Suddenlink FYI

Instead of clapping your hands, we hope that — if you’re happy with Suddenlink broadband services — you’ll share your opinion by writing a review of our services at Broadband Reports or BBR, a prominent online forum for discussing and rating Internet service providers.

Like our peers and competitiors, Suddenlink has a presence at BBR, and the picture painted there of our company has been steadily improving over the course of the last year. That positive trend is the direct result of several things:

1. We finished our customer-impacting transition work in 2007, work that was required as we created one company from pieces of three.

2. We made a series of improvements to our local and national networks, enhancing the reliability and download speeds of our Internet service

3. We upped the ante on training programs for front-line employees throughout the organization. As is usually the case, more and better training resulted in better service.

4. We improved the overall value of our services by making the “triple play” of TV, Internet, and phone — and the associated savings of bundling those services together — available to the overwhelming majority of customers.

Granted, we still have room for improvement. We cannot rest on our laurels. To the contrary: We can and must continue to focus on enhancing the customer experience. That said, we also know the trends are headed in the right direction, as evidenced by internal customer surveys and the net growth in our business over the last year.

Accordingly, if you’re one of the happy customers, we hope you’ll take time to contribute a review at BBR. Blank review forms can be found here. And it’ll only take about 10 minutes of your time.

Thanks for considering this request.

From the Multichannel story:

In Tuckerman, Ark., population 2,000, appliance store owner James Y. “Jimmy” Davidson, and his sole employee, Louis French built a 100-foot-high tower on top of a two-story building and ran a coaxial cable down to television sets in his appliance store, where he successfully received test broadcasts from WMCT-TV, which was located over 100 miles away in Memphis, Tenn.

After WMCT-TV began fulltime transmission on Jan. 1, 1949, Davidson began looking for other locations for community antennas. After completing a system in Batesville, he began building other systems in Arkansas, financing each from the revenue generated from the others.

Davidson also founded a company, Davco that supplied equipment and expertise for would-be cable operators in Arkansas and other southern states.

A quarter-century later, in 1974, Davco and Mr. Davidson provided a young man from Newport his first job in cable. Today, that young man is Suddenlink’s MidSouth Region Vice President Randy Goad.

In those two years, Suddenlink has (among other things) migrated all operations to a common billing platform, dramatically expanded the availability of phone service, double or tripled Internet speeds in most areas, grown its customer base, and — most importantly of all — improved its performance in customer care.

There’s certainly more work to be done, but all Suddenlink employees can (and should) take great pride in what they’ve accomplished so far.

Happy second anniversary.