Tag Archives: customer churn

Another Comcast Bundle

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.

Speed Matters

slow-downPark Associates just published the results of a survey that looks at why consumers switch broadband providers. The survey showed that 9% of households changed broadband providers last year. The company surveyed households that had changed and categorized their responses into seven categories.

It turns out that the number one reason that people changed providers was to get faster speeds and 35% of households listed the need for faster speeds as their primary motivation.

Of course, there are still households that care about price. 18% of households that changed broadband providers did so because they could buy comparable speeds at a lower price. But almost nobody changed providers to accept a slower speeds, even with a savings.

The survey results are backed-up by real world statistics. In most markets in the US today there is still duopoly competition between the cable company and the phone company, with the cable company generally having faster speeds. There has been a steady exodus for years from phone company DSL to cable modems and in 2015 alone the cable companies added 3 million new customers, while DSL continued to decline.

There is a lesson to be learned from these statistics. While the news is full of talk of gigabit fiber networks, not all fiber networks offer blazingly fast speeds. I know of a number of owners of fiber networks that offer speeds that are not much faster than the cable modem products they compete against. Those networks are not capitalizing on their technological advantage.

One thing that most of my clients have learned over the years is that increasing customer speeds doesn’t cost them very much. I’ve followed up on hundreds of network speed increases and almost universally ISPs report that customers use the Internet the same after a speed increase than before – but customers always say they love the faster speeds. And so, to the extent that faster speeds don’t cost much to implement, a fiber owner ought to always have speeds faster than their cable competitors – why would you not?

One issue that continues to confound customers is the different between advertised speeds and actual speeds. I have one client whose basic product on fiber is 30 Mbps and they deliver that speed very solidly all of the time. They are competing against a cable modem product advertised as ‘up to 60 Mbps’. And yet, in that market, the fiber product is demonstrably faster than the cable modem product. But this advertising discrepancy creates confusion in the minds of consumers.

There might be some help coming in this area since the FCC will soon be requiring the large broadband providers to disclose more information to customers about their broadband products. But I guess we’ll have to wait to see how truthful they really become.

My company conducts surveys and one thing we’ve found is that that only a small percentage of consumers actually know the speed they are supposed to be getting or the speed they are actually getting. But what they do understand is when their speed is not fast enough to do what they are trying to do.

We know that overall that the amount of data used by the average household has been doubling about every three years. What that means is that people will buy a data product and within a relatively short number of years they will start bumping against that speed and realize they need something faster.

I think the cable companies understand this issue. Comcast has upped speeds across the boards for data customers at least twice this decade that I can recall. Increasing speeds periodically stops customers from hitting their speed ceiling and keeps them happy with the product they have. If you are operating a network that can provide faster speeds you should be increasing speeds from time to time also. You don’t want many of your customers to be in the 9% looking for a new broadband provider.