Category Archives: What Customers Want

WiFi is the Problem

TechSee advertises itself as the world’s leading visual agentic AI platform. The company conducted a nationwide survey of  3,790 people that asked about real-world experiences and expectations around home WiFi performance. I think every ISP I know could have predicted the gist of the responses, but I think ISPs might be surprised at the percentage of people who are unhappy with WiFi.

The following are some of the most interesting responses to the survey:

  • WiFi problems are rampant. 68% of households had a problem with WiFi in the past year. 18% of customers experience problems daily.
  • Coverage issues within homes are a problem. 76% of respondents have problems with connectivity in some parts of their house.
  • Getting help is a challenge. Over half of homes try to fix problems themselves and 62% of them are able to make performance better. Two-thirds of homes have contacted their ISP about connectivity issues in the last year. 39% of those had a technician visit the home, and 20% of the technician visits did not fix the issue.
  • Customers expect their ISP to be proactive. Three-fourths of respondents want the ISP to test WiFi coverage in every room as part of the installation. 56% are willing to spend extra for more equipment if they can see that it solves coverage gaps.
  • Over half of homes have more than six devices connected to WiFi at any given time. The more devices connected, the higher the reported WiFi coverage problems.
  • Nearly half of homes have a router that is over three years old, with only 29% upgrading in the last two years.
  • Many ISPs market whole-home WiFi solutions. Surprisingly, customers of these packages have more problems than average.

What does all of this mean for ISPs? About one-third of customers are willing to pay extra for better WiFi performance, but if they pay extra, they expect coverage where they need it. The survey result that should concern ISPs is that nearly half of the people surveyed would switch ISPs to get better WiFi coverage and performance.

There is obviously a big gap between what ISPs promise for WiFi and what they deliver. Every ISP I know tells me that WiFi is their bane and the source of a majority of their customer complaints and unhappiness. Yet a lot of ISPs don’t have a truly premium WiFi service.

I’ve done a lot of customer surveys over the years, and I’m not sure that many ISPs fully grasp that many customers believe that WiFi is the direct signal from the ISP. Many customers use the term WiFi to refer to their broadband. This means they blame every WiFi quirk and weakness on the ISP.

I know a few ISPs that do this right. It’s not cheap to do it right, which means technician time with customers, but here is how the ISPs that do this well handle WiFi:

  • They do the full house sweep at installation and recommend a solution to improve WiFi. That might mean a better location for the primary WiFi router or installing WiFi extenders. They don’t leave an installation until WiFi is maximized. It means being honest about the parts of the home with the strongest and weakest coverage.
  • These ISPs help customers install new devices on the WiFi network if requested. This can be done remotely and lets them make sure the device is working right, and let a customer know if any problems are due to a device and not the WiFi network.
  • Some ISPs monitor WiFi usage and will contact a customer if performance degrades.
  • ISPs that charge a premium monthly WiFi fee are willing to visit customers to rebalance the network if the need arises.

Taking these steps can justify charging a significant monthly fee for premium or concierge service. Too many ISPs charge extra for nothing more than a one-time installation of WiFi extenders. Customers don’t view this as a premium service if WiFi still doesn’t work well.

This seems like an obvious service to offer if 68% of customers have WiFi problems. It’s particularly important if half of your customers are willing to change ISPs due to poor WiFi performance.

Our Attachment to the Cellphone

Here on a holiday I’m posting a more light-hearted blog, but one that shows the degree to which people have become attached to their cellphone.

D30, a manufacturer of hard cases for cellphones, conducted a survey across the U.S. and the U.K. asking about how people feel about their cellphone. Some of the questions were silly, but the responses demonstrate how important cellphones have become to people.

Here are the responses to the survey listed in the press release of the survey:

  • 58% of respondents would dive fully clothed into a pool at a wedding to retrieve a cellphone.
  • 56% would climb into a dumpster
  • 54% would retrieve a dropped phone from a festival toilet.
  • 51% would miss an international flight to retrieve a phone.
  • 38% of respondents would skip food for an entire day to keep their phone safe. (Would that mean somebody is holding their phone hostage?)
  • In perhaps the most intense response, one in five people would climb onto subway tracks to retrieve a dropped phone.

