CABLE VIEWERS UNHAPPY, SURVEY SAYS

Cable-television viewers are watching as much cable programming as ever, but they are less satisfied with the industry’s customer-service performance, according to a survey released Wednesday.

“The industry at this point is notorious for its customer-service problems,” said Susan Delzell, president of OnTRAQ, a newly formed Westinghouse subsidiary which released the results of its survey of 1,000 cable subscribers at the opening of the Western Cable Show in Anaheim, the West Coast’s largest gathering of cable executives, experts and exhibitors.

“If they are going to be a (viable) entertainment industry, they have to pay attention to who buys their product” and to how these subscribers feel about service, Delzell said.

The OnTRAQ report said that customer service, a key to the industry’s well-being and its most glaring weakness, suffered a significant setback in telephone service, which it said is the second most important vehicle that cable firms have for reaching and serving subscribers, after installation.

Last year, in a similar survey conducted by Westinghouse’s Group W Cable division, most customers rated telephone service, on a five-point grading system with “excellent” being highest, at 3.4, halfway between “average and good,” Delzell said.

This year’s OnTRAQ survey showed that the average telephone-service rating dropped to 3, or merely “average,” with as many as 34% of subscribers rating telephone service as “fair to poor.”

“This is a significant downturn,” Delzell said. “It (telephone service) wasn’t doing that great to begin with and it’s still bad now.

There was some good news for the cable industry in OnTRAQ’s survey. A majority of subscribers, the survey reported, believe that the industry has improved its overall image and the quality of its programming and, more significantly, said that they are spending about the same amount of time watching it.

These modest successes are all the more striking, the study said, because 58% of the subscribers surveyed said that they owned video cassette recorders, and of this group, 80% said that their cable viewing time either remained the same or increased.

“VCRs were originally viewed as competition, but cable operators are now viewing them as a complement to cable,” Delzell concluded.

The survey’s results, however, were disappointing for the industry in another respect. About 50% of the subscribers said that they failed to notice local advertisements on cable channels such as ESPN and MTV, bad news for a stagnated industry in need of new revenue sources.

Customer reactions also were nearly split on the following issues:

Fourty-eight percent of the respondents would rather choose and pay separately for individual add-on channels; 43% preferred paying a higher basic-service fee for a greater channel selection.

Fifty-one percent of the households surveyed said “it was a fair business practice for cable programmers to scramble their signals;” 41% felt it wasn’t.

Delzell said that the real value of OnTRAQ will come in future years, because the service will continue tracking the attitudes of subscribers by logging as many as 20,000 subscriber interviews each year.

She said that the surveys should give cable operators a way of comparing their performances to a national average ---- a valuable service in an industry where the cost of losing individual subscribers has jumped for $600 in 1980 to more that $2,200 this year.