The history of mergers suggests customer service might only get worse for these two companies. Coupling companies typically struggle to knit together their massive systems, and customers get lost in the process. When Comcast bought AT&T Broadband for $50 billion in 2002, customer billing problems led to such a backlash that the company ultimately launched a “Think Customer First” training program.
A BusinessWeek study of 28 mergers between 1997 and 2002 found that customer-satisfaction ratings dropped significantly after the unions, with the effect lasting for years. Cable companies suffered some of the biggest drops in that study. (Strangely, a more recent study, focusing on nearly the same time period as BusinessWeek, came to a different, completely counterintuitive, conclusion.)
More recently, customer ratings for BMO Harris Bank, United Continental and Exelon tumbled after their big mergers, Joe Cahill of Crain’s Chicago Business noted last April.
“So much can go wrong — computer integration snafus, recordkeeping glitches, you name it,” Cahill wrote, “and almost all of it affects customers.”
Satisfaction ratings do tend to snap back eventually, as companies scramble to keep customers from fleeing. But after a long history of industry consolidation, Comcast and Time Warner Cable have so little competition that their customers might have nowhere to flee.
“[I]f this deal goes through, customers…will probably see prices rise, with no corresponding improvement in service,” Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford wrote last month, when the merger was still just a rumor.
If there’s any reason to hope, it’s that both companies are suffering from the broader long-term trend of customers dropping cable subscriptions in favor of other alternatives. One of those alternatives is broadband Internet, which both companies also offer — although they are the lowest-rated providers in that space, too.
Article Appeared @http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/13/comcast-time-warner-merger-customers_n_4780438.html