Comcast just announced that they will be bundling solar panels with their other services in selective markets. This adds to the already-largest bundle of products in the industry and is one that many competitors will have a problem keeping up with.

Comcast has been doing a trial with Sunrun, a solar panel maker from San Francisco. Comcast found during this test that their customer satisfaction and customer retention rates rose significantly with customers who bought the solar panels. Comcast has now entered into an exclusive 40-month marketing deal with the company. It’s been reported that Comcast will get 10% of Sunrun’s stock if they can install 60,000 solar customers. Comcast has committed to spend $10 million on sales and marketing for the solar panels and will get a share of the customer revenue from the product.

Sunrun currently has about 150,000 solar installations in 22 states. Comcast has over 27 million potential solar customers. The cable company also has over 1 million home automation customers, which Comcast believes will be their best market for the new solar product.

Even before this announcement Comcast has become a fierce competitor. Comcast’s CEO Brian Roberts recently said that as he looked around the industry that he didn’t see any products of interest that the company doesn’t already have – a claim no other ISP can make.

This announcement falls on the heels of Comcast’s decision to get into the cellular business. They are now marketing in a few markets with prices lower than Verizon and AT&T and plan to eventually roll this out to their whole footprint. They also just bought a pile of spectrum that will help them increase margins on cellular service. Analysts say that over five years that Comcast could capture as much as 30% of the cellphone business in their markets.

Comcast says it is tackling both of these product lines to reduce churn and to increase customer stickiness. They understand that long-time customers are their most profitable customers and they are putting together bundle options that ought to please a lot of households.

All of their effort looks to be paying off. Comcast is the only cable company that gained cable TV customers for the year just ended in the second quarter. They gained 120,000 customers while the rest of the industry is now bleeding cable customers at an average rate of 2.5% of total customers per year. While the bundles are probably not the only reason for that it’s hard to argue with this success.

Comcast has done a lot of other things to increase customer satisfaction. They created Comcast Labs (similar to Bell Lab). This group of scientists and engineers are concentrated largely on developing products that improve the customer experience. This group developed the X1 settop box which has rave reviews from customers. It’s so popular that Comcast is now selling this box to other monopoly cable providers. The settop box has an ever-growing number of features and can be voice-activated. Comcast has also integrated Netflix and Sling TV into their settop box to keep customers on their box and platform.

Comcast has also found great success with their smart home product. This is probably the most robust such product on the market and includes such things as security and burglar alarms, smart thermostat, watering systems, smart blinds for energy control, security cameras, smart lights, smart door locks, etc. Their product suite can be easily monitored from the settop box or from a smartphone app. The press releases from the Sunrun announcement is the first time in a while that we’ve heard about their success and the million plus customers using these products.

The company still has a lousy reputation for customer service and most of their customers dread having to call them. But they are supposedly putting a lot of money into making their customer service better. They recently began moving a lot of customer service back to the US, finally understanding that the cost savings of using foreign reps is not worth the customer dissatisfaction.

The flip side to making customers more sticky is that it makes it that much harder for a competitor to take their customers. Somebody buying a solar panel on a long-term payment plan is not likely to leave them for a competitor, particularly if there are financial penalties for doing so. Customers with a suite of home automation products become locked in unless they are willing to yank all of the monitors out and start over. Bit by bit Comcast is shielding their most lucrative customers from being poached by others.