• Immediacy – The web is a “pull” medium, a company advertises its website through conventional marketing methods and then hopes the customer visits when they need to interact. The desktop is a very different environment, it’s a “push” medium, it’s immediate, applications can be accessed at the click of a button and information can be placed directly in front of a customer by the provider if the right desktop software product is installed.
• Targeting – If you’re an application that sits on the customer’s desktop then you know about that computer; what applications are being run, what problems are occurring, what preferences a user has selected and what devices are attached. This allows you to provide targeted information and services to the customer.
• Control – Running on the PC gives you access to the system registry and all other operational systems within the PC. This allows for troubleshooting, performance optimization, services management, installation management and various other useful operations.

• Advanced Contextual Support – most 1st generation Desktop Support Agents could detect fault conditions and provide an automatic resolution. A 2nd generation Desktop Support Agent now needs to be able to detect the configuration of the customer’s machine and present them with support flows and information based on this configuration. In other words, the service experience is tailored to the customer and their environment.
• Unifying the Application Space – As Digital Service Providers provide more value added services (VAS) there is the potential to have a wide range of mini-applications that each provides elements of service to the customer. This “Application Space” is disparate and distributed, and in many cases even differently branded. The 2nd generation desktop agent needs to be able to manage installation of these services and then act as a point of aggregation that unifies the application space with each application being able to be launched from the agent.
• Delivering “Service Center” Functionality – Most DSPs have a “My Services” page associated with their website that provides authenticated access to account services. These are useful because subscribers that know how to use this facility can do so and hence avoid having to ring the call center. Generally the subscriber can make account changes here far faster than they could do over the phone. The problem is that “My Services” pages tend to be under-utilized. They suffer from the “pull” nature of the website relying on the subscriber to know where the services are and how to use them. A “My Services” service built into a desktop agent doesn’t suffer from this drawback.
• Desktop Messaging – As an important function of 1st generation desktop agents, this continues to be a powerful feature of 2nd generation agents with the amendment that 2nd generation desktop agents also provide powerful targeting functionality to allow service and marketing messages to become more personalised.
• Driving Revenue – As Average Revenue Per Unit (ARPU) is threatened by product commoditization and greater competition in the marketplace, strategies have to be found to sell more to the current subscriber base. A 2nd generation agent facilitates this through targeted contextual marketing. For instance, during agent installation the desktop agent can check whether a security system such as AVS or Norton is installed and if it isn’t the application can give the customer the opportunity to purchase one. This potentially improves the customer’s level of service and it’s contextual to their environment.
• Home Network Management – Finally we live in the age of digital ubiquity! After being promised the digital home for the last 10 years in the last two it’s started to become a reality. Multiple PCs, laptops, networked storage systems, media centers, wireless routers, PDAs, smart phones, internet radio, gaming consoles, digital photo frames and print sharing are all becoming commonplace. However, installation, management and support of these devices and services are not. A 2nd generation desktop agent needs to be able to detect these local area network elements, help the subscriber configure them and provide local area network support. It also needs to provide the call center agent information that allows for application based visualization of a customer’s home network.

Welcome to the second of our blogs on subscriber activation. This month we’re looking at the complex subject of CPE configuration and management.

If we step back in time around five years ago the subject of customer premise equipment (CPE) configuration and management was important to digital service providers but arguably far less vital than it is today. DSPs have always struggled with the issues around configuration and management of diverse CPE. However, the development of the broadband forum’s standards (TR 69, 64, 111 and 176) for ADSL CPE management and the increasing popularity of VoIP and IPTV have necessitated that more sophisticated systems for CPE management be developed.

For today’s ADSL broadband customer, activation means more than just setting up their PC. It means activating their gateway with services, security and quality of service (QoS) parameters, possibly configuring IPTV or VoIP equipment, and potentially even activating other devices on their network. To enable this, an auto-configuration server (ACS) is required and we shall look at some of the challenges it overcomes below.  But first, let me share with you a story that will set the stage for why an ACS is so important. 

A large UK company had a vulnerability revealed in its home gateway in 2007 that allowed for “eavesdropping, caller spoofing and other nasty attacks”. Fortunately the company in question had an ACS and so was able to rapidly update their deployed gateways, but what would have happened had they not had this facility? How would they have updated the 100s of thousands of gateways they had deployed? Recall? Disk based upgrade? Outbound calling to customers? What about the impact on brand equity and customer satisfaction? The impact to them as an organization would have been significant, in the 10s of millions of pounds. This is an extreme case but organizations suffer similar medium and low impact events on a regular basis all of which have a cost associated with them. Implementation of an ACS can be seen as an insurance policy that pays dividend when something like this occurs and can be quickly resolved.

