Indeed, there is perhaps no industry in America whose reputation for appalling customer service outshines that of the nation's pay-TV providers. In its most recent survey, for instance, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) singled out three major cable operators -- AT&T (T), Charter Communications (CHTR), and Comcast (CMCSK) -- for earning "among the lowest scores ever recorded, across all companies and all industries." Much of the blame for this abysmal customer service record can be laid at the feet of a familiar villain: outsourcing. To cut costs, most pay-TV providers have farmed out customer service functions to vast call centers employing thousands of disaffected workers -- low-paid, poorly trained, and lacking any real incentive to care about the plight of their faceless customers.

There is, however, one striking exception to this rule: the roughly 7,000 call-center reps who pick up the phone and answer e-mail for the 11.4 million subscribers of DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite-TV provider. After years of performing in line with its rivals -- which is to say, poorly -- last year DirecTV was ranked at the top of the cable/satellite industry in separate customer opinion polls from J.D. Power & Associates, the ACSI, and the Yankee Group. More important, the improved customer service helped DirecTV significantly reduce its churn rate (the number of subscribers bailing out of the service), perhaps the industry's most important metric.

It was an impressive turnaround, to be sure. But here's the real shocker: Most of the employees responsible for these improvements aren't actually employees of DirecTV. They're hired and managed by the same outsourcing firm -- Cincinnati-based Convergys (CVG) -- that runs comparatively lousy customer service operations for competitors like Comcast.

So what gives? Money, for one thing: The contract between DirecTV and its outsourcer is valued at about $200 million annually, according to analysts -- far higher, on a per-customer basis, than the industry average. But that's not to suggest that the improvement was as simple as handing over a big check. It's the way DirecTV has managed Convergys that has turned its call-center operation into an industry role model.