Mediacom is dealing with twin PR fires, handling outages in Iowa that impacted a reported 10,000 customers, while also dealing with the fallout of finishing dead-last in a well-publicized customer-satisfaction survey of pay-TV operators.
"We actually had two separate incidents in Iowa this week where commercial trucks have pulled down aerial fiber optic cables," Mediacom's Thomas Larsen told FierceCable. "In both instances, it was fiber that Mediacom leases from Windstream, and their crews made the repairs necessary to restore service. Unfortunately, when you are dealing with wired networks, there are going to be occasions when third parties accidentally sever the wires you use to provide service."
Separately, Mediacom is reacting to the media fallout following its last-place finish this week in the annual ASCI Telecommunications Report, which ranked customer satisfaction among a dozen pay-TV operators.
Mediacom actually improved its score by 6 percent this year, or three points, to 54 of 100. But that earned it last place, behind Time Warner Cable (59 score). That wrought headlines such as this MarketWatch doozy today: "This is the most hated company in America."
"I think Mediacom is at a distinct disadvantage to all of the other, much larger, companies that were reviewed," Larsen said. "I don't think our sample size adequately compares to the sample sizes used to rate the national providers like AT&T, Dish, DirecTV, Comcast, Charter, etc."
Larsen said out of the 12,710 consumers queried, only 95 were Mediacom customers.
"That being said, Mediacom has really been investing a lot of time and resources to improve our customer experience over the last several years," Larsen added. "We have introduced an award-winning mobile care app and e-commerce sites for our customers to use. Mediacom was one of the first companies to introduce night and weekend appointments and 30-minute appointment windows, strategies that are now being copied by much larger providers. We recently announced a $1 billion capital investment plan over the next three-years that will allow us to deploy 1-Gig services across our national footprint."
For more:
- read this Fort Dodge Messenger story
- read this Fortune story
- read this MarketWatch story
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