Bell Canada: Broadband Leader Delivers Value-added Services with Simplicity Built-in
The climate is changing in the competitive field of broadband service providers. Just a few years ago, the biggest challenge was managing the explosive growth of new customers. Today, as the broadband market matures, the focus has shifted to retaining existing users and growing revenue through value-added services. This strategy, however, is incredibly challenging; companies must maintain or improve the quality of their customer experience while adding technologically sophisticated services such as voice-over- IP (VoIP) and home networking. Successful companies have learned the most important lesson of this new era is to keep it simple. Not dumb, but simple—a far greater challenge. At Bell Canada, the largest provider of Internet services in Canada, mastering this delicate balance has become job one. As the company offers more powerful digital home services, it works diligently to ensure that the services will be easy to use and the customer experience will be elegantly simple.
Value-added services like VoIP, security, IPTV and home networking are inherently more complex than merely providing a broadband connection. Providers must shield their customers from the complexity so they don’t become frustrated and give up. Bell Canada is achieving this by building management technology from Austin, Texas-based Motive, Inc., directly into the provider’s value-added services. In essence, Motive’s software makes Bell Canada’s services self-managing and therefore easier to install, use and support. The net result is an effortless, satisfying and entertaining customer experience no matter how complex the underlying technology of the service may be.
Earning the Business
Bell Canada is the main subsidiary of Canada’s largest communications company, Bell Canada Enterprises, and provides local telephone, long distance, wireless communications, Internet access, data, satellite television and other services to residential and business customers via some 26 million customer connections. The provider’s DSL service, which includes Canada’s most popular portal, the co-branded Sympatico/MSN portal offered by Bell Canada’s Consumer Internet Services unit and Microsoft Corporation, has been a particular success. At the end of 2004, the company had more than 1.8 million DSL subscribers, of which 624,000 also subscribe to one or more value-added services—an impressive level of “take-up.”
Mainstream Success is No Sure Thing
An Internet pioneer, Bell Canada began offering a portal as early as November 1995. For several years, the number of customers increased steadily. Then the company’s Internet business reached a plateau. Charlotte Burke, senior vice president of consumer Internet services, recalls: “In our first year, we achieved 50,000 customers who were mainly technology enthusiasts. It was not until we started interacting more intensively with our customers that we ‘broke through’ and started earning the 200,000 or so customers we signed up the following year. The lesson we learned was that when you’re dealing with mainstream customers, everything has to be simple.”
During the past few years, Bell Canada has learned more about what simplicity means to customers—and precisely how to deliver it to them. The company took a major step three years ago when it began using Motive technology to offer DSL customers a faster and simpler pre-qualification and self-installation process, plus easy-to-use tools for self- and assisted-support. These improvements achieved two goals: they improved the user experience, and they reduced Bell Canada’s costs for supporting new and existing customers. Today 99 percent of customers self-install their service, and self-support saves the company $3 to $4 million per year by deflecting about 35,000 help-desk calls per month. The savings allow the company to better serve its customers and invest in new capabilities.
“Living with the Customer”
For Bell Canada, becoming adept at determining what is easy and simple for customers of varying skill levels required adapting its research methodology. The company is now incredibly sophisticated in its interactions with customers—both online and in person—and as a result has gained a clear and detailed understanding of how customers perceive simplicity.
“We conduct Web trials with customers all the time,” says Burke, “We even have Internet-based self-care tools and a virtual customer service agent to provide advice on a variety of technical issues. At the same time, we also learn a lot from customers online. In addition, we run an in-person testing program that we call ‘Living with the Customer.’ Our consultants spend hours with willing customers in their own homes. What we find is that if our consultants visit for two or three hours, we get to see how people use the technology in their day-to-day lives. We get to see who’s the technology expert in the household, who decides how things are configured and which applications are used, and who uses which applications. So even within one household, there can be novices, advanced users, and people in between. We’ve got to cater to all of them successfully.”
