LAS VEGAS – Being the primary video source for customers is a far different thing than being there for them as a wireline, wireless or data provider.
Cable companies know this inherently thanks to decades of experience and many, many mistakes over the years. Cable’s first alert that there might be a network problem used to be when a customer called in to report they had no TV service and it might have taken a few calls (and please be there sometime between 8 and 8…) before the problem was fixed.
Nowadays, large cable companies have sophisticated network operations centres that often alert them to problems before the customer even finds out – and therefore prior to the element of extra cost is introduced like a call to customer service or (horrors!) a truck roll.
Cable’s service history and development came to mind as Dan Turner, program director for Telus TV, led a session at the National Association of Broadcasters’ Telecom 2009 conference session this morning here in Las Vegas.
He outlined the issues his company had to face – and reverse – over the past couple of years as the big western-based telco began to ramp up its nascent IPTV service in Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver and a few other territories.
The number of “chronic customers” – those who had to repeatedly call for help to make their new digital television service work right “were significantly higher than we were expecting,” noted Turner. Issues such as the TV pixelating when the phone rang, or the set top box rebooting for no reason in the middle of the show or needing to reset the modem every day were common complaints.
The fixes offered at the tech level (who might have spent four hours there in the first place installing IPTV) ran the gamut and often times, did not do the trick. Many times the tech simply swapped out the set top box, whether they knew the box was the problem or not – which caused the refurb and return rates for Telus’ Cisco digital decoders to spike.
A service with this many customer service holes could not be pushed to scale until the problems were solved.
To outsiders, said Turner, the problem was always going to be the “50-year-old” copper network which delivered the advanced services over that “last mile” – or at least from the DSLAM out to the homes, usually much closer than a mile…
But after analysis, Telus found that it was causing its own problems and that it could be fixed at a relatively low cost. “We were creating the chronic customers ourselves in the way we were servicing them,” said Turner.
“It wasn’t that we need more tools, much to our vendors’ chagrin, maybe” said Turner.
For example, when customers called the 310-MYTV number, their call was routed first by whatever number they chose first in the phone menu, meaning it could be routed just about any call centre in the company, instead of to where the expertise lay. “We had many different support teams focused on providing customer service in their silos which were not correctly connected,” said Turner.
Plus, techs were not in the habit of recording exactly what they did each visit, leaving any follow up technicians who visited wondering what might have been done the first time. Turner even said one customer had their entire drop replaced on back to back days due to faulty record-keeping.
So Turner and his team decided to ACT – and formed an Advanced Chronic Trouble-shooting team to get to the bottom of why so many customers were having repeated issues with their new, interactive digital TV service from Telus.
For six months, key members from the field, including network operations, technical support and even the CTO, monitored progress of customer trouble call resolution from start to finish, tracked completion and accuracy of records and followed up with customers within 30 days.
Just doing that boosted the problems resolved in the first contact or first tech visit to 68%.
“That addressed two-thirds (of the problems),” said Turner, “an enormous success from our perspective.”
After further analysis, Turner’s group realized that most of the chronics had one of the same three problems of either a customer premises issue, outside plant or network problem – but really, most of the troubles were occurring in or at the home.
“We realized it has nothing to do with our plant, really. We don’t have to lay fibre to everyone’s house,” he said. Issues like old wiring in the home or locating “a microwave close to the drop” were some of the real-world issues Telus had to address. Indeed, most video providers will tell you that it’s the decrepit air conditioner or the neighbour’s band saw that is more often than not the problem with video quality of service.
A low percentage was plant issues and network errors were often DSLAM port problems or provisioning mistakes that could be fixed without sending anyone to the home.
The company also had to move to align differing service standards that still existed based on former territories of old telcos Telus had purchased over the years so that the tech working in Kelowna is labouring under the same thresholds as the one in Edmonton.
Turner also found that once techs were at customer homes, they spent far too much time talking to tier II tech support asking for help, so certain tools were pushed deeper into the field to lessen that cost.
In the end, reworks and repairs were cut in half and repairs resulting in a chronic customer was reduced by 75%, said Turner. “We literally chopped the head off this problem,” he added.
And just in time too as Telus is ramping up its consumer marketing out west to try and drive Telus TV into far more connected homes.
Turner thinks Telus is at the blade end of the hockey stick graph, just about to grow big, noting that they have more people wanting the service than they can serve (which also has a bit to do with the dearth of trained labour in the market, something cable competitor Shaw has complained about, too).
“Right now demand far outstrips our capacity to install,” he added.