In the survey, people described what losing a cellphone would mean to them:

  • 25% said breaking or losing their phone would be more upsetting than crashing a car or losing their child in a supermarket. (That last comment makes me fear for parenting).
  • Nearly a third of respondents have cried when they lost their phone.
  • 38% would rather lose their wallet than their phone.
  • 74% said a broken phone leaves them anxious and frustrated.

As a counterbalance to a story of people being attached to their phones, I’ve been reading a number of articles in the last week that describe the experience in schools that have banned student cellphones during the school day. Students and parents were upset at first, but within a month, most had grown happy with the change. Not having phones meant that students have to actually talk to each other. Lunch rooms are again full of student interaction instead of everybody staring at screens.

I’ve never lost my phone in a terrible place, but the survey does make me wonder if I would retrieve my phone from a festival toilet. There is a huge chance that I wouldn’t have my phone at a festival, but if I did, I might retrieve it – after reading this survey, I can see it would make a good story.

The Human Touch

Recently, Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath wrote to customers saying that Verizon customer service has “taken a different path” and the company is raising the bar on the customer service experience. This sounds a lot like communications with customers I’ve seen over the years from all of the big ISPs – I can think of dozens of company messages telling customers that a big ISP cares about customer service.

What’s different about Mr. Sampath’s email is that he also included an email address where customers can contact him directly if they are having a problem that is not getting resolved. I have to assume this will use a different email address from the one he uses for normal emails, because it seems likely that his inbox will quickly fill with customer complaints.

This reminded me of an experience I had back in the early 1980s when I worked at Southwestern Bell. The company had an executive telephone hotline that was supposedly a direct line to the President for customers who knew the special number. Calls to this number were recorded and landed on the desk of somebody who happened to sit close to me. I would often overhear some of the complaints that came to the executive line, and they were the normal things you would expect – overbilling, botched installations, etc. Employees around the company responded quickly to every referral from the executive hotline.

I have to think that Mr. Sampath is doing something similar and has recreated the executive hotline using an email address. If Verizon customer service is indeed getting better, I assume anybody who makes a valid claim to that email will get some attention from elsewhere in Verizon. If that doesn’t happen, this will quickly be chalked up as another big company public relations ploy rather than an actual aid for frustrated customers.

I have to wonder how well this idea will work with such a gigantic company with coast-to-coast customers. I know at Southwestern Bell that no employee wanted to get the internal message from the executive suite that they had messed up. Will that work for a much bigger company?

People who run smaller ISPs, or other small businesses that deal with the public, will laugh at this article, because fielding customer issues is a daily part of every executive’s work day. It’s something that nobody loves doing, but it comes with operating a business. Every ISP hopes that employees can satisfy every customer so that the top guys never hear about problems. But the folks at Southwestern Bell many years ago figured out that there had to be a way for customers who aren’t satisfied with the routine solution to have an outlet to be heard.

This story has me thinking about how important the human touch is with customers – having a real person to talk to who can solve a problem. That question was prompted for me when I noticed that Verizon is touting that it has incorporated AI into the customer service process. I have to wonder if AI will be used to tackle problems sent to Mr Sampath’s email.

While big companies can pretend otherwise, we have not yet reached the time when an AI can provide the same quality response as a real person. My gut tells me that it will be a huge mistake for the big ISPs and carriers to take the human touch out of customer interactions. If so, that’s good news for the smaller companies that compete with big ISPs. I foresee that small ISP advertising will emphasize that customers can always talk to a real person.

 

Do You Require Binding Arbitration?

Cory Doctorow recently wrote an interesting blog about binding arbitration. In recent years, binding arbitration has become common and is routinely used by companies to stop unhappy customers from suing them.

Binding arbitration seems like a sensible path to choose between two companies doing business. I’ve assisted in several binding arbitration complaints between carriers, and it’s faster, more efficient, and less costly for companies than wading into the court system.

But corporations have gone overboard and now routinely include a binding arbitration clause in non-negotiable agreements with customers. I don’t know anybody who thinks they have any choice when required to sign an online Term of Service. It’s hard to call these documents a contract because they are not negotiable – we either sign the online agreement, or we can’t use the online service.

