Brighthouse...

[jaye]

I figured this wasn't DOCSIS 3.0 and some hack / mod to the current system...I can go on and on of questions pertaining to brighthouse and what they should/could do. I am wondering if any of the true insiders that work with upper level techs or engineers in this market could fill us in on how they are going to offer a competitive product to local and national answers that either have upgraded current infrastructure or started from the ground up....DirecTV, Dish Network, Comcast, Verizon, hell...even Knology is pulling ahead with more HD, VOD, and Box GUI....

What happened to Mystro/SDV/100 HD Channels....this hacked SARA hybrid to add features not built into the original have made it totally unstable with that of the looks still reminiscent of Prodigy Classic Online, it makes me wonder if Brighthouse even understands the product in itself is an interactive advertisement in an area that is served mainly by Brighthouse, Verizon, Comcast, and Knology to a lesser extent. Satellite based services such as DirecTV and Dish Network definitely have to be creating some type of dent especially with two-way services offered with broadband widely available and codec compression reaching higher quality with lower bandwidth needed.

Some type of answer with substance and more than something I can find out from a phone tech...

[skottey]

I figured this wasn't DOCSIS 3.0 and some hack / mod to the current system...I can go on and on of questions pertaining to brighthouse and what they should/could do. I am wondering if any of the true insiders that work with upper level techs or engineers in this market could fill us in on how they are going to offer a competitive product to local and national answers that either have upgraded current infrastructure or started from the ground up....DirecTV, Dish Network, Comcast, Verizon, hell...even Knology is pulling ahead with more HD, VOD, and Box GUI....

What happened to Mystro/SDV/100 HD Channels....this hacked SARA hybrid to add features not built into the original have made it totally unstable with that of the looks still reminiscent of Prodigy Classic Online, it makes me wonder if Brighthouse even understands the product in itself is an interactive advertisement in an area that is served mainly by Brighthouse, Verizon, Comcast, and Knology to a lesser extent. Satellite based services such as DirecTV and Dish Network definitely have to be creating some type of dent especially with two-way services offered with broadband widely available and codec compression reaching higher quality with lower bandwidth needed.

Some type of answer with substance and more than something I can find out from a phone tech...

My, you have a way with words.... of course the average phone tech isn't going to understand you. They can't even answer a direct plain English straight up question!

The other day I found myself asking a tech at the Roadrunner national help desk if she knows what "ping -t" is. Actually, I didn't even throw in the "-t" until after. I kept telling her that I was pinging from the customer's computer, and to rule out their computer or equipment as the problem, hooked up one of my own laptops and patch cables to "ping" out. She seemed baffled every time I said the word "ping." HAHA... So I asked if she knew what "ping" is and my customer (a 50+ aged grandmother) even laughed, as if she knew what I was asking and that I was toying with the "tech."

I deal with BHN/RR a lot, as well as Verizon T1/pots/DSL/FIOS support. Neither one of them has a great staff. BHN has just or is about to vote on forming a union. You think the employees are bad now, wait until they have union protection. They can spit in your face through the phone and keep their job!

I think BHN would like to hire knowledgable people, but like you are implying, they may not know what they are doing from the top down. Management needs to have a 90+% understanding of the job function and the technology or else they will inadvertantly hire somebody that cannot technically do the job. As a business owner, I get stacks of resumes from underqualified applicants. If I didn't know my industry and selected somebody based on personality alone, I might end up in the same boat as BHN. But I have a pretty good BS detector and know what skills I want from an employee and what questions to ask.

Having all that said. Yes, BHN appears to be in trouble. I currently have DirecTV and BHN for TV, and a VO biz Internet account through BHN. I love the DirecTV HD-DVRs (I have two), and am growing tired of the BHN HD-DVR. We basically use the BHN box as overflow, recording the least important network shows on BHN. I have all my premiums with DirecTV, and as a subscriber of BHN for like 12 years (since it was TW and Paragon), I thought I would keep them around for a while as I experiemented with Dish last year and got DirecTV this year. But I am getting fed up with BHN for TV. I'll be ditching them soon. I am happy with their Internet and will keep that around for a while, and probably get FIOS as a secondary for redundancy of Internet at my home office.

Much needs to be done by BHN with TV and Internet if they want to compete. You are right about that. I wasn't aware that Knology had been adding channels. From time to time I check their channel guide (yearly?) and didn't know. I do have customers with them and their Internet has notoriously been slower than BHN's RR.

