Okay, this one may scream self-promotion, but we simply couldn’t ignore an article in the current BusinessWeek, “A Cable Company People Don't Hate – How Cox is keeping customers happy and stealing business from the phone giants.” Yes, we cringe a bit at digs like the one in the headline, but, then again, we have to admit it’s a fair dig since Cable’s customer service record hasn’t always been sterling. But back to the present: the article addresses not only Cox Communications', but the industry’s, successful entry into the phone biz and our push into wireless. Here’s a snippet:

There's a ton of money to be made in phone service--about $60 billion of yearly revenue just on voice plans for U.S. consumers. And don't cable companies know it. For years they have been laying miles of new fiber-optic cable and doing everything they can to steal chunks of that business from the phone giants. So far they've managed to pull away about $4.6 billion in phone revenues, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.

In the scramble for every customer, one cable outfit seems to have hit upon a formula that works: beating the phone companies at customer service. In recent surveys conducted by J.D. Power & Associates Inc., owned by Business Week parent The McGraw-Hill Companies, Atlanta-based Cox Communications outscores traditional phone providers such as AT&T, Verizon Communications, and Sprint Nextel. On a variety of metrics, from network performance and reliability to billing and cost, customers in several regions describe Cox as their preferred provider.

Techdirt has a post about the BusinessWeek article, here.