The main purpose of binding arbitration in these kinds of one-sided agreements is to eliminate class-action lawsuits. Corporations know that customers are not going to take them to court over a small claim, but they fear large groups of customers acting together in a class-action lawsuit. In most cases, a customer ‘signing’ an online Terms of Service gives up their rights to take part in class-action suits. The arbitration clause generally makes it clear that arbitration is the only way to settle disputes.

Doctorow’s blog talks about how the use of mandatory arbitration has started to boomerang on big companies. Over 100,000 unhappy customers have asked for arbitration with Intuit. The company has been running a bait-and-switch free tax form service that never worked but which instead led people to expensive tax solutions. Intuit offered $40 million to customers to settle the issue, but Judge Charles Breyer of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California told Intuit that it had to stick with arbitration since that was the only solution offered to customers. This means Intuit must foot the bill for the individual arbitration complaints – a process that could cost it over $175 million.

Reading this blog sent me to look at the big ISPs in our industry. Sure enough, every big ISP I looked at had binding arbitration in its customer Terms of Service. A few had an interesting twist. AT&T says that binding arbitration must be used to settle all disputes other than bodily injury or death. Comcast gives customers 30 days to opt out of binding arbitration by writing a letter to its corporate attorneys in Philadelphia. But all of the big ISPs are obviously worried about big class-action lawsuits.

I wonder how many smaller ISPs require binding arbitration. It’s something I’ve never recommended to my clients because I think one of the things that distinguish small ISPs from the big guys is a willingness to make things work. A binding arbitration clause says to customers, “Talk to my lawyers and not to me”. A small ISP is doing something wrong if a dispute with a customer ends up in an arbitration dispute or in a court.

If your Terms of Service require arbitration, you ought to reconsider. I can’t think of a single reason why a small ISP should hide behind a legal trick instead of talking to customers when there is a problem.

Being Stingy with Broadband Speeds

I’ve never understood ISPs that build fiber networks and then sell small-bandwidth products. The fiber technologies in place today can easily provide gigabit speeds to every customer without straining the network. The cost of providing 10-gigabit electronics keeps dropping and is now only a few hundred dollars extra per customer. Why would a fiber-based ISP have speed tiers that provide 50 Mbps?

I’ve found that it’s not unusual for an ISP with a low-bandwidth product on fiber to also charge a lot for gigabit bandwidth. There are a number of ISPs that charge $150 to $200 for a residential gigabit bandwidth product.

Bandwidth pricing philosophies differ around the industry. There are ISPs like Google Fiber, and Ting that only offer gigabit broadband. These ISPs are declaring that their fiber is a faster technology and they are marketing based upon that technology advantage.

The big ISPs in the country have trained the public that extra bandwidth is expensive. The cellular companies are the king at this game and will sell an extra gigabyte of usage for as much as $10. The big ISPs like Comcast and AT&T charge a lot for any customer that exceeds an arbitrary data cap. These pricing philosophies make a lot of money for the big ISPs, but this pricing conveys the false message that extra customer usage drives up costs for an ISP, and that customers that use more data ought to pay more.

Anybody who understands how ISPs operate realizes that there is little or no incremental cost for a given customer to use more bandwidth. It seems counterintuitive, but a household that uses a terabyte of download for a month doesn’t cost the ISP any more than the customer that uses 200 gigabytes per month – all due to the way that ISPs pay for wholesale broadband. ISPs buy enough bandwidth to satisfy the busiest hour of the day – and the rest of the day a lot of the bandwidth sits unused. There was zero incremental cost to ISPs for wholesale broadband when their customers started downloading and uploading a lot more data during the daytime due to COVID-19 – because the daytime usage still didn’t exceed the evening busy hour.

An argument can be made that faster speeds are more efficient for an ISP.  Consider the difference between two customers that each download a 1-gigabyte data file. A customer with a 50 Mbps product is using the network, and potentially interfering with other traffic for twenty times longer than the customer with a gigabit bandwidth product. Faster speeds reduce collisions between data streams, and a fiber network with fast customer speeds is significantly more efficient than one with slower speeds.

