From Comcast to Xfinity

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Table of Contents

Introduction
The rationale for Comcast Rebranding
The changes, entailed by rebranding
Discussion
Conclusion
Reference List

Introduction

In 2010 Comcast began to rebrand many of its services, including cable Internet access, cable telephone services, and digital cable (Bray, 2010, unpaged). According to the company’s representatives, the new brand called Xfinity is supposed to signify the multiplicity of choices that are available to the customers (Bray, 2010, unpaged).

However, many journalists as well customers believe that this change can be explained by the necessity to shed a negative image about the company, in particular, poor customer service (Bode, 2010, unpaged). This paper is aimed at discussing the rationales for this change, the previous business processes of this company, and possible impacts of rebranding on the company’s structure, work culture, and policies.

It is also necessary to determine whether rebranding will eventually boost Comcast’s financial and organizational performance. This assignment can throw light on the underlying causes of rebranding and organizational change. On the whole, the key task is to identify those factors which lead to rebranding and those changes may be entailed by this rebranding. These are the key objectives that have to be attained.

The rationale for Comcast Rebranding

Scholars believe that there are two drivers for rebranding: first, the company can pursue such a policy in order to better differential its products and services from those ones of their competitors. However, this change can be explained by the negative reputation of a company (Shroeder, Morling, & Askegaard, 2006; Donnelly & Linton 2009).

Under such circumstances a company needs to dissociate its products and services with negative images. It seems that the management of Comcast is attempting to achieve this objective.

First, it should be pointed that according to many customer surveys and especially the American Customer Satisfaction Index, in 2009 this corporation had the highest percentage of dissatisfied clients, more than 44 per cent. (The American Customer Satisfaction Index, 2011, unpaged).

These data indicates that in prior to rebranding Comcast ran great risk of losing its market share. Hence, the adoption of a new brand name Xfinity was probable the best solution for them. At least, it was the first step that they had to take under those circumstances.

It should be noted that at the present moment Comcast is considered to be the largest providers of cable television in the United States; additionally, this company occupies leading positions among telephone operators (Khariff, 2008, unpaged). The company represents the industries which are regulated heavily by the government.

Apart from that, the typical feature of these industries is a low threat of new entrants, which means that a new company, intending to enter this market has to possess a considerable starting capital (Albarran, 2002, p 89). The corporations, operating in this market are economies of scale, and it is very difficult to compete with them with by means of price differentiation.

Thus, these peculiarities led to the false sense of security among top executive managers of Comcast and eventually culminated into a situation, when a company could lose many of its clients. As a matter of fact, this difficulty is encountered not only by Comcast; it is typical of those companies, which have grown in terms of their financial performance and their structure.

The decision-making within such companies gradually becomes slower, especially if we are speaking about exchange of information among the company’s business units (Hodson & Sullivan 2008, p 168). Hence, we can say that Comcast is a typical example of such large and slightly bureaucratic company.

The main reason why too many clients decided to use the service of different companies was inadequate level of customer support in Comcast. Many of these people complained about inability to contact the executive officers of this company in order report about poor functioning of the network.

In fact, some conflicts with customers suggest that some managers of this organization were not particularly concerned about the needs of the clients. Furthermore, many complaints were caused lack of responsibility among the employees of Comcast (Oldenburg, 2005, unpaged). The most important thing immediately attracts attention is lack of transparency and integrity in relationships with the clients.

More importantly, for a very long time, the management of Comcast was not very interested in the monitoring of customer service and this indifference only contributed to its inefficiency (Oldenburg, 2005, unpaged). To some extent, these examples indicate before 2009 acted as a company, which was entirely sure of its position in the market.

The main reason for such organizational behavior was lack of competitors and very limited choices available to the customers. Yet, in recent years the situation has changed dramatically other companies began to target Comcast clients and many of these people accepted their offerings.

Thus, one can say that rebranding is an attempt to reestablish relationships with the customers; yet, at this point, it is not clear whether this attempt will succeed. The outcomes of this policy will depend on many factors such as ability of the management to involve employees into decision-making and offer powerful stimulus to these people.

Previous Business Processes

At this stage, we need to discuss the peculiarities of business processes within Comcast before 2010. This activity will increase our understanding of this company worked in the years before rebranding. Overall, the term business process is usually used to describe a set of activities which are performed in order to produce and deliver a product or service to the customer (Weske, 2005, p 5).

Business processes of a company can be essentially divided into three large groups: 1) managerial business processes; 2) operational business processes; and 3) administrative business processes such as financial reporting, HR management (Harmon, 2003). Therefore, we need to take into account these distinctions while analyzing the performance of Comcast.

