Chorus /NTL admit they are crap

Sponge Bob

UPC Ireland increases staff as difficult rebranding efforts gather pace

http://www.tribune.ie/article.tvt?_scope=Tribune/Business/Technology&id=74701&SUBCAT=Tribune/Business

UPC IRELAND, the cable company incorporating NTL and Chorus, is hiring up to 140 new staff across all divisions . Dunn admits the next hurdle is improving UPC's customer service responses, and €10m has been earmarked for a new customer care centre.

The next step for a normal company but a "Hurdle" for Chorus who have never ever 'cared' for customers.

PauloMN

It's a start, isn't it?

I'd be much more concerned if they said "Customer service problems? What problems?".

Sponge Bob

He has been in charge of Chorus for years and now he realises the problem :eek:


Yeah!

christophicus

I could have sworn they said something similar 3 or 4 months ago.

watty

But if the Network is really good you don't need many Customer Care. Are they falling into IBB trap of spending money on ogoing compaints instead of "once off" on Infrastructure, or are they doing both?

Jumpy

Sponge Bob wrote:

He has been in charge of Chorus for years and now he realises the problem :eek:


Yeah!

Heh, did you used to work for them Sponge Bob? There seems an almighty chip on the shoulder there.

DingDong

watty wrote:

But if the Network is really good you don't need many Customer Care. Are they falling into IBB trap of spending money on ogoing compaints instead of "once off" on Infrastructure, or are they doing both?

There spending money on both, but mainly on replacing the network.

Solair

Well, to be fair to Chorus, it had big plans. They merged a number of cable companies (Cork/Irish Multichannel + CMI) and the various MMDS operations into a single unit and had various grand plans to roll out a seriously good digital products. However, they were never able to raise the capital to actually complete any of these projects. E.g. in Cork they layed loads of fiber optics and ducts, but never actually got around to using any of them!

The dot.com bubble burst, their shareholders weren't prepared to cough up the funds needed to invest in the network and the result was that the service stumbled along running on a shoe string. Chorus MMDS never got fully digitalised, the cable networks were falling apart and had a pathetic channel line up on digital which was just a mirror of MMDS.
Their internet and telephony products were put on indefinite hold.

To make matters worse, Sky Digital launched and then it re-launched with RTE, BBC etc and that really took a huge bite out of their potential market.

As the network and infrastructure was so weak, many customers would regularly have problems, this caused a major customer service nightmare where by their call centres were (and still are) over-loaded with calls. Fault repair times were too long, crews totally over-stretched etc etc

NTL Ireland had similar, but less dramatic problems. Mainly because their cable networks were in a slightly better state of repair when they bought them. However, they too didn't invest in anything like the kinds of products that they were promising. NTL UK seemed to be uninterested in actually putting money into the network. So, again there was no triple play services, or at least only a few experimental highly limited roll outs.

UPC are spending really large amounts of money on upgrading the infrastructure and that will improve things a lot and will mean that the customer service people aren't doing an impossible task and dealing with really frustrated and angry customers all day.

If UPC are going to make money here, they know they're really going to have to take on eircom in the broadband and telephony market place. That's where the money's made.

Also, they need a product that's able to really compete with Sky digital, not a half-assed basic digital cable platform that's missing all of sky's attractive features.

Give them a chance to get things sorted. It's going to take a while, but they at least do seem to be analysing the market and realising that their company does have issues to address. Chorus lived in a state of denial and constant PR firefighting i.e. stumbling from one embarasing Joe Duffy show to the next.

UPC have basically purchased a pair of companies with a lot of unfulfilled potential. The cable infrastructure here is very extensive from an international perspective and passes a hell of a lot of homes. So, like eircom, they have a direct wire into most homes, certainly in urban areas.
Once they start leveraging that, you'll start to see a sea change in telecommunication in Ireland.

Good quality cable internet and telephony has been the missing link in the Irish market for a long time. Cable internet has driven the speed and price of broadband in most other markets, DSL usually plays catch up. Here we're utterly dependent on DSL and slower Wireless services and eircom has had a comfortable monopoly on fixed line telephony access networks.

The UPC inroads have been spectacular - UPC is already Ireland's second largest provider of broadband internet connections! And it's pretty much gone from a situation where it was an insignificant player, to a major one in a matter of months. So, watch this space!

So, anyway - less of the pessimism and fingers crossed that UPC actually pull this off!

boomerang

Wow Solair - great post! So informative!

Really puts the history of Chorus/NTL in a nutshell.

I have great hopes for Chorus/NTL now that UPC Ireland are in the driving seat. I know that the most important thing for them right now is to upgrade and harmonise their combined networks. But I really hope they'll put as much and time effort into getting their customer service ethos right... That seems to have been the missing ingredient up to now.

conax

I was never a huge fan of Chorus, but they recently appear to be on the right track with their network. In Cork they have optic fiber running to and operating on nearly all of their nodes, their cable broadband appears to be working relatively well, VOIP is on the way the analogue set top boxes are all but gone and the new DVR set top box is due for release before the new year.
Having said that their MDS service is poor,customer services absolutely stink, their billing service is even worse.