This is not to say that I’m advocating that ISPs should sell only the gigabit product since that is the most efficient use of a network. I think ISPs with only a gigabit product are leaving revenues on the table – unless the product is priced low enough to be affordable for everybody. I think companies that only a gigabit product at $70 or $80 are pricing out of the financial reach of many homes.

I get to peek behind the curtain of a lot of ISPs, and I know that an ISP with a smart tier of products can have more customers and more revenues than the ISP with only one product. I’m positive that an ISP with a $60, a $70, and an $80 product will do better than an ISP with only a $70 gigabit product.

The COVID-19 pandemic has finally forced the industry to confront broadband affordability. Even in markets where there is fast broadband available, we found out during the pandemic that there are a lot of homes without broadband for students because their parents can’t afford it. ISPs have not cared much about the homes that can’t afford broadband – and in most markets, that’s anywhere from 10% to 40% of the market. ISPs have been happy selling expensive broadband to those that can afford their prices and have given little thought to those that can’t.

I am truly puzzled why ISPs with fiber networks have broadband products between 25 Mbps and 75 Mbps. That’s like buying a race car and driving it on the freeway at 25 miles per hour. A cable company is not afraid of a competitor that wants to fight the market battle at speeds the cable company can match. The cable companies are afraid of ISPs of affordable symmetrical data products they can’t match.

Customers Still Flock to Promotional Rates

FierceVideo and others recently reported on a survey done in June by the research firm Cowen that looked at consumer use of promotional rates.

Cowen found that 20% of big ISP subscribers are on Internet plans that have promotional rates that will expire within the next 12 months. Another 13% of subscribers are on promotional plans that will expire in a time frame longer than 12 months. Surprisingly, 10% of subscribers have price-for-life guarantees. This leaves just 57% of subscribers paying full price for ISP services.

Promotional pricing is a sensitive topic for the industry and none of the big cable companies or telcos disclose the volume or amounts of discounts they give to customers. The big ISPs are all under a lot of pressure from Wall Street, and one of the key metrics used by analysts to track the big companies is ARPU – average revenue per user. ISPs have hard decisions to make. Giving too many discounts can kill ARPU, but not offering discounts can lose customers and revenues.

Some big ISPs have been working to curtail promotional pricing. AT&T has lost nearly three million video customers in the last year and claims that the losses mostly are due to tightening the promotional pricing that was given in the past by DirecTV. It’s also been reported that Charter has been tightening its policies on promotional prices, and in particular was ending a huge volume of promotional pricing they inherited through the acquisition of Time Warner Cable.

The Cowen report highlighted the difference in discount philosophy varies by ISP. For example, the report said that 45% of Altice customers have a promotional package, Comcast has 42%, and Charter is at 32%.

The big ISPs dole out promotional discounts in a few different ways. All of the incumbent ISPs offer low prices on the web to attract new customers. These new customer discounts generally last for 12 to 24 months before customers are moved to normal pricing. The other big category of promotional discounts is discounts that are negotiated with customers, often when customers threaten to leave an ISP.

The Cowen study confirmed something that we’ve always seen in the market. The promotional prices tend to go to younger subscribers, and older customers tend to pay full price for services. It takes real effort to either change ISPs or to renegotiate pricing every year or two, and only consumers willing to go through that hassle end up with a repetitive series of promotional deals.

The statistic that surprised me was that 10% of respondents in the survey said they had lifetime rates. ISPs have been somewhat leery of using the ‘lifetime rate’ words, but over the years as ISPs increased speeds and prices on their networks they have often allowed customers to stick with slower and less expensive broadband – generally with the caveat that a customer with a grandfathered plan can make no changes without being moved to newer pricing. In my mind, there is a significant difference between grandfathering an existing plan that offers slower speeds than other customers compared to new lifetime sales promotions that offer such deals to new customers. One of the biggest advantages to the ISPs of grandfathered plans is that customers keep these plans for years, meaning no churn.

Small ISPs struggle with promotional rates. Some small ISPs that still offer video offer guaranteed bundled rates for customers who buy cable TV. But I know a number of small ISPs that have ceased offering bundled discounts since the margins on cable TV are too small to afford them.

