Converging on Southeastern Massachusetts
by Glenn RittTom Coughlin roams the maze of cubicles spread across Comcast’s expansive back offices on Resnick Road in Plymouth. The carpeting is newly laid. The walls are freshly painted.
Elsewhere, sheet rock and plastic still separate one bustling area from corridors of continuing construction. Soon another 230 employees will join 100 already answering phones and helping customers from Quincy to Provincetown.
Coughlin inspects the 46,000-square-foot facility, which opened in early November, with the pride of a new parent. He has been in the cable industry for a quarter-century. He’s a real pioneer, having climbed a career ladder that began in Chicago when he went door to door selling the novel service to customers who barely knew of the technology – and could not imagine how it would change their lives.
Today, he is vice president of Comcast’s Southeastern Massachusetts region, and he has decided to move his offices permanently from Taunton to the Plymouth call center.
That decision not only reflects Coughlin’s view of Plymouth’s future and the overall growth of the South Shore and Cape market, but also of his personal management philosophy.
“Being in this building means I can keep my fingers on the pulse of the business and not separate myself from both the people who take care of our customers and the customers themselves. If I wish, I can even pick up the phone when it rings,” he said.
“People use our products five, six, eight hours a day. Their whole lives are tied into our products – and this is where they call when they need us.”
The call center cost Comcast $4 million to renovate and was deemed necessary in large measure because of the company’s build-out of digital voice services and its successful bundling with residential Internet and cable.
It also reflects Comcast’s growing commitment to the region in the wake of its purchase of Adelphia in 2006.
When Comcast took over Adelphia, it immediately “hardened its plant,” as Coughlin described it. These enhancements to Comcast’s advanced fiber network were beyond the view of most customers, but they were taken to insure the system’s integrity – especially as it expanded with greater broadband products.
Many of these structural investments already were in place on the Cape as far as Eastham and Chatham. They included surveillance and telemetry equipment to help the company’s engineers monitor the health of its enhanced fiber network around the clock.
Comcast’s Plymouth commitment also recognizes key economic and demographic trends that bode well for the entire South Shore and Cape Cod.
• While the overall population of Massachusetts is shrinking, this region is growing in both population and households.
• The number of new businesses – especially small and home-based ones – is increasing.
• The second-home market is vibrant, and many of these owners have their primary residences elsewhere in Comcast’s New England market, where there are eight other call centers – including four in Massachusetts.
• The region is experiencing substantial economic development – large retail complexes like Colony Place and Wareham Crossing, mixed-use projects like The Pinehills, Cordage Park and A.D. Makepeace and commercial enterprises such as the proposed digital film campus in South Plymouth, a casino in Middleborough and Southfields in Weymouth.
• The ability to attract quality employees is strong. Comcast carefully studied the job market – which extends to the Upper Cape – as part of its decision to locate here.
“We knew Plymouth had potential as a good labor market,” said Coughlin. “When we started interviewing prospective employees, we discovered great applicants. It has confirmed that this is a high-quality area.”
The new call center actually is one of three Comcast facilities in Plymouth. Even with the renovations, the company could not accommodate all of its regional warehousing needs without leasing another building nearby; and it has rented office space at Cordage Park for its hiring and employment services.
Competition and customer service
The call center – which along with another in New Bedford serves the area from Quincy south through the Cape and Islands and west to Attleboro – reflects two key Comcast strategies: the need to think globally, but act locally; and a commitment to “insourcing” at a time when many companies are “outsourcing.”
Both suggest higher operating costs for the nation’s largest cable company, but they are deemed critical as Comcast – which is based in Philadelphia – faces increased competition from many directions, including wireless, DSL and DirectTV providers.
“In taking over Adelphia and starting to serve our new customers here, we wanted to make a statement that while we are a big company, we operate as a local business,” said Coughlin, who lives in Plymouth.
That is the company’s philosophy everywhere, he noted; but it becomes particularly important for a market previously served by another cable provider – especially one like Adelphia, which was poorly managed and undercapitalized.
With roots in customer service, Coughlin very much appreciates this reality. “I literally learned it on the streets,” he said, reflecting back on jobs serving condominiums and managing sales and customer service operations.
“Those were the bad old days when cable was really a construction business,” he said. “We were rewiring the entire country; and unfortunately, the industry took its eyes off the ball of quality customer service.”
Today, customer service is recognized as a priority, which is particularly important for a company whose cable, Internet and phone products and services are used 24/7 in homes and businesses.
That fact also underscores Comcast’s commitment to insourcing, whose corporate roots go back to Tupelo, Mississippi, where it was started as a small, family-owned business.
