Earlier this month, Comcast made a bid to acquire Time Warner Cable for approximately $45 billion dollars. This would add an additional 12 million paying subscribers to their existing 22 million subscriber base and leave Comcast controlling roughly 30% of the entire cable industry market. The collective consumer and media group reaction was a long sigh of frustration, anger, and helplessness. Given the choice between dealing with a cable company and waiting in line at the DMV, most people would gladly pay their dues and wait 4 hours at the DMV. Assuming the deal gets regulatory approval, the resulting monopoly wouldn’t bode well for consumers.

Cable companies have a notorious and well deserved bad reputation. With Comcast and TWC coming in at the bottom of the barrel. Complaints range from billing disasters, throttled internet speeds, general unresponsiveness, and even blatant lying on promised discounts. That being said, everybody loves a good redemption story. If handled tactfully, Comcast can use this deal as a catalyst in the transformation of their organization. Here are some initial steps that Comcast and TWC can take to begin the process.

Improve Customer Service

People considering cable and internet packages have options aside from cable now, so the customer experience is vitally important. There’s a lot of low hanging fruit in the cable industry when it comes to customer service — small changes have the potential to make huge improvements to the overall customer experience. For example, the installation process is a huge stress point for customers. Being transparent about scheduled installation times through online tools and applications and properly vetting general contractors would make the installation process much smoother. While running a cable company is more complicated than selling shoes online, the Zappos experience still applies. Putting customers’ needs first is the foundation of a successful business.

Improve Customer Responsiveness

Directly tied to customer service, it’s important to channel customer insights into informed product decisions. There are many latent customer needs not being met or even addressed. For example, most people only watch a select few channels and don’t need or want hundreds of options. On top of that, Intentionally misleading and bloated cable plans only serve to frustrate the customer further. A potential solution would be testing the validity of creating select channel packages. Bringing customization and choice into the normally rigid channel selection process would more closely match the change in consumer demand. Yes, Comcast and TWC would potentially lose money in the short term, but with the additional resources gained from the merger, testing new business models would be feasible and a step in the right direction.

Be Adaptable

Experimentation, even at a small level like above, will go a long way towards guiding Comcast & TWC through the shifting competitive landscape. Technology that empowers smaller players is opening up the market and the big players have to adapt. One step in adapting is redefining the guiding vision behind the organization. A merger is a great opportunity to reshape and align the purpose of the company to be more future oriented and aware. The first steps towards that goal would mean making customers the first priority, increasing transparency, and taking risks on new business models.

Giant lumbering cable companies are pretty much the antithesis of responsive organizations. Comcast & TWC have hundreds of moving parts, are incredibly slow to adapt, and are not customer oriented in the slightest. The reality is Comcast and TWC’s incumbent advantage is becoming less and less valuable. Innovative and fast moving technology companies like Google and Aero are already chipping away at Comcast and TWC’s market share. Organizational change would be difficult, but improving in small steps is possible and entirely necessary for the long term success of the company. “Business as usual,” just isn’t cutting it anymore.