Small ISPs also generally don’t like the hassle of always having to negotiate rates with customers seeking a discount. Negotiating with customers changes the culture in a call center and adds a lot of pressure to customer service reps – and is probably the number one reason why the public dislikes big ISP customer service.

Many small ISPs have also given up on the idea of having residential service contracts. It’s a major pain to collect from somebody who breaks a contract and drops service. Most of the small ISPs I know feel that their quality of service is superior to the competition and they don’t want to fight to keep unhappy customers.

Say No to Data Caps

Last week I had a blog that asked why the FCC is seemingly supporting data caps by allowing caps on broadband built with federal grant money. The FCC has established grants that place premium value on fast broadband speeds and low latency but that ignores one of the most important aspects of broadband today – usability.

A broadband connection that doesn’t let homes partake in the same online world as the rest of America is inferior broadband – and there is no better example of an unusable data plan than one a low data cap. The FCC’s RDOF rules support monthly data caps of 250 gigabytes for plans offering 25/3 or 50/5 Mbps. The FCC is clearly saying to rural America – we’ll give grant money to ISPs to bring you better broadband, but we’re going to let the ISPs cripple that broadband so that they can bill you an extra $50 or $100 per month if you want to use that broadband like everybody else in the country.

Recall that ISPs that win the RDOF grants have six years to build the new networks. How will a 250 GB data caps look by the time these networks are built? OpenVault says that the average home used 274 GB per month in 2018 – already higher than the FCC’s proposed data cap. By the end of 2019 average usage had grown to 344 GB for the average home and exploded to 402 GB by March due to people and students working from home during the pandemic. Trending household usage forward until 2026 would suggest that the average home will be using more than a terabyte of data each month by then. That’s not a big stretch since more than 10% of homes are already using a terabyte or more of data today.

The FCC is not the only one to point a finger at. There are plenty of state broadband programs that have awarded grants to ISPs that have data caps. This has happened because policymakers have not viewed data caps as providing inferior broadband. This is easy to understand since just a few years the vast majority of homes used a lot less broadband than the data caps. You might recall in 2015 when there was big public pushback when Comcast tried to introduce a 300 GB data cap. At that time, Comcast said that only a tiny number of customers used more data than 300 GB per month – but in five short years, the national average data usage is significantly higher than the cap Comcast wanted to impose in 2019.

We need a new policy at the state and federal level that says that ISPs with data caps are not welcome to broadband grant funding. Not only should they not be able to impose data caps on grant-funded networks – an ISP that has routine data caps for others should be prohibited from participating in any grant funding anywhere.

There are still ISPs that say that data caps help to protect the integrity of their network. This argument went out the door when most ISPs stopped billing for data caps during the pandemic – the one time when protecting the network would have been important.

What hasn’t been said enough is that a broadband connection with a data cap is an inferior broadband connection. A home with data caps faces the monthly choice of either curtailing broadband usage or else spending a lot more for broadband. Are we going to fix the rural broadband gap by transitioning rural homes with slow broadband connections to ones with tiny data caps that cost a lot more than everybody else in the country?

It’s always been clear that data caps are mostly about greed. There is no better example of this than the AT&T rural hotspot that has a data cap that allows for as much as an extra $200 in monthly fees to a subscriber. It’s outrageous that the FCC gave grant money last year to Viasat which has tiny monthly data caps. The whole proposed 5G Fund is outrageous if billions of federal money will allow the cellular carriers to sell more rural hotspots with tiny data caps and huge monthly fees.

It’s time for broadband policymakers at all levels to categorically say no to data caps. Shame on the FCC for allowing data caps into the discussion of the RDOF grant. But also shame on Congress for not issuing a new telecom bill to stop all of this nonsense. And shame on any state policymaker or regulator who has allowed state resources to be used to support broadband with data caps. It’s time to say no.

Why Homes Don’t Have Broadband

I write all of the time about the rural digital divide – about homes that have no broadband options or that have terrible options such as extremely slow DSL or wireless service. The COVID-19 crisis has reminded us that there are also a lot of homes in cities and towns that don’t have broadband.

John B. Horrigan published a paper earlier this year titled Measuring the Gap that makes the point that the reasons that homes don’t have broadband are complicated. There have been studies over the years that have tried to pin down the primary reason that homes don’t have broadband, but by doing so the studies have glossed over the fact that most homes have multiple reasons for not having broadband.

