Few companies face the levels of customer dissatisfaction that Comcast confronts every day. Web sites have been created solely to document the horror stories of aggrieved customers. In June, Comcast ranked second in MSN Money’s Customer Service Hall of Shame, and it ranks second to last among cable and satellite TV companies on the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

After years of poor performance and faced with growing competition, Comcast decided to take customer satisfaction seriously. It started by monitoring blogs and Twitter to find and assist unhappy customers. Next, as a StarTribune article documents, it developed a new Customer Care program that features:

• Giving Comcast technicians handheld devices that can test a home’s entire network
• Expanding technicians’ hours to include working on Sundays
• Giving employees “Make It Right” cards to a hand out to anyone with a complaint; the cards have a phone number to call for priority assistance
• Training technicians and call-center agents to listen and be respectful and to help solve problems the first time
• Promoting a new customer guarantee that promises to handle problems quickly, respect the customer’s time, and offer a 30-day money-back guarantee on all services

Listening to the Voice of the Customer is the first step to improving satisfaction and building loyalty. The first Area to Address in Item 3.2 of the Baldrige Criteria focuses solely on customer listening, while Item 3.1 asks how you determine and deploy customer support requirements and how you exceed customer expectations throughout the customer life cycle.

The goal is captured by a question in Item 3.1: “How do you create an organizational culture that ensures a consistently positive customer experience and contributes to customer engagement?”

Comcast is busy crafting a better response to that question.

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