I was recently joking with a colleague about some of the really dumb things that some of the big ISPs do – those things that get negative press or that make customers permanently dislike them. But after thinking about it a bit, it struck me that bad behavior by the big companies is almost inevitable – it’s a challenge for a big company to not behave badly. I can think of a number of reasons for the poor decisions that big ISPs seem to repeatedly make.

Good Intentions but Bad Policies. Some of the ugliest stories in the press from our industry have come from Comcast customer service. Customers have recorded customer service representatives saying some of the most awful things. Comcast executives have often been quoted as saying that they want to do a better job of customer service and the company has thrown big bucks at the issue over the last decade to try to improve.

But Comcast has corporate policies that undo all of their good intentions. Some of the most memorable press stories came from customer service reps who are compensated for stopping customers from disconnecting service or for upselling additional services to customers. Win-back programs and upselling are good for the Comcast bottom line, but they tempt poorly paid customer service reps into saying anything to stop a customer from disconnecting or entice a customer service rep to sneak unwanted products onto a customer’s bill. The bottom line is that policies that promote good behavior go out the window when employees are compensated for bad behavior.

Decentralized Management. I remember reading last year about the big push at Verizon to bring all of their fiber assets under one regime. The company built fiber over the years under a lot of different business units and there has been no centralized fiber inventory. This has to have cost Verizon a fortune over the years with lost revenue opportunities on fiber that already exists. An outsider like me looks at this and wonders why something this common sense wasn’t done fifteen years ago. Unfortunately, the poor communications inside the company is a natural consequence of operating different business units, each in silos. The FiOS folks never knew what the enterprise or the cellular folks were doing, and so the company frittered away the huge synergies that could have been gained by making all fiber available to all business units. We’ve seen attempts at the big ISPs to make the kind of consolidation Verizon is doing, but if they aren’t careful, in time they’ll slip back to the old bad practices.

No Emphasis on Being Good Corporate Citizens. I worked at Southwestern Bell pre-divestiture. There were some negative sides from being a giant monopoly,  but the company also put a lot of effort into instilling the message internally that the company had a nationwide mandate to do a good job. The company constantly extolled its accomplishments to employees and effectively indoctrinated them into being good citizens. I happened to sit close to the person who took ‘executive’ complaints – complaints from customers that had escalated to upper management. The company made a legitimate effort to deal with every problem that made it that high in the company. Employees were rewarded for loyalty and good behavior with lifetime jobs – phone company people were joked to have bell-shaped heads.

Big ISPs no longer promise jobs for life and working at a big ISP today is just a job. I know a mountain of people who currently work for the big ISPs and none of them have that same esprit de corps that was normal at Ma Bell.

Quarterly Profit-Driven. A lot of the problems I see from the big ISPs come from the modern emphasis on quarterly earnings. This emphasis permeates down into the ranks of management at an ISP. For example, a department head might decide to not make a major repair or upgrade if it causes a blip in the department’s budget. The constant drive for quarterly earnings improvements drives ISPs to lay-off needed technicians to meet an earnings goal. It drives companies to raise rates even when they haven’t increased costs. It makes companies chase new shiny ideas like 5G even if the technology is half-baked and premature. Unfortunately, Wall Street matters more than both employees and customers – and it shows.