During “Living with the Customer” visits, Bell Canada consultants hand the customers a product (such as a home networking product), still sealed in the box. They ask the customers to open the box, configure and install the product, using Motive self-installation tools. As the customers do that, the Bell Canada consultants watch intently for any opportunity to simplify or expedite the process. For example, if a customer thinks he has just completed a transaction and the next screen doesn’t reward him with a “complete” notification, Bell Canada knows that the process will have to be modified to include that notification. “The Motive people have been a big help to us at this level of process detail, which is of course their expertise,” says Burke.
When Bell Canada needs to observe customer reactions in a more controlled environment, they invite 50 to 100 customer volunteers to visit the office. As the customers try out new products, consultants watch every move, keystroke and facial expression. They see what works smoothly and learn what places and situations cause customers to hesitate, get lost or become frustrated. This fine-grained information allows Bell Canada and Motive to determine how and what to automate, and by doing so, keeps improving its broadband Internet service. The results can be dramatic. For example, the company has eliminated about 70 percent of the time required for its activation process.
A Trusted Provider
Burke summarizes: “The most valuable overall lesson we have learned from our research is this: how we design our services is as important as what we design. We want to be a trusted provider, selecting the right partners and offering the right services or service bundles—but above all we want to offer those services in the right way. That is how we keep our customers and successfully sell them additional value-added services. One reason that we enjoy a high level of take-up is that we make our value-added services easy to buy and install, so customers won’t get frustrated.” Simplicity is now built-in to every value-added service Bell Canada offers. The company values Motive’s software as an essential part of its continued growth. Having reached nearly 70 percent penetration of its broadband market, Bell Canada is now deep into the territory of mainstream, non-technical consumers.
“You see, when you hit 70 percent, you have to be a lot smarter,” Burke says. “You’re not selling to early adopters who will buy almost anything new and forgive almost any mistake. That’s all in the past now. It’s no longer ‘what’s new’ and ‘what’s cool’ and ‘let’s let our customers try all these different, fun things.’ Now it’s going to be ‘how.’ If it doesn’t work well and it isn’t easy to use, we don’t want it. With hundreds of partners to choose from, we could launch a new music, video or content service every week if we wanted to. But that is not what will sustain our competitive advantage. What will sustain us is how the services work for the customer.”
She adds: “And that’s where Motive comes in. Motive has the software that can deliver a sustained competitive advantage. Motive helps us sell more and helps support our services in a more cost-effective manner.”
Motive is in effect part of Bell Canada’s R&D organization, helping to build simplicity into the company’s services from the very beginning. When a customer buys a value-added service from any Bell Canada partner, the activation, use and support are straightforward. All of the customer “touch points” have been simplified, ensuring a satisfying experience regardless of which channel, Web or other, the customer uses to interact with Bell Canada.
The collaboration between Bell Canada and Motive recently proved to be instrumental when Bell Canada launched MSN Premium last year and had to migrate hundreds of thousands of subscribers onto the MSN service. Motive simplified the entire process, including the deployment of the Motive software itself, the deployment of the MSN software, and the management of any configuration issues. Motive’s management software is built-in to the algorithms of the database; when customers call in with problems or questions, Bell Canada can diagnose the problems, answer key questions, even spot opportunities to improve service.
Providing “Data Tone”
Going forward, Bell Canada’s key goal is to persuade more customers to subscribe to a greater number of value-added services, especially those that enable the “broadband home.”
“Home networking is a challenge, for us as for any provider,” says Burke. “All of a sudden, the demarcation point isn’t at the modem any more. It has started to spray all through the house. So we have been working with Motive to support customers when they are trying to get their PCs configured, get security configured, and get all their devices configured. We have already installed a remote agent tool to enable our help desk to diagnose what’s going on at the customer’s desktop.”
“That kind of support is becoming more and more important because everything is becoming so complicated and because customers are increasingly relying on the Internet. People are becoming ingrained. They’re sharing photos. They’re connected to work. Internet connection is becoming like dial tone. It’s ‘data tone,’ and people expect it to be on all the time. Our big challenge in the future is delivering on the complexity of the broadband home. And we need every tool to make it simple that we can possibly get. Motive is a great partner to provide that.”
