Ask any cable company executive why they need a multi-hour appointment, and they’ll give you the same dumb explanation: That their techs don’t know what they’ll encounter when they arrive at a location.
That’s a lame excuse. What could possibly be so unexpected that it can’t reasonably be estimated? Boxes? A mess? Sasquatch? If after 20 or 30 or 40 years in business your employees can’t survey a job site and reasonably estimate the time required to complete a job, you need to train them better.
Sure. There may be holes that need to be drilled or some wire that needs to be pulled. There may be an old TV set that needs to be hooked up to a new DVR. But most of that can, and should, be sussed out in advance. Ask the customer what he’s got before you send Johnny Cablequest over to his pad. Moreover, technicians encountering problems should be equipped to report back to home base so that the company can adjust. Is this particular job going to take all day? Might be a good idea to assign that technicians queue of appointments to another cable guy. Just a suggestion!
…All too commonly, a tech has a schedule of appointments to follow for a set day. One technician will be assigned a list of jobs. The tech gets backed up on one, and all the others are late. Charter, for example, was busted several years ago for not only not knowing where its techs were in the field, but also lying to its customers about when they’d arrive. That’s a paddlin’!
By contrast, Comcast now uses dynamic dispatch, which effectively lets it triage installs. A tech arrives at an appointment and reports back from the scene how much time is expected for the work order. As the job progresses, the company can make adjustments on the fly things start getting behind. It’s a technology solution to a human problem.
“Giving all our techs laptops and handhelds is helping us shrink the appointment window,” says Moyer.
But dispatch needs to be done right. Cablevision also uses dispatch, but only for critical calls. While that likely helps reduce no-shows and late arrivals, it won’t necessarily help shrink a window. Without a good dispatch system, things can get sideways, quickly.
But at least it’s a start.
Look, cable companies. We know that sometimes things take longer than you expect. We know that you may get into a home and find antiquated AV systems or line problems or bees or whatever. But we also expect you to take steps to try to fix that. We expect you to use a dispatch system to get your techs out on time, to call us when you’re running late, and to compensate us for our time if you are.
Allrighty. Having worked as a satellite technician for the last few months, I can authoritatively say that this is one of the dumbest things I’ve read in a long time. This is so dumb, I’m still undecided, as I type this very sentence, whether or not I should even elaborate on that statement or just stare at the above excerpt in astonishment, marveling at it like you would at a two-headed animal skeleton in a pickle jar on a dusty shelf in some ramshackle roadside souvenir shop in a flyspeck town. It’s so dumb, I’m pissed off at Ms. Cauthen for teaching me how to read in first grade, thus paving the way for me to inflict this upon myself all these years later and be possessed by a sudden desire to make like Oedipus and carve my eyes out with a spork for having fed the information to my brain. That’s how dumb this is.
But okay, let’s do this thing. I’ll just start from the top:
What could possibly be so unexpected that it can’t reasonably be estimated? Boxes? A mess? Sasquatch? If after 20 or 30 or 40 years in business your employees can’t survey a job site and reasonably estimate the time required to complete a job, you need to train them better.
What, indeed. How about a brief list of some of the things I’ve personally encountered in a short period of time that have slowed me up considerably? Customers who didn’t describe their setup very well to the operator they placed an order with. Customers who are in the process of moving in and haven’t got any of their stuff unpacked or arranged yet. Customers who change their mind about what they want after you’ve arrived, and expect you to magically produce a revised order, or spend an hour making a round trip to go get the equipment you need. Customers who want to argue about custom labor fees. Customers who don’t want new cables run through a wall or floor. Wasting time trying to contact and get permission from a landlord because the customer didn’t do it themselves. Supervisors who drop two more jobs on you halfway through the day, fucking up whatever unimportant plans you thought you had. A family of hoarders. Dangerous twelve-pitch roofs in hundred-degree-plus temperatures. Gag-inducing crawl spaces, possibly occupied by snakes or black widows. Old, outdated cable that needs to be replaced. Equipment that doesn’t work right out of the box. Lost tools. Incoherent directions or places so far out from civilization that GPS can’t find them. Lack of cellphone/handheld service for closing orders. Remember, this is a brief list. Off the top of my head.