A good example of this is a Pew Research Center survey in 2019 that explored the issue. In that survey:

  • 50% of respondents said that high prices is a reason for not having broadband, but only 21% said price is the primary reason.
  • 45% of respondents said they relied on smartphones that could do everything they need, but only 23% said that was the primary reason for not buying broadband.
  • 43% said they were able to get access to the Internet from a source outside the home, but only 11% gave that as the primary reason.
  • 45% said that the cost of a computer is too expensive, but only 10% gave that as the primary reason.

As Horrigan points out, sometimes there is bias in the questions being asked in a survey. If the surveyor has pre-conceived ideas about why folks don’t have broadband they will miss some of the reasons. Consider a 2017 survey from the California Emerging Technology Fund. This survey showed different reasons than Pew for why homes don’t have broadband because the survey asked different questions. The survey showed:

  • 69% said the cost of monthly access and of affording a computer or smartphone was too high. 34% listed this as the primary reason for not having broadband.
  • 44% said it was too difficult to set up a computer and to learn how to use broadband, which 12% gave this as the primary reason.
  • 42% said they were concerned about privacy and computer viruses, while 21% gave this as the primary reason for not having broadband.
  • 41% said they had a lack of interest in being online, with 22% giving this as the primary reason for not having broadband.

The results of those two surveys are drastically different because the surveys asked different questions. If a survey doesn’t provide the option to say that privacy is a reason for not having broadband, then that gets missed. People can only respond to the questions asked in a survey as presented to them. For example, there were 12% of respondents in the second survey above that worried about privacy as their primary reason for not having broadband. There had to be people that felt the same way in the Pew survey, but since that question was never asked, respondents were forced to pick from among the choices they were given.

This highlights one of the issues of using surveys to find out why people do certain things. Surveys are best used when measuring what people do. For example, a well-designed survey can make a great and reliable estimate of the number of homes in a community that don’t have a home computer. But it’s a lot tougher to use a survey to find out why homes don’t have computers since there might be dozens of reasons for not having one.

Another issue to consider is that people might not tell a surveyor the truthful answer to a question if they think the response is personal. For example, people don’t like to admit that using a computer is too hard for them or that they are intimidated by technology. Many people are not going to tell a stranger that they can’t figure out how to use a computer. However, those same people might willingly share that they would be more likely to use a computer if they had better training. The manner of asking this sort of question can change the response.

This blog is not meant to bash surveys, because a survey is one of the best tools available for understanding broadband in a market. A survey can quantify how many people use different ISPs and can measure their happiness with the various ISPs already in the market. A survey can provide a decently reliable estimate of the percentage of the community that will consider switching to a new ISP. But surveys are a lot less reliable when they ask people to reveal personal reasons why they do or don’t do something – for the simple reason that people are often unwilling to share their shortcomings and fears with a stranger.

This is something to keep in mind if you want to use a survey to understand broadband in your community. Asking questions about sensitive subjects produce unreliable results. As an example, surveys do a lousy job of predicting what people are willing to pay for broadband. A survey can quantify what somebody would like to pay for broadband, but that is not the same question of what they will pay. I’ve seen surveys convince ISPs to set low broadband rates due to faulty survey questions. It’s somewhat meaningless when somebody who is already paying $75 per month for broadband tells you they would only change to a new ISP that charges $45. Such a respondent is likely somewhat embarrassed to admit they are paying too much for broadband today, and that bias makes their answer unreliable.

Writing good survey questions is an art. I’ve been doing that for twenty years and I still find situations where it’s nearly impossible to get the answers that clients are hoping for when the survey probes into questions that customers don’t necessarily want to answer.

Bad Customer Service as a Profit Center

There was a December article in Fast Company that spelled out what I’ve long suspected – that many big companies have lousy customer service on purpose – they want to make it hard for customers to get refunds or to drop service. The article was written by Anthony Dukes of USC and Yi Zhu of the University of Minnesota. The article is worth reading if you have the time to click through all of the links, which elaborate numerous ways that big companies abuse their customers.

