Paid television is increasingly becoming a service that many households will either find it convenient to have or necessary to have. Many paid television services operate around the world without a glitch. They are at the forefront of using technology to serve their customers better. They create a profitable business while providing their customers with engaging entertainment services.
Most often than not these customers are taken good care of by the established customer care departments. There will be exceptions when these services fail. What if the services are hampered by a badly introduced technology that is either too immature for the market or causes more harm than good? How should service be modified to handle that?
It is not the intention of this blog to single out a service provider for such a scrutiny, but an untested product introduced to the market offered as the latest and greatest may soon meet its end if not serviced properly.
A shocker of a product:
- Most paid television service providers will have their own set up boxes to encrypt and decrypt the services provided to their customers. These set up boxes have a range of capabilities including the basic capability of recording a program, scheduling a recording and managing the recordings for later on viewing.
- A setup box of such basic capabilities when expanded to provide more services in terms of the number of channels that can be recorded simultaneously; increased capacity of the storage to retain the programs for a longer time; and, a better access to the recordings should perform to its expectations.
- This newly introduced setup box was plagued with issues. It soon became apparent that the box cannot deliver what has been promised. The service provider resorted to keeping the product in the market while using its broad customer base as a test base for this new product.
- When it has become apparent that recordings were either lost or not recorded, or, have problems in viewing them later on, the first thing to do is to pull the box out of the service when it cannot even match its predecessor in the basic functions, let alone providing a greater customer experience.
- Service provider offered to replace the box with a newer box sometimes claiming that the hardware unit is not matching up with the enhanced software capabilities, and, some other times claiming that software has a bug that needs upgrading.
- Software upgrade interruptions caused minimal interruptions to the viewing pleasure, losing a part of the recordings from the recorded programs when the upgrades were sent down the line. However, these updates were so frequent, almost every other day the recorded programs had partial recordings with either a power loss message or an entitlement loss message.
- Hardware upgrades were actually entire box replacements, and customers lost the recorded programs in their entirety as the service provider did not have a capability to transfer the programs across to the replacement box. They to had to hide behind the regulatory compliance quoting that the broadcaster’s content rights have to be honored.
- These two issues took the customers, who embraced the newer technology for a better experience, into a nightmarish experience of dealing with customer care department, often hours over the phone, and, to explain the same issues that they are having with the newer setup boxes, repeatedly.
What is wrong with this service and how could it be made different”
- A very simple offering of a second box on the account to continue the recording on the replacement box while the customer can finish viewing the program on the older box would have lessened the frustrations created by being not able to view the recorded programs.
- While catch up services were possible for the channels that are not free-to-air, a recording service that records the same programs in the cloud that customers can access would have lessened the impact of the issues created by software and hardware upgrades.
- Changing the existing contract where customers have been locked up on a 12-month or a 24-month contract to a month-to-month contract would have given them the option to terminate the contract if the promised resolutions did not materialize within a short period of few weeks or few months.
These are very simple changes if the provider had seen it from the customer’s viewpoint rather than restricting their service capabilities within the technological or regulatory constraints.
It is important to note that hours and hours spent over the phone to resolve an issue would become naturally irritable if the issues repeat and taking away the very customer experience that a provider has promised to deliver. Even the monetary compensations to lessen that impact would only be temporary if the same issues keep resurfacing with upgrades and replacements.
If the provider had done a walkthrough of the impacts on customer experience when technologies fail to deliver, the service options would have proved falling well short of customer expectations (created by the provider) to realize that their services should increase in its capability beyond the current capabilities. Having gone through 5 plus replacements of setup boxes within a year, having gone through the bitter experience of losing hours of recording with no recourse to retrieving them or watching them, having gone through hours on phone with technical to deal with technical issues and customer care with replacement options, you can imagine the frustration levels of customers experiencing what a new setup box had been promised to offer but could not.
Service is invisible, but matters.