[The Insider]

Good luck finding anyone willing to work in a call center at the current going rates, with as much knowledge as somoene working in the field. Or someone who is an IT professional. Its just not going to happen with any company. Not to mention the high turn around rate at call centers. Theres not much companies can do to fix this, and keep the business running profitablly. The minimum requirements to work at most all (including BHN) call centers is a high school diploma. Aside from that they are trained to deal with "Most all common calls", they do have tier levels with reps who have been their longer, who can handle almost all issues. But call 10 times in a row youd be lucky to find someone whos been their longer then a year in those 10 calls.

As far as resumes go, when you have to have 300 positions filled, you get real slim pickens as to the pool of workers you can pick from. When staffing a call center you have to base a lot of it on personality, because you need to know they can communicate well with people. Thats the toughest part of the job, the technical stuff can be taught. In your example of "ping" who knows if the person you spoke to was a simple level1 tech their job is to take orders process them, setup work orders etc. And they have a computer that tells them basic troubleshooting stuff and steps they need to go through.

[skottey]

Good luck finding anyone willing to work in a call center at the current going rates, with as much knowledge as somoene working in the field. Or someone who is an IT professional. Its just not going to happen with any company. Not to mention the high turn around rate at call centers. Theres not much companies can do to fix this, and keep the business running profitablly. The minimum requirements to work at most all (including BHN) call centers is a high school diploma. Aside from that they are trained to deal with "Most all common calls", they do have tier levels with reps who have been their longer, who can handle almost all issues. But call 10 times in a row youd be lucky to find someone whos been their longer then a year in those 10 calls.

As far as resumes go, when you have to have 300 positions filled, you get real slim pickens as to the pool of workers you can pick from. When staffing a call center you have to base a lot of it on personality, because you need to know they can communicate well with people. Thats the toughest part of the job, the technical stuff can be taught. In your example of "ping" who knows if the person you spoke to was a simple level1 tech their job is to take orders process them, setup work orders etc. And they have a computer that tells them basic troubleshooting stuff and steps they need to go through.

I don't fully agree with you. I partially do, but not fully. On one hand, I know what you mean by pay being low at a call center. But one of my first computer jobs was doing tech support for dial up. As tech savvy as I am, I made the fast track to second level support. I worked with many knowledgeable individuals. I also worked with some not so knowledgeable. But I have to say doing this sort of job was a great way to get started. For anybody with a knack for tech who wants to get a career started, call centers are great. You cannot take a non-tech person and make them a tech person with training. You just can't. I have been doing tech long enough. Sure, you can teach the average person basic stuff, how to read from a script and so forth, but you cannot make them truly understand it. I hire a lot of young people just starting out. All they need is a chance to excel. A lot of companies don't want to give them a chance because they have no experience. But if they have true skills and a personality, they make excellent employees in the field and would make good call center employees. So I think it is the other way around. You can't train tech, you can train customer service skills.

As far as the pool of employees being slim pickens, I am not so sure about that either. Heck, whenever a new Walmart opens with 400 jobs you hear about 2500 people applying. Just about any job gets way more applicants than jobs to be filled. I say again, if the hiring manager understands the technology and the need, they can hire the right people. They would be better off hiring a bright kid with no experience but a knack for tech than they would some 30 something that has six years call center experience selling Billy Mays garbage and NO TECH SUPPORT experience. Again, they can train that young bright kid in customer skills. But I think these call centers make the same mistake you have made. They are hiring on personality and thinking they can train tech skills.

Quick funny but sad story/thought- When I was laid off in 2003, before going from part time to full time with my business servicing computers, I took a job for a national cell phone chain doing tech support for $12.50/hr in Tampa because I HAD to take something. After nine months of looking and slowly growing my businesses' billable hours, I had to work. Well, we started in like October and training went through Christmas. As the weeks went by it became clearer that the job really sucked and many of us laughed about how we were going to quit after training. It was sick. There were people in there from all walks of life being trained on cell phone tech support. Most of which had no business being in there. The only reason I was in there was because I needed some money. Well, with a training class of like twenty, all of us quit except like three by the end. What a waste of money on behalf of the call center. And the funny thing is, they expected this. They knew that of all the training classes, there was going to be a huge turnover. Why not hire the right people from the start and pay them better? They spent weeks paying to train these people that they knew would leave, hoping to get a few "suckers" to work for $12.50 and keep them around after training. Not that it matters really, but many of the people left because they found out during week six or seven that all new people would be stuck on second or third shift. They should have been told sooner.

