Goal: Tci Image Upgrade -- New Leader Guides Cable Giant's Transformation

The TCI cable company gained such notoriety in the Puget Sound area that customers came up with inventive variations on the acronym that officially stood for Tele-Communications Inc.

Like Terrible Cable Inc.; Truly, Completely Incompetent; and Television Criminals Inc.

Now enter James "Trey" Smith III and a new acronym, AT&T.

AT&T acquired TCI in March, and in July, Smith took over as the area's new head for the cable company that had long felt the wrath of customers and towns across the Puget Sound region for poor customer service and postponed system upgrades.

A veteran of the cable industry, Smith is charged with transforming the Northwest division of the former TCI into part of the Broadband & Internet Services unit at telecommunications giant AT&T.

AT&T plans to provide a host of telecommunications services, including local and long-distance phone service, Internet access and cable-television connections over the cables that TCI ran into 1.5 million households in Washington state.

But persuading customers to forgive TCI's past and trust its network as the path to the future makes Smith's already daunting challenges in this competitive landscape even tougher.

Smith, 51, has the benefit and disadvantage of coming from outside the TCI culture. He doesn't share the reputation that TCI had. But he also must adjust to a new business and mold it in a new direction.

He started in the cable industry in 1977, working for Cox Cable

Communications. He moved to Times Mirror Cable TV in Southern California in 1982. After 13 years with Times Mirror, he took another job with Media One/Continental Cablevision as its senior vice president for the Western region.

Smith then decided to retire from the business and play golf. The retirement lasted two months before he accepted the president's post with Rogers Cablesystems, Canada's largest cable company.

Even then he wouldn't sit still. Two months later, a mentor with AT&T persuaded Smith to leave Rogers and head west to handle the transition of TCI into AT&T's new division.

It seems a strange choice in some ways. TCI steadily angered towns around the Puget Sound region because of service disruptions and broken promises on upgrading cable service. Customers complained about rude employees working the customer-service line. The company was even the target of spoofs on the local comedy show "Almost Live."

But TCI was focusing on these problems even before he came to town, Smith said. Two customer-service centers - one in Fife and one in Everett - help respond to complaints in a more efficient manner.

AT&T, which announced it would buy TCI about 15 months ago, insisted on improvements in the handling of customer-service calls before being "willing to put their name on the door," Smith said. AT&T only recently bestowed its name on the cable network.

Smith said he is focusing on better training for employees to improve customer service. He also is overseeing the remainder of the upgrade of the cable network throughout Seattle and King County to ensure that it can handle the telecommunications services AT&T is eager to offer.

Local-telephone service over cable could happen as soon as next year, he said, and Seattle will be one of the first markets for that service.

Smith will also concentrate on increasing community outreach, whether by sponsoring free movies in Fremont or offering installation specials for donations to food banks.

Company employees' adjustment to Smith has been smooth so far, said Paula Trustdorf, vice president of operations for the Northwest division. "Trey arrived here at this division with definite goals and vision in mind," she said.

Employees agreed with those goals, she said. Previously, the company had to focus on a new customer-service call center and the upgrades. Now they can turn their attention to new initiatives.

"We're ready for the next level," she said.

In some measures, the cable company has improved its record. The number of complaints that filter into the King County and Seattle offices that handle cable communications has dropped significantly in the past two years.

"I think there's been a conscious effort on the part of the company to do a better job with customer service," said Chris Jaramillo, a compliance officer with the King County office of Cable Communication.

Although TCI broke its promises and needed a nine-month extension on upgrading its network, the new company seems to be meeting its revised deadlines, said Steve Holmes, director of the office of Cable Communications for the city of Seattle.

"I'm real happy to see things like that," Holmes said. "That was stuff we pushed and pushed for a lot of years and got a lot of resistance."

The spirit to offer better service has long been there among the local employees that worked for TCI, Holmes said.

"Nobody wants to work for a company where you can't announce who you work for at cocktail parties," he said. "The issue is more whether or not they had the resources to make that happen."

AT&T's interest to offer more services seems to have provided that extra motivation, Holmes added.

Helen Jung's phone: 206-464-2742.