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Keith Hayes
Making it Convenient for the Customer
SCTE Member Since 1991
Title: VP, HFC Technical Operations and Engineering, Adelphia Communications.
Broadband Background:
Previously, Hayes was VP of network planning and construction at Adelphia, where he worked with the regional Adelphia teams to upgrade more than 30,000 miles in less than two years. He is a past chairman of the board of SCTE, and he served two terms as director of SCTE Region 9, representing Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and the Caribbean.
You’ve added one more feather to your illustrious cap. What do you have to say about the Star of Integrity Award that you received at the SCTE’s Conference on Emerging Technologies?
That award should be the Adelphia Star of Integrity Award. Because everything that I was recognized for were things that the Adelphia team accomplished. They rebuilt 20-plus percent of our plant in 18 months, they advanced operational improvements that drove tens of thousands of unnecessary truck calls out of our business each month. And that’s a 15,000-employee effort to make those kinds of things happen.
What’s been the biggest change in Adelphia?
The biggest change has been in the culture, from one that was ‘do what is convenient for the business’ to now one that does what is convenient for the customer. We do that by changing our work practices so that they are more customer friendly, so that our windows of work are friendly both in terms of being able to get to your house to do installation or service repair when it is convenient for you and also ensuring that we keep our network on during prime use hours, both video and data.
How do you bring about this kind of change?
The first thing is to articulate the reasons why change is important. That’s done by finding ways that show the importance of our actions to our customer experience. It’s things like showing a video tape of a very intense movie and at the climax of the scene, pulling the plug on the TV so that you see ten seconds of snow and then plugging it back in and using that as an example of what our customers experience when we pull and amplifier or a pad or an equalizer in the middle of the day.
So it’s putting yourself in your customers’ shoes?
Exactly. I tell my team to act as if everything we do is going to affect their grandmother.
Is that a challenge across the board, beyond Adelphia?
Absolutely. The more competitive the business is, the more important it is that we deliver customer excellence at every contact: in our scheduling windows, in our rates and programming, in our phone-answering capability. We’ve got to be at least as good as DirecTV, Dish Network and the RBOCs, and preferably better. Because our customers clearly have a choice, and it’s simply a phone call away in most markets to switch their service. We all know how hard it is to gain new customers, so we’ve got to make sure that we deliver an experience that will make it tough for our customers to walk away from us.
In a more competitive landscape, how is cable going to keep its technical teams intact?
It’s key that our technical people see a forward path in their career. Adelphia along with other cable operators have developed career paths so that if you want to specialize in maintenance, for example, there are ways to maximize your earning potential. Or if you want to move up the technical management ladder, there are ways to develop those skill sets. Rather than being ad hoc, there’s a road map there and there are tools available to the technician in terms of training or development resources that the companies provide through SCTE, NCTI and others that give them skills they need to move to the next level.
How many frequent flyer miles have you racked up over the past year?
That’s a painful question. In excess of 100,000—on Delta alone.
Is it slowing down?
Yes and no. There are weeks that I’ll only go one place. But there are other weeks where I’ll be in three or four different states, like next week.
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