that you said that. And so that’s going to be an interesting challenge for companies, but also for society as we sort of figure out how do we take advantage of that to improve customer experience – but also, if you don’t have people working, they can’t buy your services, you know?

ROB STODDARD: Yeah. That’s very true and that’s a huge difference, isn’t it, Mark? I’m flashing back to 30 years ago working for a cable provider when during that era, if you wanted your company’s customer service representative to be up to speed, you had to hand them a six-inch-thick three-ring binder that had reams of information about what we were currently offering. Now I assume all of that can be done with AI. You don’t need the human touch.

MARK SNOW: Well, the piece in the middle is this thing that’s being whispered, or the things that are being put on screen to prompt the reps to say what they need to say based upon the machine-learning based stuff that improved the experience. But you’re right, now it’s sort of the logical next step that may be that it’s all a robot. There’s going to be parts of society that are going to say, I want to talk to a human, I’m going to go to a store to make sure I can talk to a human. So this is going to be really interesting watching it unfold in real time. We’re living again in very unprecedented times, and it’ll be exciting and a little scary, but this industry is right in the very middle of it.

AMY MACLEAN: And I think reassuring the workforce as well, that their jobs are not in danger, that this [AI] is a tool.

MARK SNOW: Yeah, the idea that AI’s not going to take your job, someone who knows how to use AI will take your job, has been something I’ve heard. Wyatt and I have talked about that over the last couple of months. There’s the idea that it [AI] can enable, but on the margins, it’s probably going to mean a need for maybe fewer and fewer contact type employees, at least in care centers, I think. But that’s just having watched that occur over time. Because my old career actually started off in customer service and customer care in the mobile business back in 1994, and the ratio between customers and customer service reps has not gotten bigger. It just continued to get smaller and smaller as we’ve gotten better at this service, this good customer service, but now with the AI it’s going to continue to evolve.

WYATT BARNETT: You’re also seeing this on the technician side, they’re starting to talk about HUDs, or heads up displays, because rather than having a copilot you ask for something, this is like the IVR where it says oh, this customer called and their service cuts off every time it rains. You know, it kind of puts it in their ear or in front of their eyes. So that’s another way we’re going to see this evolve.

ROB STODDARD: I would remind us that the beauty of this conversation, which is being recorded for an archive, is that 15, 20, perhaps 30 or 50 years from now, people will be able to watch this conversation and figure out when we were right and when we were wrong about what’s going to happen. (laughter)

MARK SNOW: May we be around to be part of that.

CHAR BEALES: No, we will be AI. The next panel will be all AI.

MARK SNOW: That’s right.

WYATT BARNETT: Max Headroom style.

ROB STODDARD: I’d like to come back to one more element of the current CX program at the Syndeo Institute and, Mark, ask you about this in just a minute before we wrap up, and then we’ll come down the line with one final question and call it a day.

My experience with CXC over the years has involved a lot of time focusing with this group of companies on what I always thought of as a “common scorecard.” And that is, what are the measurements that are important to me as a company that are going to inform how well I’m doing in customer experience and customer care in general. And in the late 2000s, we did a round of common scorecard work. In the 20-teens we came back to it, had a devil of a time getting companies to agree on definitions for various elements of this. And now in mid-2025, amazingly, our friends at CXC are going through the exercise one more time. Mark, I know you’ve been personally involved in that. I know the term of art is “KPI” (Key Performance Indicator) Maybe you could talk a little bit about that and how are you looking now at the ability of these companies to know how well they’re doing based on common understanding of these definitions?

MARK SNOW: Right. It’s a big lift, because every company has a slightly different way of not only measuring things, but how they define what the thing is. So take average speed of answer. Where does the meter start? Does it start when the customer dials, or does it start when the customer has navigated through the IVR and now they’re waiting for someone to pick up the phone within whatever queue they’re in. Not every company is in the same exact place with that. And to get them to change that is complicated, because there are often systems and incentives and performance measurements that are based on those things, and to harmonize with other companies, that’s complicated. And even to re-measure to a common measure adds a layer of complexity. I think that’s what it has challenged, and it has sort of narrowed the number of KPIs that the industry has been able to align around. And those are all operational inside-out measures, and the CXC people that are representing the companies are the real experts on that because they often own those measurements, and so they’re leading on that sort of inside-out measure.

Where I’ve spent more of my time is on the outside-in, what the customer says, whether that’s CSAT or NPS. Customer effort made its debut a few years ago but didn’t stick around. It turns out it doesn’t quite do what everybody thought it was going to do. But what we’re doing right now, and actually it just started at the beginning of July, is we’re testing a new measurement that looks at six different dimensions of transparency, trust, do I feel like they customize things for me; it’s measurements of the customer experience at a more granular level. And we’re going to be measuring everybody the same way just like we did with NPS across the MSOs as well as the telcos and the fixed wireless guys. So once again we’ll have this universal measure. And so I think what we can do at CTAM to help our CXC friends, is bring that outside-in customer perspective, as a companion to what they’re working on more on the operational KPI side.

ROB STODDARD: So it all begins and ends with the customer.

MARK SNOW: Amen.

ROB STODDARD: Right. Char, was this an issue for you back in the day with all the work among cable marketers, the ability of the companies themselves to know how well they were performing in the marketplace?