This certainly rings true for the big ISPs. I harken back to the days of AOL, which was famous for making it a challenge to drop their service. Comcast has always had a reputation of making it hard for customers to break a bundle or leave the company for another ISP.

The article cites some interesting statistics. They claim that in 2013 that a study showed that the average home spent 13 hours per year disputing charges with customer service. That’s nearly two workdays of time, and it’s little wonder that people hate to call customer service.

Customer service at the big telcos and cable companies was never great, but in my time in the industry it’s gotten worse – the big ISPs are now rated at the bottom for customer satisfaction among all corporations. I think the big change in the industry came in the last few decades when the big ISPs got enamored with win-back programs – offering customers incentives to stop them from dropping service. Unfortunately, the ISPs tied employee compensation to the percentage of win-backs and there have been numerous articles published of ISP employees who would not let somebody drop service and who would keep a customer on the phone for an hour to convince them not to leave.

ISP customer service also took a downward spin when every call with a customer turned into a sales call trying to sell more services. Unfortunately, these sales efforts seem to result in new revenues, but it’s irksome to customers to have to listen to several sales pitches to accomplish some simple customer service task.

Dukes and Zhu claim that a lot of customer service centers are structured to dissuade customers from dropping service. They say that long hold times are on purpose to get customers to give up. They cite some customer service centers where the people answering the first call from customers have no authority to change a customer’s billing – only customers willing to fight through to talk to a supervisor have a chance at fixing a billing problem. They claim that chatbots are often set up in the same way – they can sound helpful, but they often can’t make any changes.

They also believe that companies are getting sophisticated and use different tactics for different customers. Studies have shown that women get annoyed faster than men in dealing with poor customer service. Research has shown that some demographics, like the elderly, are easier to dissuade from getting a refund.

Smaller ISPs understand the poor customer service from the big ISPs and most of them strive to do better. However, I know of smaller ISPs with aggressive win-back programs or who use every call as a marketing opportunity, and such ISPs have to be careful to not fall into the same bad habits as the big ISPs.

I find it amusing that one of the many reasons cited for breaking up the Bell System was to improve customer service. Regulators thought that smaller regional companies would be nimbler and do a better job of interacting with customers. This turned out not to be true. In fact, I consider my interactions with monopolies to be the easiest. I can’t recall a call I’ve ever had with an electric or water utility that wasn’t completed quickly and efficiently. Perhaps ISPs ought to strive to be more like them.

Our Digital Illiteracy

Pew Research Center recently surveyed 4,272 adults and tested their knowledge of basic computer topics. The results showed that there was a lack of general knowledge about a few of the terms that are important for how people use the Internet.

For example, the survey showed that only 30% of survey takers knew that website starting with https:// means that the information provided over that site is encrypted.

Only 28% of respondents understood the concept of two-factor authentication – something that Google and Microsoft say can eliminate nearly 100% of hacking of a connection.

Only 24% understood the purpose of private browsing.

The respondents fared better on a few topics. For example, two-thirds of respondents understood the danger of phishing, but it’s a bit scary that one out of three users didn’t. 63% understand that cookies allow websites to track user visits and other activities on web sites.

48% of respondents understood the concept of net neutrality – the technology topic that has gotten the most press over the last four years.

A few of the questions were a bit smug. Only 15% of people could identify a picture of Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. I have to admit that this is a question I would also have failed because I don’t much care about the personalities of the people behind web companies – even though I follow the issues involving these companies closely.

It’s probably not surprising that younger users did better on the survey question than older users. It’s still a bit shocking, though that only 1% of survey takers got every question right.

The bottom line of this survey is that the general public probably has a much lower knowledge of the Internet that many web companies and ISPs assume. I think this survey highlights an opportunity for small ISPs to educate customers by passing on safety tips or important knowledge about the web.

ISPs communicate with users on log-in pages, when billing and on their web site. It wouldn’t be hard to add some recurring messages such as. “Did you know that web sites that start with https use an encrypted connection with users and provide for a safer connection?” Experienced web users will blow past such messages, but we know that repeating messages eventually make an impression on most people.

It’s easy for technical folks to assume that the public understands basic concepts about the web – but surveys like this one remind us that’s necessarily true.