Why ask for any ideas or input if you're not going to even use them? It seems like a waste of their time and money.

He was looking for marketing suggestions, not a way to actually make their business better. So sad. They might rope in new customers with gimmicks, but they can't keep them with lousy service.

@squinko: Perhaps they're asking for more abstract suggestions.
-I want to be able to set my TV to automatically order me pizza.
-I want to be able to deliver the punch lines in my favorite episodes.
-I want unicorns to be real.

Sooo they want customers to be their marketing firm? Tons of ideas and the cost being a single itouch, yes?

Well they answered their own question. Just keep offering people free stuff.. it's cheaper than fixing the infrastructure and retraining reps and fixing bills to make sense.. we'll just take it as hush money and blog super nice things, honest!

They are all great suggestions. Too bad they are super-ceded by profit profit profit.

If only there was an ISP who at the core wanted better technology for people instead of making pure profit.

The US is behind in internet and a lot of other cool stuff.

Evidently "TWC" is Time Warner Cable? Not The Weather Channel?

/doesn't have time warner

Shock tactics, shooting straight from the hip, cook'em in their seats with your ideas, that's how you do it.

@robdew2: I too was wondering what The Weather Channel did wrong...

Yeah, there's a marketing tool at work here alright.

The billing one could easily be a customer loyalty issue - charging a single clear price for each service including all fees and taxes that is the same from month to month, and not making me have to call up and get changed to their latest "deal" every 6 months to keep a reasonable rate would make me much more likely to stick with my cable company.

@Matt Woodcheke: and apparently his name is Jeff.

@OmniZero: To be fair, businesses are pretty much always in it for the profit, and I can't blame them. (It drives me crazy on game developer, particularly MMOG, message boards, when you see the players become totally incensed that the company is trying to make money. No shit, sherlock!)

On the other hand, though, providing better technology and service than the competition would BE a route to profit.

A customer loyalty program is a process which rewards customers for spending money on the company's products or services.

For example, supermarket discount cards, gift cards, air miles or any special offer. It specifically doesn't mean changes to the product and service itself, since it's marketing.

The OP's suggestions are typically submitted to management (and normally filed in the round cabinet for posterity) whereas marketing have a budget to boost sales and revenue of the product as is.

*rolls eyes @ iTouch* - there is no such product, jeffTWC...unless you're touching yourself.

Anyway - good on jchristenbury for telling it like it is.

Looking at the guy's Twitter page, it appears that he's trying to emulate ComcastFrank. He's even got a nice banter going on with ComcastBonnie.

I have no sympathy for the cable companies. Government would actually do a better job.

After my promotional rate was up with TWC, not only did they raise my rate (as expected), but they actually charged me a 17¢ "service change fee" (or something like that) the first month of the new rate.

@Vanilla5: A lot of people call it that, it's really not a huge deal. I mean, technically "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" is the right name for the fairy tale (Actually, "Snow White and Rose Red", but that's taking it back to which story you want) but nobody freaks out when people call it "Snow White", especially after the Disney movie came out.

And while you didn't freak out, I've seen way too many others actually do so.

@Matt Woodcheke: Nice double meaning of
"tool" there. Well done!

I'm not sure what the point of this post is--he was specifically asking for ideas for a "loyalty program," not general ways to increase customer loyalty. It doesn't matter if the ideas were good or not (personally, they all seemed good to me) they just happen to have nothing to do with what was asked for.

Just wondering what kind of suggestions they were looking for to award the iTouch.

"I think TWC charges way too little money for all of the great services you offer. Have you thought of raising your rates and profit margin?"

@Ben King: Wouldn't a "customer loyalty tool" be something like buy 11 months get one free or some sort of point system like air miles?

The way I read it he asked for one thing and was bitched at for industry wide problems that had nothing to do with what he asked for.

I think a lot of companies (my own included) are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon without any real thought about what to do with real, incoming tweets. All the industry best practices are starting to say, "You should Twitter! Twitter is good!" so it's getting built into marketing objectives without any real understanding. Our Director of Corporate Communication still refers to blogs as "WEBLOGS" (all caps, always in quotes) in emails, and she now heads up our social media strategy. Sigh.

@Wombatish: Nah, I don't freak out - it's a common mistake people make but I've also seen the same mistake made in new stories, which is part of the reason it bothers me so.

(I'm looking at you CNN.)

@OmniZero: Perhaps you could start such a company. A technologically progressive ISP not interested in profit would be very appealing to me as a consumer. At least until you went out of business and I had to find another one.

Ah yes. The age old industry ploy of pretending to listen to your customers and doing what you please anyway. If your customer "thinks" that your listening to them they might be more loyal.

Its really just a shame that most Americans are spineless self interested idiots that don't have the balls to drop the services of bad companies. Its also really a shame that most American companies realize this and capitalize on it.

Hahahahaha, this is totally awesome.

Twitter, a "marketing tool"? NEVAR!

@Travis Estell: I'd rather pay 2 more cents a month as part of the regular bill than pay a "We're billing you more now fee".

I hate random/hidden fees. I HATE them. Just charge me the amount it costs to provide the service.

@Yossarian: Who says I would go out of business? If I have all the customers why would I go out of business? I'm not so ignorant to know that you NEED MONEY to have a business. I just feel like some companies extort as much money as they can, instead of relaxing a bit and not trying to get all the money they can all at once.

I know a great way to help with your consumer loyalty program! Don't use your near monopoly status to try and force crippling bandwidth caps that consumers that would make them buy higher tier plans that are actually worse due to the caps! Then don't use obviously BS marketing speak to try and tell us it's good for us!