CHAR BEALES: Yes, that was an issue. There was a lot less agreement then. It’s so heartening to hear Mark talk about getting an agreement through this consortium working together because, and you were a veteran of these, we had people who led the companies through the franchising wars that couldn’t let go of that for 20 years. They couldn’t agree. We had the companies who, if they advocated this position, the next company had to advocate an opposite position. It was a contentious industry because they were fighters and risk takers, and they were out there in the marketplace. And so it’s wonderful to see that this industry has taken advantage of this unique structure to be able to work together cooperatively, and it sounds like it’s a lot better today than it was when I was dealing with it.

MARK SNOW: All of which you started rolling all those years ago. You were in the room when they decided what an RGU [Revenue Generating Unit] was going to be. (laughter) Now it’s a PSU [Payment Service User]. (laughter) All right, now let’s not go too far.

ROB STODDARD: I do want to pose a final question. This discussion is a time capsule, and people in later years will come back and view it and get a sense of what we were thinking in the middle of 2025. From that perspective, as you’re looking at everything that’s gone into kind of the alchemy around CX over the last few decades, if you were to project ahead a decade or two for this industry, what do you think CX, as a concept, will look like in the future? How well will these companies stand the test of time and perform well, or will they fail compared to the competition that’s in the marketplace? Looking down the line at CX for this industry, what would you expect in the year 2035, 2045? Wyatt, with apologies for starting with you, I’m going to hand the ball off to you to go.

WYATT BARNETT: I’m always good for a little speculation. You know, this is the thing. If we’re still in the business of delivering a service to people’s homes that requires some care and feeding on some level, we’re going to be fundamentally in the customer care business. You can’t ever eliminate that side of the business no matter how fast technology advances. So while I think, while there might be holograms running around, AI powered holograms running around, you’re still going to need a layer of customer care and customer service, because if you’re this technical service provider delivering the bandwidth, at some point somebody’s going to have to fix that to make everything else go. So I think we’re still here in some layer.

ROB STODDARD: Well said and I am looking forward to those holograms. I can’t wait. Amy, what’s your take on that?

AMY MACLEAN: I think there’s definitely going to be a push to be almost a “no customer service” experience. Everything just being seamless. Maybe this is wishful on my part, but where I hope we go is with all the AI and technological innovations, that there is some delight and surprises that the industry brings. Maybe when you’re moving that person into an assisted care facility and they’re keeping their mobile service, you bring flowers, it comes from your cable company and says, “Hey, thanks for being a great customer, we’re glad to still have you.” I think those little human elements are something that cable has done very well over the years. If they can find a way to bring that into this next generation, it would be amazing.

ROB STODDARD: And we’ll hope that Cablefax is still there to cover it.

AMY MACLEAN: Still faxing.

ROB STODDARD: In 15 or 20 years, absolutely. Mark, from the marketing perspective, from the CXC perspective, what do you think?

MARK SNOW: I think service and customer experience will be with us as long as we’re in business. The first recorded customer care complaint was about poor copper being made by some merchant like 3,500 years ago. They found it in cuneiform and they were just like, “I can’t believe you gave me this copper and it was so bad. Please don’t do business with them anymore.” The first customer service complaint. So you know, it’s humanity, right?

This industry has always faced the threat of competition, and it’s always come out stronger than it did before. If you go back to the local-into-local development [among providers of Direct Broadcast Satellite Service] and we thought, oh, the world was going to end, the satellite guys are able to offer local, you know, and then the HD wars, and then the Verizon Fios and AT&T U-verse era, and now with fiber and fixed wireless, and now even perhaps satellite at some point. We’ve always taken competition and sharpened our saw and gotten stronger and better, and I feel like what we deliver may look a little different in 10 or 20 years. I imagine connectivity will be at the center of something and whatever’s outside –, whatever that is, holograms or whatever the world looks like – if we can stay relevant in the middle of that with a great product set that is very simplified and allows that sort of bolting on and takes advantage of whatever technology says, whatever’s available to make that service delivery experience elegant and simple and intuitive and then offer care and fix it fast, we’ll be fine.

ROB STODDARD: Char, what’s your confidence level in industry CX a decade or two from now?

CHAR BEALES: My confidence is high. I think I’m not sure, as you ask the question, what industry we will be in, in 10 years. We started being known as a television service. That’s not what we are now. Now we’re connectivity, we’re broadband. Now we’re moving to mobile. But the throughline of all of that is the relationship with the customer, and that has to be primary, and I think we’ve learned our lesson. And Mark is right, competition has made us stronger and sharper, and I think that this industry has a bright future. Whatever the industry is.

ROB STODDARD: May that be the last word. What a great conversation! Thank you all so much. Wyatt, Amy, Mark, Char, thanks for enlightening us about your own roles in the history of the Syndeo CX Collaborative. We appreciate your insights into the state of the cable customer experience, how far we’ve come, and how much further we have to go.

I’d like to say a special thanks to our host organization today, NCTA – the Internet and Television Association, with deep gratitude to Wyatt and to the fantastic facilities and production teams here at NCTA for producing today’s session. Thanks also to the Syndeo Institute CEO Diane Christman; to the director of the Barco Library at the Syndeo Institute, Brian Kenny; and to the entire team at the Syndeo Institute for helping produce this program and leading the work of the Syndeo CX Collaborative. If you found this conversation of interest, there are other excellent oral histories as well as additional information about the industry’s CX collaboration, in the Syndeo CX archive at syndeoinstitute.org. Please be sure to check it out. Thank you for viewing this program and enjoy the rest of your day.