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Is Time Warner Cable Blowing Smoke?

by Ryan Shell on January 6, 2010

old tvIn a moment you are going to read three words; after reading them I’d like you to scroll to the bottom of this post and immediately type the first thing that comes to mind.

Are you ready? Here goes nothing.

Time Warner Cable.

Ok, now go write your thought in the comments section.

While watching TV recently I’ve noticed a new Time Warner ad campaign that highlights employees (mostly customer service) and how their goal is to help customers. The spots themselves have a bit of a warm and fuzzy feel…

After seeing several of the spots I thought to myself, “This is a lost cause and a waste of money.” Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel pretty strongly that no matter what Time Warner does or says, it’s not going to make people feel like their prices aren’t to high and that their customer service doesn’t stink (of course there are exceptions).

And this isn’t meant to be a bash Time Warner post at all.

My point is that there are times that a company needs to sit down and really think about the message they want to get across, but more importantly, ask themselves if people are going to accept the message. Call it a BS (that stands for blowing smoke right?) meter if you will.

In my opinion, a better route for Time Warner would be for them to highlight their services and attempt to add value to what they deliver.

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About the Author

Marketing & PR pro. Social media user, cyclist, inline speed skater, volunteer, blogger, public speaker. Founded Fashables. Work at Ketchum. And I’m goofy.

Tagged as: time warner cable

  • Ryan

    I think a better approach would be the Domino’s method you highlighted last week… admit the problems that exist and explain how they’re being addressed.

    I can’t personally find the words to express my hatred for TWC – their customer service is simply attrocious (when you can actually get someone on the phone without holding for 3 days). Beyond the CS side, they need to address the weaknesses in their infrastructure if they’re going to keep raising rates every year.

    In the Triad it really bothers me that we don’t have any competition for them yet. AT&T has moved into Raleigh with their U-Verse service and hopefully it will put some competitive pressure on TWC to step up their game. I can only hope our area is next in line.

    /rant

  • http://www.palmettocoop.com Mark Curran

    OK. I’ll play. I have been sucked into their “bundled” services for home phone (yeah I still have one, don’t ask me why.), road runner internet and the HD Cable tier. I scream every month when I get their bill, because I want to know where my huge savings are. The only reason I don’t switch is because the other options (AT&T, Dish network, etc.) are no better. I love to hate Time Warner Cable!

  • Matt Clark

    Necessary evil is my first thought. I don’t want a dish or to buy my own equipment and in order to do this, I am stuck with TWC. I have them for cable and internet and I love the internet service, though it is a tad overpriced, but it’s ridiculous what we pay for cable television. I haven’t experienced their phone service, but I hear it is skittish at best…

  • jwg

    I guess I’m the exception here. I use business class internet service and have very few problems. When I do, a call to national support gets it straightened out quickly. The biggest issue I had was several years ago when the chinese were scanning networks and the modem kept resetting. It took a few days and some detective work to prove the problem.

    I recently switched to the Digital phone (for the home line) and am pleased with the qality of the service. I just wish that they offered detailed call billing like VoicePulse (the other line). I don’t think that we’ve had any outages in 7 mos.

    As far as television service goes, the biggest gripe (other than price) I have is that the set top boxes do not have enough horsepower to run the new software. Again, whenever I’ve had an issue, I can usually get it resolved in a few minutes. For example, this past Sat. we purchased an on demand HD movie. The sound kept dropping out (I suspect that it’s a box or bandwidth issue), so around 9:00 pm I called customer service. A very nice lady gave a refund for the purchase & offered to have a technician out Monday morning. We wound up watching the non-HD version (which had no issues) and I declined the service call.

  • http://brendabowers.wordpress.com Brenda Bowers

    Competition! We just don’t get what we are forced to pay for from Time Warner Cable. I live in an apartment and am where I can not get a satellite service so am stuck with TWC. We have two TVs but the second TV doesn’t get all the channels and all TWC tells us is “too bad”, but we continue to pay extra every month for the second TV.

    I do like Road Runner but think it is overpriced and have often thought about checking out some other Internet provider. Then get lazy and that is the end of my effort. BB

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