PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Customer satisfaction ratings for Comcast Corp. fell this year to an all-time low and rank at the bottom of cable and satellite TV providers, according to a survey released on Tuesday.
As consumers’ happiness with cable and satellite TV rose as a whole, the nation’s largest cable TV operator lost ground, according to the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index. The index has tracked the group since 2001.
Comcast lagged behind smaller operators such as Cablevision Systems Corp. and RCN Corp., which as a group topped the customer satisfaction ratings for the first time ever.
Comcast, whose service so infuriated a Virginia grandmother she took a hammer to a local Comcast office, tied with struggling Charter Communications for last place.
Charter, controlled by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has languished for years and was nearly delisted by Nasdaq recently. It’s now under fire for a plan to track customers’ use of the Web and in January mistakenly deleted the contents of 14,000 customer e-mail accounts.
Comcast rated 54 out of a perfect 100 for customer satisfaction. Rapid growth for the Philadelphia-based company, which have been buying up smaller cable systems, may have added to its customer service problems, the report said.
“Comcast has come in and put a lot of money into technology, but not too much into customer sevice,” said Claes Fornell, founder of the index. “The system is still not reliable enough and when customers call for customer assistance, it is not handled the way they would like it to be.”
Rick Germano, Comcast’s senior vice president of national customer operations, said the cable giant isn’t happy about its ratings but “we get it. We’re listening.”
Comcast has conducted focus groups in 10 cities across the country in the past year, created a group in the last 60 days to monitor and respond to bloggers’ complaints, improved its internal processes and stepped up training of its customer service employees and technicians.

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