Time Warner Cable Woes: Who Cares What the Customer Thinks?

If you cannot identify how a potential new product or strategy benefits the customer, you have no business pursuing that initiative.

Immediately scrap the plans, return to the drawing board, analyze the voice of the customer and determine a course of action more consistent with what your audience values.

Oh, and please pay it forward, and pass the advice along to Time Warner Cable.

During a series of recent product updates, TWC eliminated the popular "DVR compensation" feature from its set-top boxes. Though the provider has repeatedly provided justification for its decision, such statements notably overlook the customer’s perspective.

A magical game-changer for those who aim to avoid commercials, DVR compensation incorporates a lag into the fast-forward function so that viewers will not miss any programming when they hit play. By removing the guesswork from fast-forwarding—and the related hassle of having to continue fast-forwarding or rewinding if one guessed wrong—DVR compensation significantly improves the viewing experience.

Given its obvious benefits, one would assume that if TWC were to remove such a feature, it would have a significant, customer-driven reason for doing so. One would be wrong.

In its official statement, which articulated that there are no plans to restore DVR compensation, TWC merely noted, "As part of a recent update, we upgraded our software functionality and the DVR compensation feature was removed on DVR set top boxes."

Save for a recommendation to use the different (and inferior) "instant replay" feature as an alternative, that was the entirety of Time Warner’s initial commentary on the manner.

Conspicuously absent? Any direct statement on the role customer sentiment played in the decision.

Were customers actually opposed to the DVR compensation concept? Were customers complaining about notable performance issues? Were customers so adamantly begging for its removal that disabling it—as opposed to making it an opt-in feature—was the right course of action?

Those are the questions—not entirely-internal discussions about software functionality—that should be driving Time Warner’s thought process. Devoid of any reference to its users’ perspective, Time Warner’s response signals to the marketplace that customers are not at the heart of every decision it makes.

Amid the ensuing outrage, TWC has only further demonstrates the disconnect between its internal decision-making and the voice of the customer. Customers have utilized the TWC message board and social networks to voice their displeasure with the elimination of DVR compensation (in the process effectively confirming that customers did not universally ask Time Warner to remove the feature), and TWC has refused to respond from a customer-centric perspective.

It has loosely floated dialogue about memory strains and system response issues associated with DVR compensation, but it has neither provided an irrefutably-customer-minded reason for removing the feature nor has it demonstrated it will actively take customer feedback into response when reconsidering its decision.

"Presently, Time Warner Cable has no plans to reintroduce this feature" is not an appropriate response to someone who is complaining about the loss of a feature he, the customer, valued.

And it is that tone-deaf element of TWC’s positioning that makes the DVR compensation issue so alarming. By failing to frame its decision as a customer-driven one even when directly responding to customers, TWC is going the extra mile to show that it will not let customer feedback—or even customer outrage—stand in the way of its strategic process.

As weak as the argument is given that TWC is not the only provider to offer a DVR compensation feature, its discussion of memory strains and response issues would have been slightly more palatable if framed from the customer’s perspective.

If Time Warner noted that customers were complaining about slow load times and that customers’ monthly fees would increase if TWC were forced to upgrade the memory in its boxes, the cable company would have at least shown it strives to create optimal value for its customers.

But in omitting that customer verbiage, TWC, as far as public perception is concerned, distances itself from any obligation to act in the customer’s best interest. If the customer appreciates the addition or removal of a certain feature, great, but the company is not going to hold itself prisoner to the will of the customer. It will do what it thinks is the right thing to do.

What it fails to realize is that the only thing to do, let alone the right thing to do, is what the customer is demanding. If customers enjoy a feature so much that they can look past the technological issues associated with supporting it, the business has no business taking it away from them without just cause. And when customers complain about the lost feature, the business has no business refraining from formulating responses and reactions based on their audience’s overarching sentiment.