Of course, one should not suppose that each business process is equally important for the management of Comcast. In this case, the most significant aspects are HR management, organizational reporting, post-sale services, and organizational structure. These business processes are essential for maintaining good relationships with the customers.

The first and probably the most important business process to be discussed is corporate management. Comcast is an organization which has a very complicated workplace hierarchy. This means that there are many barriers between the frontline personnel and top-management. This organizational structure inevitably leads to slow decision-making within the company.

This company is much departmentalized and each of these departments is run by a great number of executive officers (Comcast, 2011, unpaged). The second aspect that one should pay attention to is stakeholder management. The term “stakeholders” can be interpreted as those organizations and people, who are influenced by the company and who in turn can affect its performance (Polonsky, 2005, p 1065).

In the case of Comcast we can speak about shareholders, governmental agencies such as Internal revenues service, employees, customers and non-governmental organizations, for example, consumer unions. Judging from the numerous complaints about the quality of customer services, one can argue that the needs of the clients were often overlooked by Comcast.

Apart from that, strategic management of this corporation has long been based on the premise that they are the strongest market player and other firms will not be able to outrival them. This attitude toward the competitors is one of the company’s positioned weakened in later years.

Furthermore, when speaking about the corporate management of Comcast, we should also mention that the company’s executives believed that their cable services are the only alternative, available to the clients.

However, Comcast’s competitors like to Time Warner Cable or Charter Communications began to actively attract its customers, especially those, who were dissatisfied with their quality of Comcast services.

To some extent, such misinterpretation of the situation can be explained by the fact the management assessed performance according to financial criteria. However, customer retention rates were studied properly.

It is worth mentioning that high degree of departmentalization of a company makes company much more cumbersome and slow. In part this argument can be supported by the fact that it took Comcast a very long time to process the complaints of the customer and do repair work (Belson, 2006, unpaged). This information suggests that there was no efficient flow of information within the company.

Furthermore, one should remember that the employees of this company were given a very small degree of autonomy. In order to respond to the customer’s request, they had to receive permission from the managers, who occupied a higher position in the workplace hierarchy. Another important aspect that we cannot overlook is assessment of the company’s and employees’ performance.

Comcast relies on quantitative methods of measuring performance, (namely the ratio of operating income and loss), while overlooking the opinions of both clients and employees (The US Securities and Exchange Commission, 2009, p 69). As we have said earlier, before 2010, they did not attach much importance to such performance measurement as customer retention rates.

This is one of the reasons why they overlooked the growing dissatisfaction with their work. It is quite possible to hypothesize that Comcast would not have to resort to rebranding if they had adopted different standards of organizational reporting in the previous years.

Human resource management is another business process that we need to discuss. Comcast hires a great number of part-time employees, in particular, 6.000 workers out of 100.000 (The US Securities and Exchange Commission, 2009, p 13). These people do not have the same kind of benefits as full-time workers do, and it is quite probable that many of them are not fully motivated to perform their duties appropriately.

Apart from that, this company frequently employs third-party companies which provide them with operational support (The US Securities and Exchange Commission, 2009, p 15).

Comcast does not exercise full control over the work of these enterprises and it is possible that many of them do not meet the best quality standards. Hence, one can say that the employees of Comcast have different attitude and perceptions of their job and duties. Lack of culture that would support the best quality of services can be the underlying cause of customer dissatisfaction.

The efforts of Comcast management should focus on this problem; otherwise rebranding will not yield the expected results. At this stage, the most important task is to understand how the work of these people can be improved. For this purpose, they should actively involve this people into decision-making and let them express their views.

Finally, we need to speak about such business process as customer service. As it has been said before, this component of their work is continuously criticized by clients and journalists. Judging from the company’s financial statements, one can argue that this criticism is not unsubstantiated.

First, during the period between 2007 and 2008 Comcast reduced customer service expenses by almost 5.9 percent (The US Securities and Exchange Commission, 2009, p 28). In sharp contrast, administrative costs of Comcast is much higher than those ones related to post-sales services. Overall, this evidence shows that this company failed to become customer-centric.

For a very long-time Comcast has remained a bureaucratic organization with a very complex workplace hierarchy and too formal relationships among colleagues. Due to these policies, they could not respond to the changing market forces, in particular, the growing intensity of competition and increasing bargaining power of customers.

As a result, they reached a point when rebranding was the only viable solution; without it they would have found it very difficult to convince the clients that the company is genuinely willing to improve its work.

The changes, entailed by rebranding

It is quite probable that rebranding will affect several business processes within this corporation. First of all, we need to speak about HR management in Comcast. In the future, the assessment of employee’s performance will rely more on the customer surveys. This strategy will ensure that these people will have a stronger incentive to address the needs of the clients.

