Meet Rick Fraher, area vice president of installation and service for North Florida at Comcast. He started the position May 8. His team includes about 500 technicians and supervisors and his area is the Florida Panhandle, Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Lake County and Brunswick, Georgia, and Dothan, Alabama. The Florida Region is the largest in the country for Comcast by subscribers, with about 3 million customers.
What I really want to do is create a great employee experience and a great customer experience. Comcast has a really solid product. I want to make sure we deliver it as well as it can be and make sure that our employees are happy and our customers are happy and ultimately make North Florida the No. 1 market in the country.
I’m from California so it’s a different coast. It’s more humid. There’s more lightning and rain than I’m used to. I’m a big Dodger fan and they don’t start playing until 10 o’clock at night, so I don’t get to watch the full game. I watch some of it and then my wife records it.
There are some legitimate issues that we need to address. We probably hear from about 3 percent to 4 percent of our subscriber base, meaning 96 to 97 percent are perfectly happy with the service and we never hear from them.
I started in the cable industry in 1990 as an installer in San Diego with Time Warner, so I’ve worked my way through the ranks. I’ve had jobs across different departments; a lot of it was in technical operations and engineering. I also spent some time in human resources and training, then got back into technical operations. I have a pretty diverse history with the cable industry.
The biggest early change was integrating fiber optics and deploying internet and what they used to call the information super highway back in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. I think most recently is probably our video deployment and there’s more emphasis on the internet. We’re transitioning to more video streaming through the internet.
The two products that we recently deployed or are in the process of deploying are a cellphone service called Xfinity Mobile and our wireless video device. Where we were using a wired device to get to some rooms, we now have a wireless solution for rooms that don’t have any cabling. It’s a better customer experience.
The biggest shift in the industry is probably the way video is being delivered. We have a lot more options in how you get your video service, whether it be Netflix or Hulu or something along that line. We’ve integrated Netflix into our X1 platform. We’ve also made sure that our internet is capable of handling that new demand.
My wife and I have gone kayaking, camping, a lot of outdoor type stuff, going to the beach. I work all the time now. This is the busiest job I’ve ever had.