Mediacom, regularly rated America’s worst cable operator by Consumer Reports, is earning its bad reputation when it left one Iowa retirement community with extended outages that began Dec. 20 and did not get resolved for more than two weeks.

Dozens of elderly residents at the Good Life Retirement Apartments in Norwalk, Iowa were unable to talk to anyone except a national technical support center that never connected the dots about the broader outage and only arranged individual service calls that never addressed the larger problem.

When the Des Moines Register’s consumer watchdog began receiving calls, Mediacom finally noticed.

The optics of delivering bad service to a retirement community populated primarily by 70+ year old retirees on fixed incomes that depend on cable television for entertainment delivered the cable company yet another public relations blow.

A Mediacom official finally acknowledged there was a bigger problem. Phyllis Peters, communications director for Mediacom, told the newspaper the outages were due to a “rare and broader issue” that affected customers across Des Moines.

Affected customers have been given credits for the extended outages, finally resolved Jan. 4, but most would have rather received working service.

“With this being a senior community, we don’t get to go out to the movies at night,” Edna Haines told the Register. “Our TV is our entertainment.”

Mediacom claims they are addressing their poor reputation for customer service with two new initiatives:

• Customers left endlessly on hold can select a new call-back feature to request a local employee call back the customer at a pre-selected time;
• Mediacom’s national customer service center (1-800-332-0245) now uses speech recognition to help direct calls to the appropriate department.