Having the soft touch

If you’re managing activation of services in a customer’s home then there are probably four things that are of utmost importance to you:

Customer experience – First and foremost you want your new subscriber to have a great installation experience. This will determine their attitude to you and ultimately even contribute to whether or not you retain them as a customer. It’s far easier to create an initial good customer experience than to attempt to repair a bad relationship created by a poor customer experience.

 

Installation quality – The quality of any installation can have a long term impact on the quality of service a subscriber receives. Detecting problems at point of install that can then be rapidly solved by an engineer prior to him leaving the customer’s property is likely to have a very beneficial impact on the customer’s satisfaction with your service.

 

Time! – If you’re conducting engineer installs, time *is* money. A lot of DSPs use third party engineers to conduct installations. Simply rolling a truck to a customer’s home is likely to set you back $ 50 - $ 100 before you start to account for any extra time the engineer has to spend at the customer’s location.

 

On-going maintenance – Whatever CPE is installed at the customer’s home you want to be able to continue to maintain it once you’ve left the customer’s location. Part of this is simply being able to update modems with new firmware but there is also the requirement to be able to enact service policies such as bandwidth usage, user quarantine, abuse management and security management.

Motivated by Installation

I have found that there are three primary motivators of customer satisfaction with an installation:  simplicity, reliability and speed.

SIMPLICITY:  Zero-touch configuration allows the customer to simply connect the device to the network and an ACS automatically triggers power cycling of the device, enables services and triggers any required provisioning. The customer is oblivious to any of this, they just knows that their device works immediately (or very nearly so) without them needing to go through a complex set up procedure.

RELIABILITY:  Zero-touch configuration delivers reproducibility and removes the potential for human error ensuring that every installation follows a distinct and known path. This contributes to a high quality of installation. It also has the ability to look at modem parameters such as line attenuation (the degradation of signal to a modem generally due to distance and physical line characteristics). This can give an engineer or call center representative a clear indication of whether the quality of an installation is good and allow them to take immediate action to improve the line quality if required.

SPEED:  Zero-touch provisioning also potentially means not having to role a truck, or at the very least, significantly cutting down on the amount of time an engineer spends at a customer’s home. To understand the impact of this, imagine for a moment that you have a DSP that is doing 30,000 IPTV installs a month at a truck roll cost of $100 per truck roll. Remove the need for this truck roll and you’re instantly saving $3 M a month or $36 M a year. Even halving the time an engineer has to spend at a customer home would have a significant impact on costs.

Closing Thoughts

Although not strictly part of the activation process the foundation for on-going maintenance is laid down during activation. The use of an ACS to activate gateways or other LAN devices means that they can be connected to thereafter for maintenance activities. In my mind this is the single most important activation benefit that an ACS provides, not only does it allow for the auto provision of new, free and paid services but it also allows for the automatic update of devices as seen in my earlier story.

So to summarize, a good DSP activation process has a number of requirements that necessitate the implementation of automated systems. A combination of disk based install and an auto-configuration server provides a flexible solution that meets the majority of these needs.

If you have any questions regarding activation you can contact the Digital Optimist at orhan.ertughrul@consona.com. Or for more information on how Consona can help you implement a market leading activation process contact us and we’ll be happy to help you.

This month we’re tackling the issue of activating the subscriber. This will be a two part blog which will cover disk activation systems this month and auto-configuration servers next month.

Broadband is now a mass market product where customers expect installation of their connectivity and configuration of their basic services to be quick and easy.  And although the subject of activating a subscriber may seem a little mundane, I believe it’s one of the most exciting parts of the customer lifecycle and one which relatively little investment is made by digital service providers. A couple of years back I worked with a large UK organization who didn’t even have an install process per se. They simply pre-provisioned the customer’s modem and gave them a single printed sheet with instructions on how to set up their email. Perhaps unsurprisingly they weren’t growing the subscriber base according to their projections.

A well thought through activation process can reduce costs, improve subscriber retention, differentiate your service from that of your competitors and generate revenue; issues which every digital service provider is struggling with. This blog entry will look at some of the best practices associated with activation.

Making Activation Work For You

Ask the majority of employees in a digital service provider organisation what the activation process is for and in around 90% of cases you’ll get the same answer “It’s for getting the subscriber connected to our network and activating services they want.” This is primarily true but it drastically underestimates the importance of activation in your organization. In the case above your activation process is relegated to the position of a necessity instead of it being viewed as a substantial asset.

