Nine months before Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable Inc. bought Adelphia Communications Corp. for $17 million, the three companies came together to hash out the logistics in what become one of the biggest corporate moves of the year. For Debi Picciolo, vice president of Time Warner Cable’s north L.A. division, the multimillion-dollar merger meant lining up three corporate identities, three cultures, three operating systems, three types of infrastructure, three call centers and three ways of doing business. It’s been a long process one that isn’t quite over yet. “We’re still working on it,” said Picciolo. “We want people to see no difference.” Time Warner also has to create a wholly new identity for the bulk of Valley viewers. The company had served a relatively small area the western portion of the San Fernando Valley, the city of San Fernando and chunks of Santa Clarita. But under the merger, Time Warner swallowed areas once served by Comcast Cable Valencia, Saugus, Tujunga, Sunland and partially Santa Clarita and those covered by Adelphia Cable Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Agoura Hills and the southern edge of the San Fernando Valley. One of the changes is adding new personnel to the customer service department, such as the 200-person center in Chatsworth. She said the centers were often understaffed under Adelphia, which sometimes resulted in lackluster service. The company has hired new staffers and provided more customer service tools, Picciolo said. “It wasn’t the people,” she said. “They may not have had enough people.” One of the more daunting transitions has been switching the Adelphia and Comcast brands to the new Time Warner identity. Every truck, monogrammed shirt, letterhead and building sign has to be changed over, Picciolo said. In the Conejo, San Fernando, Santa Clarita, Simi and Antelope valleys alone, Time Warner has 1,500 employees in 10 locations, from tech sites in Calabasas and Van Nuys to a call center and regional office in Chatsworth. With all those different pieces, there have been some bumpy spots in the transition. Case in point is the effort to make sure all of the coverage areas have the same stations on uniform channels. That means at some point the channels will have to be changed for some viewers. Some subscribers take issue with the change. “We make sure they know about it,” said company spokeswoman Patti S. Rockenwagner. “But we also want to make the changes quickly in an efficient way.” Another sore spot is the issue of monopolization. Time Warner is now the only cable provider for 75 percent of households in Los Angles County, replacing a slew of other companies and brands that have been swallowed up by competitors over the past 25 years. That type of dominance may make good business sense, but Jim Conran, executive director of Consumers for Cable Choice, a national advocacy group against cable operators that monopolize areas, said the lack of competition could result in poor service. “The bigger a company gets, the more aloof it can get from the customer. Because it’s just one customer,” he said. “It makes it tougher for consumers to get a fair shake.” Rockenwagner, however, noted most areas of the country have long had designated cable providers. Even before the switch, a resident of Studio City, for example, had no choice but to buy Adelphia Cable. The situation is no different today, only Time Warner covers a much larger area, she said. If anything, Rockenwagner said, the rivalry has been heating up between cable and satellite providers. “Competition is growing,” she said, “on every front.” In the end, customers will determine the success of Time Warner’s regional dominance with their checkbooks. Rockenwagner said she’s hopeful. “People see a difference in the approach from their previous providers,” she said. “They do.”
