Ellen Filipiak, as those of you reading this blog probably know already, is the Senior Vice President of Customer Care for DirecTV. Way back when, I had a series of REALLY bad problems with DirecTV that drove me to fight my way through the company - at the time a nightmare unto itself. I wasn't looking for money or free services as compensation for my problems, just a conversation. The team that reported to the President of the company (not sure what their status is now) was absolutely HORRIBLE in how they handled my calls and demand for a conversation. Not only that, they sent my blog entries to Public Relations, rather than some high level of customer service!! Well, eventually, Ellen and I spoke and she agreed to the blog entries and has proven to be a trooper - making sure, good or bad, every two months, there is a blog entry. In fact, her blogging on the site and my original battle has created some buzz over time. For example, a thread at DBSTalk back in February of this year about this whole thing. One day, a few months ago, I don't remember when exactly and feel too lazy to go to Feedburner to find out, my greatest page view count for a day ever came when some DirecTV site (anti- I think) found her entries and had its members reading it (thousands that day). Some of her posts have been bad, some good, this one is probably the best to date. It hasn't been written by marketing, and legal doesn't seem to have an involvement in it and she seems to be writing honestly, though of course, from the standpoint of DirecTV - but that is her job. What they are doing is interesting and actually might be positive. I'd like to think I had some effect on this, but I don't really. I think that the social customer has had all the effect - of which, in this case I am only one. But DirecTV is being forced by the weight of the social changes going on around us all to make changes and respond differently than they could ever have expected to. We'll see how they do. One thing they still need to do is reduce the price of Sunday Ticket. Its INSANELY high, but that not's a fundamental problem. I buy the Extra Innings package each year because, hey, baseball plays 162 games so I can get the Yankees and thousands of other games. But the NFL plays 16 and the playoffs. DirecTV is overpricing because they are playing on male fanaticism for football. Bad move. Not fundamental. But still bad. Bring down the price.
Read Ellen's entry and let me (and her) know what you think. I think, best yet, but a long way to go for the company. Long way. But progress is there.
"When I first started posting here last year I was brand new to DIRECTV and still trying to get my arms around our business. Since then I've learned a great deal about what it is DIRECTV customers expect and what we can do to meet and exceed those expectations.
While we have made progress towards meeting and exceeding those expectations, there are still significant challenges ahead that we must address head on. I have set the stage for this in the last year, adding new ways of listening to and gathering information from our customers. There was a time when all of our feedback came through our call centers, but with our operations spread out over multiple locations it was difficult to pull all of this information together in a timely manner. Over the last several months we've not only expanded our view to include forums, Twitter and blogs like this one, we also implemented new tools to help us gather and analyze customer feedback in near real time.
The changes to the way we gather information has helped us to better identify our customer's primary pain points and make the necessary changes to our business to eliminate them. Some of these changes have already been discussed here, like reducing transfers and improving agent education and some have been introduced directly to customers. We recently began rewarding long time customers with savings on programming and equipment and giving our long standing customers new ways to send feedback to us about all areas of our business. Since late August we've received feedback from more than 25,000 customers and we're using their insights to promote changes to the overall customer experience.
Another area that we have been paying close attention to is home services. Historically our installations and service calls have been handled by contractors and as we reviewed feedback we heard from customers who were frustrated with the process of dealing with a third party. While we work hard to make sure that all of our partners can uphold the high standards that our customers have come to expect, we know that there can sometimes be a disconnect between what the customer expects and what a contractor can provide. To improve this part of the customer experience we have assumed control of a number of home service contractors which allows us to control the home service process from beginning to end.
While we've seen some noticeable benefits from the changes we've implemented so far we realize that we still have a significant amount of work to do. We're still focused on improving customer support across all areas of our business and these new ways of gathering information and listening to customers are helping us do that. I feel that DIRECTV is committed to providing the best customer service experience by better fulfilling on our promises to customers in all aspects of the business before our customers need to contact us. Ultimately our customers will have the final word on this issue and it's their respect we must earn with each interaction."
So have big corporations in general become "aware" of social media's ability to affect their brand? DirectTV appears to be acting our of self preservation in the face of some potentially negative "PR"...
Posted by: Craig Klein | October 06, 2008 at 10:47 PM