In addition to that, Comcast will establish full control over those third parties with which they cooperate at the moment. Among other expected effects of rebranding will be the reduction in the number of part-time employees. The thing is that effective customer service is hardly possible unless each worker is willing to contribute to the company’s success.

The employees act in this way only when they want to stay in the firm for a long time. In turn, part-time employees may not be very interested in it. Finally, companies like Comcast can hardly establish effective customer service without providing regular training the workers.

One should focuses only on short-term orientation programs offered to new hires in every company; a great number of scholars believe that training should be provided to workers at regular intervals, for example, every two or three years (Hakes, 1991, Morris, 2009).

These are the strategies the management of Comcast can implement in order to improve the retention of its clients. Again, one should not underestimate the possibility that many workers of Comcast can lack appropriate skills which are indispensible for good relationships with the clients. So, the management should place emphasis on providing sufficient training to the employees.

This corporation should also adopt new methods of measuring the company’s performance. At the present moment, they do it only by using financial data, such as operational revenues and costs. This approach does not give complete picture about the successes and failures.

The management of Comcast should also pay attention to the customer retention rates in order to determine the efficiency of rebranding policies. Most importantly, the adoption of this metrics will allow them to see how customers view the company and what areas need improvement.

They need to remember that organizational reporting should not be limited only to financial performance. Such an approach does not provide complete assessment of the organizational achievements or failures. The experience of Comcast eloquently illustrates the dangers, entailed by this approach to organizational reporting.

One can also expect the changes in the organizational structure of Comcast. As it has been noted in the previous sections of the paper, this corporation has a very complex workplace hierarchy and in many cases, this only slows down decision-making within the company. Hence, in the future the number of layers in the management hierarchy will be reduced, and many middle-line managers will be dismissed.

Again, one can assume that in the near future Comcast will become less departmentalized or fragmented. There is great likelihood that many employees, representing different departments, will soon form cross-functional teams. Cross-functional teams are a typical of matrix organizations which urge the employees with different skills to work on common projects or problems (Brickley, Smith & Zimmerman, 2002, p 113).

This approach will allow the company to better respond to the company’s complaints if they do occur. Thus, we can argue that the main business processes that can be changed are organizational reporting, HR management, the structure of the corporation and corporate management.

Comcast has to become more transparent in relationship with the customers in order to regain their trust and loyalty. Hence, future strategies of this enterprise should be focusing on these particular problems. Only rebranding will be of little or no avail to Comcast especially in the long term.

The point that they need to take into consideration is that Comcast’s positions in the market are no longer unrivaled. Such a view of the market situation can prevent them from making any progress. More importantly, such perception of the market does not allow the company to see the new trends in customers’ preferences.

Discussion

At this point, it is too early discuss the actual impacts of rebranding policy, pursued by the management of Comcast. The new brand name Xfinity will not bring the expected results to this company, unless rebranding will be accompanied by the changes in HR management, organizational structure, and performance assessment.

The management of Comcast should bear in mind that many customers are already skeptical of their innovations and the company will have to take a substantial amount of time and effort to prove that rebranding policy will really bring improvements for the customers.

These issues should be taken into consideration by the top executive officers of Comcast. As we have argued before the main driver of rebranding was the need to shed a negative image. Yet, in itself the change of brand name or logo cannot eliminate the underlying causes of this problem, such as bureaucratic structure, lack of performance standards, and high degree of fragmentation.

Hence, Comcast will be able to improve its relationships with the customers, only if they manage to resolve each of these problems. At this point, we can argue that Comcast or Xfinity should not expect rebranding to yield instantaneous results. Those organizational changes that we have described are usually very time-consuming, and the management should not expect to implement them a year or two.

The management should also remember that some members of the personnel will resist these changes in the business processes, and the duty of executive officers is to help these people overcome these difficulties. We have to emphasize the point that the proposed strategies will not be successful, if there is no close cooperation between the top-management and frontline personnel. These conditions are indispensible for the success.

Conclusion

There are several findings that one can derive from this analysis.

Large companies, which have grown in terms of their profitability and size, tend to become less attentive to the needs of their clients. Comcast is an eloquent example of such a company.
The growing complaints about Comcast can be explained by the fact this company lacks culture that can support the quality of services.
High degree of fragmentation inevitable slows down the decision-making within a company and makes it less responsive to the needs of the client.

It is possible to single out the following business processes, which can be changed: HR management, organizational reporting, post-sale services, and organizational structure. These are the key aspects that need to be addressed by the management of this corporation.

Overall, rebranding is way starting the relationship with clients from a clean slate. Yet, without in-depth organizational changes, this strategy will be fruitless. The example of Comcast illustrates the difficulties, faced by many large companies.

Reference List

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