“It was entrepreneurial back then, and remains so today,” said Coughlin, who joined the company when it was only the 14th largest cable provider in the nation.
“As it grew, and Philadelphia became its headquarters, management determined that it could not sit there and make decisions for local markets,” he said. “We know that you can outsource calls cheaper. Some other cable companies still do that. But, inevitably, insourcing and local facilities lead to fewer repeat calls, more efficiency and less customer dissatisfaction.”
Finally, insourcing is about competitive advantage, emphasized Coughlin, who rejects the impression that the cable industry is a monopoly.
“We are facing competition from every direction,” he said, pointing to providers ranging from satellite to Verizon’s DSL and FiOS services to wireless and voice providers. “We see competition everywhere we work, and it requires not only constant investment in infrastructure, but focus on the customer.”
That reality was reinforced by third-quarter results that reported a softening in cable subscribers. Nationwide, phone companies in particular are starting to pose a threat. Verizon Communications and AT&T Inc. are offering new TV services and fast Internet connections, overlaying previous Comcast markets.
Comcast reported a 12 percent drop in new digital-video subscribers in the third quarter compared with the previous year. Total basic-video subscribers fell by 65,000 to 24.2 million. At the same time, Comcast reported making significant progress in growing its phone businesses.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Comcast plans to push back against satellite and telephone companies that have been entering its turf with deep discounts.
Comcast says that for every video subscriber it has lost, it has gained 10 phone subscribers. As of the end of the third quarter, more than 9 percent of the 40.3 million homes offered phone service have subscribed, leaving much room for growth. Phone service is particularly profitable because it leverages preexisting cable; competing phone companies must spend billions to update their networks to catch up to Comcast’s broadband network.
Comcast’s surging phone business also is opening the door for digital phone service for businesses, along with other new products. The company says that its voice product was key to its overall strategy in 2007, and will continue to be a driver of its continuing success.
Focusing on the business customer
“Digital voice represents the true beginning of convergence, including a single bill for consumers,” Coughlin said. “It means that a customer with digital voice can listen to voice mail messages on the Internet and actually e-mail voice messages.”
Now, digital voice will be marketed to businesses, as Comcast enriches its commercial services.
Locally, success on the business front will be the main responsibility of Dan Sullivan, who was named this fall to the newly created position of vice president for business services in Southeastern Massachusetts.
Unlike Coughlin – who once was an air controller and has moved around the country over his career – Sullivan was raised in Hanson and still lives there. He began his telecommunications career in the early 1980s pulling cable in large office buildings, then moving into sales, marketing and account management roles – most recently with Sprint and National Grid Wireless.
His new job: grow cable, Internet and voice services in the small and medium-sized business market, which represents nine out of every 10 companies in all of Cape Cod and most of Plymouth County.
Sullivan is building an extended team to market a full suite of services, beginning with digital voice that can serve as many as eight lines, as well as video and high-speed Internet services for businesses – especially facilities like doctors’ offices.
Business bundles, said Sullivan, are designed “so small businesses can look and act like big companies.” When it becomes widely available, Business Class Digital Voice will join existing Business Class services like:
• Business Class Internet, which includes Web site solutions, access to GoToMeeting services, ad-free e-mail, higher speeds and firewall and privacy protections.
• Business Class TV for waiting areas, conference rooms and break rooms.
• A communications service relying on Microsoft tools such as Outlook and SharePoint that will let employees of small businesses collaborate among themselves and clients by sharing documents, calendars and other activities on the Internet. This software suite is provided at no extra charge to all Business Class Internet customers, and will allow local companies to use technologies that previously required in-house IT staff. Underlying all these offerings, said Sullivan, is the ability for companies to rely on Comcast for their IT needs, rather than employ their own technicians.
Looking ahead, Coughlin and Sullivan are alert to their company’s rising competition and a softening national economy. At the same time, they say they see significant opportunities to grow their business locally in the face of those challenges.
“Twelve years ago, I was speaking with some of our technicians,” Coughlin recalled. “Satellite TV was just emerging as a serious competitor. They worried aloud that it might put us out of business since we were still very much an analog technology.
“All it did was force us to compete harder. It led to two-way networks, cable-modems, digital services. We leapfrogged the satellite guys. It made us a better company.”
Published in Cape Business January/February 2008
Glenn Ritt Glenn Ritt is editor and co-publisher of Cape Business Publishing LLC. He is the former publisher of Cape Cod Community Newspapers and editor of The Bergen Record in New Jersey. 
