Insight Broadband: What, Are You Kidding Me With This?

It all started innocently enough. Last summer Insight Broadband, the Northern Kentucky cable company, made some changes as part of an upgrade.

I can only guess what happened next but it probably goes something like this: Insight BB failed to do proper regression testing, e.g., 9 times out of 10, when you make a major systems change, somethin' else is gonna go bonk. And that's exactly what happened.

For me, the biggest problem I had with Insight BB last summer was faulty e-mail service. While it appeared that e-mails were being successfully sent, I'd later find that no, they went nowhere. Not exactly a prime position for a writer, facing deadline on top of deadline, to be in. Other Problems included shifty broadband cable service and pretty much no way to get a call through to Insight Broadband to get answers to my questions. Having said that.

I will give mad props to the CEO of Insight Communications, who sucked it up on-line and on TV, actually, where he apologized and basically said, we screwed up. That took a lot of guts and more than anything, it's the primary reason they retained this customer. In addition, Insight BB gave me a partial refund for the three weeks of poor e-mail service (Just a partial refund- I'm still a little frosted about that, but it beats a blank, as my friend Matthew always says).

It was an excellent retention tactic and it worked well- Insight Communications saw a 13% increase in revenues over year 2005, with more than 54,000 new customers signing on during the year and more than 1.4 million overall customers at year's end. High-speed insight bb revenue increased 26% over the previous year, too.

But the ongoing challenge for Insight Communications and CEO Michael Willner has to do with regaining my trust- and more importantly, the trust of Insight BB customers everywhere. last week, I again started experiencing e-mail problems. I didn't know how bad they were until I popped in Saturday to find a stack of e-mails waiting to be read, topped by, you guessed it, an apology from Insight Broadband.

So maybe this time everything will work out fine. I can only hope that my invoices hit their mark, and that my editors are happily slashing my turned-in-on-time work even as we speak. Because honestly, if all of those e-mails are lost, the only apology I will accept this time will be from Michael Willner. In person.