Hey TWC, I can offer you other advice for a modest fee (and I'll use the same standards of modesty you use when deciding how much to charge your customers).

As a side note, does anyone else find it funny that the guy trying to improve marketing would make such an obvious gaffe that would lead to them getting flamed on major sites?

One of their trucks almost knocked me down in Manhattan today, trying to bully through the crosswalk.
I wasn't mad, just surprised to see a technician actually rushing to get somewhere!

@JeffMc: You think TWC piss-poor cable speeds, CS reps who blindly and ruthlessly follow their (often misleading) scripts, and a bill a human can comprehend are "industry-wide"? TWC can change all of those things.

What they are looking for are gimmicks to hook customers, regardless of offering lowest common denominator service. That's what you mean when you say "industry wide problems", you know. If TWC offered services that greatly outclassed Cox or the others, you couldn't pry customer away with a crow bar. THAT'S what the guy was talking about.

I for one would love to choose what channels I get. Gone are the 18,000 useless sports channels. Gone too is the women-pandering programming. But a la carte programming will never happen, because they make more money bundling one or two good channels with crap like the Nashville Network and the Fishing Channel.

@AmoretteTyndareus: Many of these media conglomerates have near-monopolies in the areas they provide service. Even if there are other companies, they usually suck just as bad. The only way to drop the services of bad companies is to drop the service completely. If our decision to stick with a crappy --albeit existing company-- rather than cutting off service altogether makes us spineless, than I'd certainly like to see you in the same position.

@maddiesdad: This was at lunchtime, right?

@OmniZero: This has been tried. The town of Wilson, North Carolina was getting complaints about crappy service. So they built a fibre infrastructure and asked the two local ISPs to use it. They refused, so the city created its own ISP called Greenlight, Inc.

When the two ISPs (one of whom was TWC, not surprisingly) heard about the better service offered by the municipal ISP, they went to the state legislature to try to block it.

More info here:
[www.zeropaid.com]

I appreciate your desire for a utility (which is what net access really is, these days) which has the good of the customers at heart, but it's unlikely to happen, ever.

@AmoretteTyndareus: It's hard to drop the services of lousy companies when they are a monopoly. This is why the only real solution is to create a competitive market.

I actually won last week's TWC iPod touch drawing on Twitter (they can call it what they want, I'll call it by its correct name) from them. It's en route to me,

@jchristenbury maybe doesn't understand what a customer loyalty program is so what he tweeted to TWC - while all excellent ways of earning loyal customers - wasn't really relevant to what they were asking for or what they are involved with as marketing people.

They were looking for ideas/input about customer loyalty programs -think cards like your local grocery store or pharmacy or frozen yogurt place offers. Last week they asked (on Twitter) "Tell me your fav/best customer loyalty programs and why!" I replied: "CVS is my fav. I don't need to carry the actual card, the coupons are targeted and relevnt and the cash back rewards are generous."

2 days ago I was notified that my name was drawn and I'd won the iPod touch. Doesn't make me curse TWC any less every time my internet connection slows to a crawl for no good reason or when my HD channels start looking like jigsaw puzzles :) But I'll take their free iPod touch!

@AdineJemagee: Providing better service would be a very good loyalty program. Instead of trying to market the idea of customer loyalty to customers who are the victims of lousy service, why not market it to the corporate executives who are the cause of lousy service?

@JeffMc: Sorry, let me take another crack at this.

-After 6 months, I want to be able to set my TV to automatically order me pizza.
-After 6 months, I want to be able to deliver the punch lines in my favorite episodes.
-After 6 months, I want unicorns to be real.

@OmniZero: profit is needed to expand. YOu want better technology, you need to pay more now in order to pay for the expansion, thats how it works.

Even the handful of reps from major companies are using twitter/facebook/myspace to monitor shit, and sure, a handful of them will get help, but you have to be a retard to not see this is a marketing ploy.
the more people they can reach quickly, the quicker they can advertise/capitalize.

@consumerfan: How about rewarding customers that spend money on the company's products and services with ... now hold your seats tightly ... with better products and services.

I don't care for any f*****g discount cards, gift cards, air miles, or other offers. I want good products and services. Don't go spending money on marketing things unrelated to the provider's core business. Focus on the CORE BUSINESS. Learn to do it better.

@OmniZero: Behind in the internet as far as widespread infrastructure; in terms of backbone the US is still pretty dominating.

@Ben King:

A++++++++++!!! WOULD READ AGAIN!!!

@arstal:

*GASP* YOU'RE A COMMUNIST!!!!!

Don't you know that if the government ran the internet, we'd never have gotten past dial-up??????????????

/neocon

@xtc46 - thinksmarter on twitter: Profit can be put back into the business (which is what you're describing), or put into the pockets of the shareholders and corporate management (which is what TWC would prefer, apparently). Healty companies will often mix the two, paying steady dividends of a portion of their profit while still investing in new technology, developing better products, and the like.

Profit is not inherently bad. Short-term profit at the expense of a continuing operation (because the managers are being paid for good quarterly numbers) can be pretty bad.

@squinko: Probably because some higher-up person at TWC said, "We should be on Twitter."

The result is that the company is using a tool that they really don't understand.

@maddiesdad: Back in '01, I was a Cable Tech for AT&T Broadband. They used to load us with 6-7 jobs per 4-hour block of time, with little regard to how far apart they were. In Northbrook, one of the cities I worked, it could easily take 20 minutes to get from one job to another.

Some of the techs are lazy, no doubt. But just as many are overworked, or were just a few years ago.