On June 2, Customer Service Representative Tim Paulson moved from his normal job on the phones to the front desk to handle a winding line of irate customers. Meanwhile in the call center, as many as 30 customers at a time were waiting for their calls to be answered. As they grew impatient from being on hold, employees became tense and exhausted as their jobs became more challenging than they have ever been.
The cause of this chaos is the digital transition, and it's a process every cable company in America must undergo within the next year.
"I was overwhelmed," Paulson said.
The Federal Communications Commission has mandated that all cable television companies switch their channels from analog to digital by February 17, 2009. Sunflower Broadband chose to complete its transition in June in the hope that customers would be least disrupted by the channel change during the summer.
For Sunflower
Broadband, the digital transition meant changing 23 analog channels
to digital and high definition channels. Since analog channels take
up 12 times the space of a digital channel, the the transition made
room to add more than two hundred digital channels to cable packages. 
Regardless of the additional high definition channels, the transition did have its affect on Sunflower Broadband's sales. As of August 22, sales were behind their goals by $700 for bronze cable subscribers and $175 for basic cable subscribers. The transition changed the basic cable package, which accounts for 62% of cable industry sales, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Overall, Sunflower Broadband's sales are down 3% from previous years.
"That's within a margin of error," Kutemeier said. "We expected to lose a lot more customers than we did."
According to Marketing Director Rod Kutemeier, the technical side of the transition went off without a hitch; the company switched the channels successfully and without complication.
Despite the technical success of the digital transition, several environmental obstacles presented themselves that week. On June 2, the day of the transition, a thunderstorm knocked out a Westar Energy power line and caused many Lawrence residents to lose power.
"A lot of customers remembered that we were doing the transition, and thought the outages had something to do with us," Kutemeier said.
A few days later, Sunflower Broadband had its first power outage in 12 years. Customer service representatives could not answer phones and customers across town lost their services for a brief period. These complications took the management team by surprise.
"If we had come up with the worst-case scenario ahead of time of what could happen the week of the transition, we could not have come up with stuff this good," Kutemeier said.
Sunflower Broadband took many measures to prepare customers for the upcoming change in cable packages. It offered free cable boxes to customers in the months leading up to the transition to enable customers to keep their channels. The company also sent out notices ahead of time to explain the transition to Lawrence residents.
"We overcommunicated, telling and preparing customers ahead of time for the digital transition," Kutemeier said. "People were upset, but they understood what was going on and we only had three escalations total of people who requested to speak with a manager."
Some customers found a more positive experience in this change, taking advantage of the deals that were available to make the transition smoother.
"When I called in to Sunflower, the employees seemed like they actually wanted to save me money," said Sunflower Broadband customer Kristen Dayton.
According to Kutemeier, the main reason that Sunflower Broadband loses customers to competition is for high definition channels. The transition allowed the company to better compete for the highest number of these channels.
"In the short term, the digital transition certainly wasn't a moneymaker," Kutemeier said, "but we would have lost more customers in the long run if we hadn't made room for the HD channels."
Since the transition, Sunflower has added three high definition channels to the cable lineup, and promises more to come.
Most cable companies are waiting until the Federal Communications Commissions mandated date in February to transition to digital channels.
"Companies like Time Warner and Comcast will be affected by the transition just like Sunflower," Paulson said. "They will have to make the decision to either go fully digital, or to down-convert their channels to analog so that their customers do not need a cable box."
For Sunflower Broadband, however, the digital transition is already complete. On February 17, while other companies are managing the stress and complications of the digital transition, Tim Paulson and his coworkers can kick back and enjoy the show.