I think one of the biggest problems is pay. As a business owner myself, I would much rather pay better and have somebody stick around who doesn't cause me a lot of problems, than to pay crappy and have them leave and be back to square one. Most call centers, like any job, don't want to pay their people. Like they say, the best way to get a raise is to find a new job. Pretty sad. Because the person leaves for bad pay and then the company ends up hiring somebody for the same pay the person leaving was asking for, or more!

[The Insider]

I agree completely you cant just tech a non-tech person to be a tech person in a 2-3week training course. Unfortuntely though that is the majority of people seeking call center jobs are "non-tech people" and you have to weigh call volume vs staff. People do not want to wait on hold for an hour for a tech even if they know after that hour they will have someone who "is a tech person" Theyd rather get someone on the phone within 15mins and just work out the issue with them. I would prefer to have 300 tech reps, but the people just are not applying for those jobs. When they do they get hired right away though. Its just that 1 rep you have who is horrible touches so many customers before you can get rid of them.

You get 2500 people applying at wal-mart because lets face it, it requires no skill. There is plenty of non-skilled workers. The pool that is slim pickens is the skilled workers.. Tech people (unless as you say they are kids starting out) (which if you would see the orlando RR call center its full of them) do not want to work at a call center, and when they do they dont stay long. They usally get promoted up or go work for another tech company to make more income. Call center is a relativly "dead end" job if we are being honest, unless you are an exceptional employee who can move beyond it. The cable Call center has more older people, because it requires less knowledge. The majority of the calls you need to handle are billing issues, or service upgrade/downgrades. The rest are cable related service issues which after doing the normal "reboot box, check tv etc" routine then the call rep is nothing more then a work order scheduler.

In regards to your funny story, thats 100% correct how it works. That is what makes staffing a call center so hard. By the time you get someone trained and ready to go, they quit. Very high turnover in call centers across the nation. Pay is not even the largest factor either. (id guess if you paid them over 50k a year they may stay) but you as a businessman know thats unreasonable for someone answering a phone.. BHN As with most all cable companies instead focus's the money on the field personel and keep the call centers staff with people who can at least get the techs to the customers house.


Your paying somoene 12$/hr in the Orlando area which is way above the median starting pay for the area. To answer a phone. Take an order, answer a few basic questions and move on. Thats the job of the basic Rep. Their are more advanced reps Level2 level3 support which get paid better, because they have chosen to learn more and work harder. If you talk to a level3 tech you would be happy with their knowledge and experiance. Most of them have their A+ certifications (BHN pays for it along with many other including MSCE programs)

[iceturkee]

i am constantly amazed when i need to call. i know more than the average joe smoe answering the phone at dimhouse or even directv. i love the answer i constantly get when they can't find the answer in the cheat book. how many times can you tell the csr you rebooted the box 500 times and had no luck. shouldn't that be a good indicator there's a problem and not with the person who phoned you in the first place?

[beatendown]

what this guy Insider doesnt know is that even the techs in the field dont make 12.00 hr and spend up to 3 years before making that kinda money....I know sweeptechs which rrun all the major problems from outages to macro blocking issues that dont make that much an hour. You have to remember they thratened us almost with our life over the union vote and alot of good guys lost there jobs......Just because they wanted a better working enviroment not a hand out just didnt want to run calls till 10:00@ night just to be able to eat see thats the fact...

[The Insider]

I know a lot more then you think beatendown.


I dont know any sweep techs making less then 15/hr. In the Orlando area at least. And I know all of them. The lowest paid sweeptech I know of is around 16.50/hr.

Working outages for maintence techs is their bread and butter. I know people who last year pulled in over 60k. In fact 2 of them I may or may not of worked closely with and one of them may of been or may not of been me.

[cableguy01]

I know a lot more then you think beatendown.


I dont know any sweep techs making less then 15/hr. In the Orlando area at least. And I know all of them. The lowest paid sweeptech I know of is around 16.50/hr.

Working outages for maintence techs is their bread and butter. I know people who last year pulled in over 60k. In fact 2 of them I may or may not of worked closely with and one of them may of been or may not of been me.

I think Id have to agree with beatendown. If I could make 60k a year running system I think I'd bee in a better work environment. The payscales are sooo off. I hope the new year brings in a better budget. Im lucky to barely scrape 14/hr and I do a heck of alot more system work than I should be, but do it because of the "customer promise".

[beatendown]

well dam i guess i better transfer to orlando cause thats not happening in brandon or tampa.....and the sweep tech that pulled down 60k last year must of never went home he would of averaged 50 hours of overtime every two weeks.... well wait after doing the math at 15hr =31000 a year and overtime rate of 22.00 times 50 times 26 weeks still not 60k