Parker preaches customer focus at Comcast

HBJ PHOTO | John Stearns Michael Parker, seen inside a lab at Comcast Cable in Berlin, has been recognized as one of CableFax: The Magazine's “Most Influential Minorities” for the past 10 years.

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By John Stearns

The Marine influence is evident in Michael Parker, the new head of Comcast Cable's western New England region, based in Berlin.

He's easygoing, but he's also competitive, talks about leading from the front and not asking people to do what he wouldn't. He graduated from Officer Candidates School, commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve and was later promoted to first lieutenant while on active duty at the 4th Marine Division.

Deterred from Marine flight school by an astigmatism, he attended law school and became a student judge advocate for the Marines. He envisioned a career in the military, but when his father died in 1990, Parker resigned his commission and returned home to Chicago to handle his father's estate.

“I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the Marines, but as happens with a lot of folks, life sort of got in the way,” said Parker, 49, who stands about 6-4 and played basketball and lacrosse at Lake Forest College outside Chicago.

Today, Parker leads 1,700-plus employees (his goal is to know all their names within a year) in a region that includes 300 communities in Connecticut, western Massachusetts, Vermont, western New Hampshire and New York. While he enjoyed law — he worked three years as an Illinois assistant attorney general after being student judge advocate — it wasn't the right career fit.

A mentor told him, “Your problem is you come from a family of entrepreneurs. You're being asked to clean up the mess. You want to be on the other side of it.”

Parker said his grandfather, Judge Henry Parker, founded the first black-owned meat processing company in the U.S., Parker House Sausage. The Chicago business still operates almost 100 years later and distributes products across the Midwest. Parker is non-executive chairman of the company and its largest shareholder.

Parker's father was a company vice president. With entrepreneurial DNA, Parker left law for the cable industry, joining Telecommunications Inc., before going to the family business in 1996 when it wasn't performing well. He got more involved in the business to ensure its long-term survival and obtained his MBA at Northwestern University. Returning to cable, he joined Comcast in 2001 in Detroit as director of operations and increased his management roles there, in Baltimore, New Haven and Chicago, before returning to Connecticut.

He enjoys the competitive, rapidly evolving industry.

“This isn't the first time that we've faced external pressures,” Parker said. “If you look at some of the apps and the excellent platforms and just the investments that we're making … I think we're positioned to continue to have a thriving business decades from now.”

People love Comcast's products, he said, but not necessarily the ease of communicating with the company, so Comcast is on a multiyear path to improve its customer service. That includes bringing more work in-house, with about 160 new customer care representatives in Connecticut so calls are more likely to be answered locally, and adding about 30 in-state technicians.

The customer connection is key, Parker said.

“When you're presenting to me, I don't want to hear about revenue generating units … because it desensitizes you to the fact that these are customers — they pay our salaries every day,” Parker said. “I think it was Sam Walton that said your customer can hire or fire you every day. … So call people customers. … If the team is passionate about it, then I think we will be successful in moving the needle and changing the perception.”

Douglas Guthrie, who heads Comcast's eight-state South region and previously supervised Parker, praised his mentee.

“He is truly a unique leader of the future who is as comfortable in the executive boardroom as he is working side by side with a technician in a customer's living room,” Guthrie wrote.

Parker returns as many weekends as he can to Chicago where his wife, Heather, and their three children, a boy, 9, and girls, 13 and 15, will stay through the school year. Heather, also 6-4, played basketball at Northwestern where she ranked eighth for blocked shots.

When not in Chicago, Parker exploits technology to stay connected with family, including online basketball games with his son. He admits to being “kind of a geek,” adding, “I just love playing with technology.”