A ‘blessing’: 1 year to get ahead of the deluge

Originally published in Current, Feb. 4, 2008
By Steve Behrens

‘We all know this is going to be a train wreck,” said Burt Rumley, assistant transmission manager at North Carolina’s UNC-TV network. His co-workers’ only difference of opinion about next year’s analog TV shutoff, he added, is how bad the train wreck will be.

Announcements about the shutoff whiz right over the heads of many viewers, he explained in a session at the NETA Conference Jan. 25 [2008].

“When the analog is turned off,” Rumley said, “a large number of people will realize that something has happened.”
By then, in February 2009, UNC-TV won’t have enough employees to answer phone inquiries or do house calls, so the network wants to start resolving problems now.

“We have the blessing of one year to get as much off our plate as we can,” Rumley said.

When front-desk staffers and technicians can’t resolve problems, UNC-TV will send out the 11 field engineers who tend its 11 transmitters around the state, he said.
Each is handling two or three house calls a week, but it’s early yet.

Rumley recommended:

To crack the hard cases, prepare for house calls. They can help you understand specific reception situations, including what cable systems are doing with the pubTV signal and how some areas have odd reception problems. If the DTV receiver can’t get the station, a weak signal may not be the problem, for instance. Some DTV receivers will be thrown for a loop by having more signal than they can handle.

UNC-TV equips each field engineer with a small TV receiver that runs off power from their cars’ cigarette lighters, plus a dipole antenna on the car roof, a spectrum analyzer and a transport stream analyzer. The North Carolina engineers may arrive with some extra coaxial cable and converter boxes and help viewers hook up their VCRs to the new boxes, Rumley said, but for liability reasons they won’t be climbing onto anyone’s rooftop. They’ll give the viewer a list of TV technicians for that.

House calls will impress viewers, Rumley predicts:

“What do I owe you?”

“Not a thing.”

Instead of passing the buck for reception problems to the cable or satellite companies, get to know contacts there. “It’s your product, your viewer. You really need to take ownership of the problem,” Rumley said.

If you alter your mix of HD and standard-def streams in your DTV channel when primetime starts each day, some cable headend equipment may stumble and need to be rebooted each time, he noted.

When February 2009 comes around, Rumley added, you’ll want to make sure all cable systems are picking up your main channel from your digital signal—not from the analog one that will soon disappear. “If you don’t,” he said, “on the afternoon of the 18th, you’re not going to have enough phone lines.”

Develop customer-service procedures. Check with past callers to make sure your staff followed through with requested assistance. After some experience, stations can create a “knowledge base” database, recording the nature of reception problems and the best steps for resolving them.

When the front desk refers calls to the engineers, UNC-TV keeps track of calls and solutions by noting them in Request Tracker, a customer-service application from Best Practical Solutions LLC. Myers Information Systems also makes an optional ProTrack module for tracking customer-service calls.

Once the call volume peaks, Rumley expects the staff won’t take vacations ’til it’s over.

“These people may be angry,” he said. “They may be abusive. You need to understand that they’ve lost something they treasure. . . . You need to have a good bedside manner.”