Long Distance Operator, get Me CityWest Cable TV, I’d like to know what might be on that I would like to see!

Local Cable TV subscribers will soon be happy, they apparently will actually be able to walk in and pay off their Cable TV bill without having to spend the money on a stamp or call someone down below the 49th. It seems that finally a local office is going to be created for questions, applications and yes even bill payments to CityWest Cable TV. CityWest which purchased Monarch Cablevision last year for 23 million dollars has decided to set up a local call centre for those in the service area to call should they need info.

Thus far it’s been a rather unusual route for the Cable TV customer; questions get routed to an American call centre while bill payments had to be forwarded to Medicine Hat, Alberta. All the out of town dialing, created a situation that caused many a Podunkian to get rather frustrated when dealing with the “local” cable operation.

Perhaps realizing than an unhappy cable customer may become a satellite subscriber (after all when you’re doing all your work over the phone does it matter if you’re talking to Calgary, Toronto or Memphis, Tennessee?) they have put a more personalized local touch to the operation. Which is surely a sensible move considering the way that the purchase was sold to the public, that of bringing local control into the cable market.

While it’s a good start (if a tad overdue) there still needs to be a bit of work done with the Cable TV spectrum in the Northwest, there are still many channels available to the rest of the world that are but distant rumours to the folks without a dish. Unless they expand their cable offerings they may find that the call centre will eventually look like the Maytag repairman’s office, a lonely, lonely place.

The Daily News had the full details from the press release, we provide below in Podunkicized form.



CITYWEST RINGS IN CHANGE TO KEEP FOCUS ON THE NORTH
The Daily News
April 6, 2006
Pages One and Three

On Tuesday, CityWest announced plans to open a new northern-base contact centre to serve their customers across the Northwest from Prince Rupert to Houston.

Based in Prince Rupert, the contact centre will serve walk-in customers over-the-counter, and also serve customers from across the Northwest over the phone.

“One of the great things about CityWest is that we listen to our customers and respond to what they tell us, and our customers are telling us that when they phone us, they want to speak to someone here in the North,” said Chad Cunningham manager of sales and marketing at CityWest. The new contact centre will be open on May 3.

City West customers who call 1-800-442-8664 will reach the new contact centre after that date. Currently, calls made to this number are still being routed to a call centre in the U. S. set-up by Monarch Cable systems.

“When we took over the Monarch operations we felt that we should keep everything in place to ensure continuity for our customers,“ said Cunningham.

“We could make the changes we felt were necessary to improve the service without inconveniencing customers,” said Cunningham.

The CityWest customer contact centre will be open Monday-Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Pacific time. The contact centre will be a single point of contact for customers calling CityWest to order service, make a payment, report a problem or just ask a question.

“We are northerners serving northerners, and brining this contact centre back into our area is in keeping with the philosophy. This creates jobs, provides more personal and better service to our customers and it gives our customers what they’ve asked for, it’s very positive for everybody,” said rob Brown General Manager of CityWest.

Formerly known as CityTel, CityWest has been a telephone service provider in Prince Rupert since 1910. In 2005, the city separated CityTel from city operations, renamed the company CityWest and purchased Monarch Cable systems for $23 million to become a provider of Cable TV and Cable Internet services.

Meanwhile, CityWest and the crews from Ledcor Technical Services are working from both ends of the highway to install the casing for a new fibre link. Also involved in the work is the Ministry of Transportation and CN Rail.

The new fibre link planned between Terrace and Rupert will allow the company to drive a digital signal and increase the reliability, cost and speed of communications to the rest of the world over the current microwave connection.