Train them better? Oh, jeepers, Pollyanna, if only you could hear my cynical, bitter belly-laugh right now! We, as technicians, especially as subcontractors, are just numbers. This company in particular has been through over 140 techs between me and my boss, the most recent hire before me still working. It’s cheaper to throw us out in the field with a half-assed understanding of what we’re doing and hope for a fucking miracle than it would be for the company to bother training us properly for a couple months. If we can’t get it done, they’ll just shovel dirt on our worn-out corpses and bring in the next batch of guys willing to work like prisoners on a chain-gang for no benefits.
Ask the customer what he’s got before you send Johnny Cablequest over to his pad.
The people you talk to on the phone when you order cable or satellite television are call-center minions somewhere across the country, or even the world. They only see a spot on a map when they tell you that you can have service, and they only exist to make sales. They have no idea what your house looks like, or what sort of things could present obstacles for a tech. They throw a laundry list of material on the work order and leave it up to us to figure out the details of what the customer actually wants and needs when we show up. And most customers, through no fault of their own, simply don’t know what they’ve got, what it does or how it works. I’ve been tipped in cash by effusively grateful people for hooking up component cables to their DVD player, because they didn’t know how to do it. They don’t know how to follow menu prompts on their screen. Asking them techie questions over the phone is destined to end in tears (probably mine).
Moreover, technicians encountering problems should be equipped to report back to home base so that the company can adjust. Is this particular job going to take all day? Might be a good idea to assign that technicians queue of appointments to another cable guy.
Home base? You mean to my supervisor, who’s busy working several jobs himself even though he’s been told a couple times this week he won’t be routed so that he can be on hand to help the rest of us out? Another cable guy? You mean the other handful of guys who are also struggling under the weight of four, five or six jobs a day? What, you think there’s a bunch of us being paid to sit around on call 24/7 in case someone needs help? A cryogenic storage chamber full of techs ready to be thawed and sent out? Hell, for that matter, when you get paid by the job, not the hour, as we do, there are quite a few guys who would not want to see their next three jobs taken away and given to someone else, even if it did get them home earlier.
By contrast, Comcast now uses dynamic dispatch, which effectively lets it triage installs. A tech arrives at an appointment and reports back from the scene how much time is expected for the work order. As the job progresses, the company can make adjustments on the fly things start getting behind. It’s a technology solution to a human problem.
“Giving all our techs laptops and handhelds is helping us shrink the appointment window,” says Moyer.
We use a dispatcher, laptops and handhelds as well. Of course, those handhelds are slower than molasses, can’t pick up service in half the places we go, and lose battery power pretty quickly. (And they take ten dollars out of every check for the privilege of using them!) The dispatcher becomes one more annoyance to deal with, one more loss of several minutes when you’re desperately trying to finish a job, and half the time, we don’t know when the fuck we’re going to get to the next stop anyway, so we generally don’t call anyone, customer or dispatcher, unless we know beyond all doubt that we’re not going to make the appointment timeframe.
Word of advice: if you ever have to make a service appointment, whether it be for plumbing, electrical work, cable or satellite, and they offer you the eight to twelve, twelve to four, four to eight options? Take the early one if at all possible. By the last timeframe, the technician is almost guaranteed to be starving, thirsty (what, you think we get lunchbreaks or something?), mentally exhausted, royally pissed off, and ready to take any shortcut to get the fuck home as quickly as possible. (And if they ask to use your bathroom, let them. You don’t even want to know how many of them proudly admit to relieving themselves in someone’s crawlspace after being denied use of the facilities. Same principle as not sending food back in a restaurant, basically. Hey, I’m just reporting what I’ve seen and heard, that’s all.)