Why Don't Local TWC Offices Have Phone Numbers?

[Jack 1000]

Sup All?

I inquired about this at one of their national service forums:

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Dear TWC,

I think an excellent way to improve the customer experience is to consider having telephone numbers at your local office areas, which currently do not exist. Everything goes to the main customer service center downtown in my area, (Milwaukee, Wisconsin.)

It is currently not possible to call one of the local offices if you would like to swap a box for a certain model. I heard from a customer who called his main TWC office in New York, and needed to find out if his local office had the make/model box he wanted. The main TWC office informed the customer that the local center had no telephone service, so the rep had to Instant Message/Chat with the local office, and for whatever reason the IM connection did not work. The customer had to drive to his local office in bitterly cold weather just to get the box he wanted.

Phone service at all TWC local outlets would benefit all. It would provide a quicker method of communication and support networking. People who are physically impaired, or with mobility limitations would have a better experience by communicating with office reps closer to their residence. It is most inconvenient for customers to have to drive out of their way as much as 10-15 miles out, when the local office maybe 3 miles away can't say whether or not they have a box in stock, because they don't have a phone number.

Would TWC consider phone services at their local centers in the future?

Jack

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[ArgMeMatey]

There is always one answer to questions like this:  It costs too much.  

If they have local offices answering calls, there are many people who will call that local office for everything.   So the local office will be doing triage for billing, repairs, sales, and installation.  They would need queueing and auto-attendant for each local office.  Eventually to manage things, the local office manager would have to say, "OK, one person is primarily handling the phones" at peak times, and sometimes there would have to be two people handling phones.  During outages they would have to route calls to a call center due to volume.  

Bottom line, if there weren't an economy of scale in call centers, no one would be doing it.  

If they charged for each call, that would be another matter.  But these calls are a revenue drain.  Until a competitor offers lower prices and better service, they will do whatever costs them less money.

[Jack 1000]

There is always one answer to questions like this:  It costs too much.  

If they have local offices answering calls, there are many people who will call that local office for everything.   So the local office will be doing triage for billing, repairs, sales, and installation.  They would need queueing and auto-attendant for each local office.  Eventually to manage things, the local office manager would have to say, "OK, one person is primarily handling the phones" at peak times, and sometimes there would have to be two people handling phones.  During outages they would have to route calls to a call center due to volume.  

Bottom line, if there weren't an economy of scale in call centers, no one would be doing it.  

If they charged for each call, that would be another matter.  But these calls are a revenue drain.  Until a competitor offers lower prices and better service, they will do whatever costs them less money.

The TWC Direct Support Forum said that if they had phones at the local centers, it would be too difficult because they don't have the staff to handle all the calls and inquires that would come in.  Makes sense.  We had a little rinky-dink cable company in Brookfield back in the mid 80's called Telenational, which was owned by Wisconsin Bell and they just had this little office, with only a couple of reps assigned to it at the time.  Calls were not a problem because it was only a small company.

When TWC took over, they expanded office locations, but also had a routing system to the main Milwaukee downtown plant.  I agree, that there just would not be enough people to handle all the inquires at the individual office outlets.

Jack

[ArgMeMatey]

Long ago just about every office had a person called a receptionist who did a lot of things, among them answering the phone and figuring out what to do with each call!  

In the rural city where I grew up, if our phone went out, my dad would report it in person at the telephone company office, or report it from his office phone if the neighbors were away. Public phones required a dime, and then a quarter, so that wasn't going to happen, even though there was a phone booth in front of the phone company (I think there were five or six pay phones in town.)  Eventually, though, we couldn't report it at the office, apparently because the receptionist was too busy having a cigarette; but they had a free phone there that anybody could pick up to call the repair office.  

When I moved to the big city, my phone went out once, so I walked over to the central office a few blocks away.  This was in the early 90s, though, and by that time there were no more receptionists.  Just a security guard who told me to go find a pay phone!  They didn't even have a public pay phone at the phone company.  

Progress!