Comcast Plans To Create More Than 5,500 New Jobs

(RTTNews) - Cable television giant Comcast Corp. (CMCSA, CMCSK) announced a new, multi-year plan to reinvent the customer experience. It plans to create more than 5,500 customer service jobs over the next few years and set a goal to always be on time for customer appointments by third-quarter of 2015.

The company noted that it will also simplify billing and create better policies to provide greater consistency and transparency to customers. Additionally, the plan includes the renovation of hundreds of stores across the country and the development of new technologies that will enable customers to interact with us how and when they want.

The company's multi-year commitment to create more than 5,500 new customer service jobs will begin with the addition of three new state-of-the-art customer support centers in Albuquerque, NM; Spokane, WA; and Tucson, AZ. More than 2,000 new employees will be hired at these centers.

The first new center, which will open in Albuquerque, will be staffed with bilingual employees who will support Spanish-speaking customers across the country. Sites for the two centers in Tucson and Spokane will be operational later this year.

The company is also tripling the size of its social care team to serve customers more quickly on Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms, and hiring 250 team members to serve in its Xfinity Stores across the country.

Comcast is hiring hundreds of additional technicians across the country and strengthening Comcast dispatch teams and operations. If a technician doesn't arrive on time for an appointment, Comcast will automatically credit the customer $20.

Comcast noted that it is redesigning all of its stores, adding staff and introducing new capabilities, including intelligent queueing that allows customers to reserve a place 'in line' from their mobile phone, to cut wait times. It has opened or built 125 new stores to date and plan to reach all 500 of its locations over the next few years.

The new feature, called Tech Tracker, is being trialed in Boston and will be launched by the end of the year across all Comcast markets. The tool allows customers to track the location and arrival of their technician in real time on their smartphone and then rate the experience after the appointment. And, a recent partnership with The UPS Store makes returning equipment easy and convenient for customers.

In late April, Comcast called off its proposed $45.2 billion all-stock friendly merger with Time Warner Cable, Inc. (TWC) and its deal with smaller rival Charter Communications Inc. (CHTR). The decision to terminate the merger was mutual due to delay in anti-trust reviews amid regulatory resistance.