So what should an install process be doing? Rather than splitting down our list functionally like most approaches I’ve seen, we’ll take a look at this based on digital service provider strategic objectives:

Cost reduction – First and foremost your installation process should get your subscriber installed quickly and without problems. This means having enough intelligence built into your system such that a problem can be identified and resolved without the subscriber having recourse to call the help desk. This is where I favour disk installation systems that have part of their installation process online within a walled garden, to a diskless system. There are some Internet connectivity issues that you simply can’t resolve with a diskless system, such as a PC Internet configuration problem. The system should also gather and present to the customer enough information so that if he can’t get connected they are armed with the correct information should they have to call the help desk.

However, if this is as far as our cost reduction initiative goes then we’re missing a trick. Now is the time to introduce the subscriber to lifetime self-care services. In introducing them to what the online self-care resources have to offer (possible through the medium of a flash movie) and installing pro-active support applications on their desktop you’re setting them up from the start to be less of a burden on your help desk.

Retention – One of the primary barriers to subscribers switching their digital service provider are the services that they are using, and most notably email. The more services you can persuade a customer to adopt at installation the less likely they will be to churn. Imagine the situation where a customer uses your email system, online storage, white-labeled security solution and online photo album. What will be their propensity to churn compared to a customer who simply has Internet connectivity. The adoption of so-called “sticky” services is key to retaining customers and the beauty of this approach is that it is pre-emptive not reactive. It’s more expensive to try and keep a customer who is threatening to churn than to ensure that they don’t want to churn in the first place.

Revenue Generation – when a customer is installing their new broadband service they should be excited about the new service they’re getting. At this point additional value added services can be positioned which, if adopted by the user, can create incremental revenue streams and have the additional benefit of improving retention as already noted. A typical approach might be to offer them several services (such as email) which they receive for free in addition to a variety of paid services. The customer can then pick and choose their service portfolio. With critical services such as Security it’s even possible to determine if a customer has a security product and offer them one if they don’t.

Again the ability to generate revenue through your install process doesn’t end here. With the installation of a desk-top service agent you continue to have the ability to offer contextual sales and upgrades throughout the lifetime of the customer by direct marketing to their desktop.

Differentiation – taking a “customer experience” approach to activation and the delivery of services, if done well, is a great start in differentiating your service from that of your competitors but there is also a secondary effect; in removing a segment of simply resolved activation issues from the help desk you allow the help desk to deal with providing a higher level of support for the more complex queries. In other words, instead of the help desk being mired down in triage they are able to concentrate on becoming trusted advisors to your subscribers and this also helps improve the customer experience.

Your activation process should always terminate in a customer questionnaire so that you have your customers’ opinion of your install process. This should advise further upgrades and adaptations to the activation solution.

I’d love to hear about the challenges you are facing as well as any success stories in your activation process.  Share your comments here or email The Digital Optimist directly at orhan.ertughrul@consona.com.

The Next Blog:  Subscriber Activation - Part 2

Don’t miss the second part of this series where I will cover another critical piece of the activation process - configuring and updating customer premise equipment such as modems, routers and set-top boxes to name a few.

Welcome to Episode 2 of the Consona DSP self-care blog series.

Dan Quayle, much loved by pundits worldwide for his turn of phrase, is reported to have said “If we don’t succeed then we run the risk of failure”. Although something of a truism his statement applies to the current provision of online services rather appropriately in as much as DSPs frequently don’t set themselves up to succeed in the first instance. Yankee believes that in the next three years there will be a continued shift of around 12% from traditional communication channels to online channels so it is, and will continue to be, important for DSPs to have effective online service channels. Episode 2 of the blog series looks at some of the typical online service channel pitfalls.

Why Support Services Deliver Poor Performance

Today almost all DSPs have online support channels of varying breadth and complexity. They offer a range of services such as:

·         Knowledgebase

·         “My Services” section for configuration and management of products and services

·         Auto-response

·         Community tools (chat, forums, tweets, etc.)

·         Automated fixes

·         Online incident submission

·         Resolution flows (case base reasoning tools)

Some DSPs have augmented these capabilities with PC resident software agents that automatically detect and resolve problems on a customer’s PC allowing for pro-active support.

Despite having a plethora of support tools at their disposal many DSPs I’ve talked to are dissatisfied with the performance of their online service channel. The problems generally fall into four main areas:

Welcome to Episode 1 of the Consona DSP self-care blog series entitled the Digital Optimist.

Samuel Johnston once famously stated that “A second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience”. Sometimes, looking at the deployment of automated self care systems within digital service providers (DSPs) I find I have a similar feeling. It’s not that the initial deployments aren’t accomplished or that the information found within isn’t of a high quality but often, by the DSPs own admission, the impact is poor.