SBC Communications Inc.: Focus on the Customer Fuels DSL Leader’s Growth

Broadband is booming. High-speed Internet connections are becoming more popular as service and hardware prices drop and bandwidth-intensive applications proliferate. There are five times as many broadband users today as there were just three years ago, and according to research from comScore Networks, in many of the largest U.S. markets, consumer broadband usage is nearly on par with narrowband connections.

In the middle of all of the explosive growth, SBC Communications Inc. stands out. Through its Internet service affiliates, SBC Communications is the nation’s leading DSL (digital subscriber line) provider with 3.5 million lines in service. In 2003, it added 1.3 million DSL lines and became the second largest broadband provider in the country.

The growth has continued at breakneck pace: eight consecutive quarters of accelerated net subscriber additions. This growth propelled the company from 146,000 net subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2001 to 377,000 net subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2003. And, SBC companies are not stopping there. By the end of this year, the plan is to reach 5 million DSL subscribers.

Several steps the company has taken are fueling its broadband success: it significantly expanded DSL Internet availability, made the service more affordable and improved the overall customer experience. To accomplish the latter, it formed a strategic alliance with Yahoo! to create a service rich in broadband-enabled content and applications, and with Austin, Texas-based Motive, Inc. for management software that helps customers more easily install and maintain the service.

“We’ve followed a strategy that not only makes SBC Yahoo! DSL service widely available and affordable, but also provides our subscribers with rich content, personalized portals and automated support,” said Jeff Weber, SBC vice president, corporate planning. “This was a key ingredient in making our broadband service a great fit for customers.”

Making the Service Accessible
SBC Communications established its leadership position when it agreed to fund the country’s first major DSL deployment effort in 1999, envisioning a multi-billion dollar project that would triple the SBC DSL footprint. By the end of 2003, SBC Yahoo! DSL was available to 36 million homes and businesses, or about 75 percent of SBC customers. This year, SBC Yahoo! DSL availability is expected to increase to 80 percent of customer locations.

Much of the recent availability was achieved by installing new remote terminals, or neighborhood broadband gateways, which push DSL availability deeper into neighborhoods, and by deploying in rural areas that have traditionally been overlooked by most broadband providers.

In addition to network expansion, the company has worked to make SBC Yahoo! DSL more affordable. In the past, some prospective broadband customers hesitated to order service because of the price, which often hovered around $45-$50 a month. SBC companies helped change that through promotional offers that made SBC Yahoo! DSL affordable to a much larger customer base. And, the company is providing even deeper discounts to customers who bundle the service with other SBC products. Today, customers can get SBC Yahoo! DSL for as low as $26.95 a month, which is just a few dollars more than much slower dial-up alternatives.

Ensuring an Excellent Customer Experience
While making the service more widely available and affordable were critical to the SBC DSL growth strategy, the other key to success was ensuring a superior customer experience.

Originally, SBC DSL subscribers were early adopters mainly interested in the high-speed and always-available nature of broadband. But to attract mainstream customers, the company knew it needed to offer a full package of content, services and applications that took better advantage of the high-speed connection. To achieve this goal, it turned to Yahoo!, the world’s leading Internet destination with extensive experience developing media, entertainment and communications applications for the Internet. The two companies launched the jointly developed SBC Yahoo! DSL service in September of 2002.

According to Weber, no company better matched the SBC criteria for an Internet partner than Yahoo!. “We’ve combined the strengths of both companies to deliver a service that’s changing the way our customers work, live and play. Users have their own customized SBC Yahoo! DSL experiences, with the ability to personalize their browser and portal to meet their specific needs. This puts the information they want at their fingertips instead of having to search for it.”

SBC Yahoo! DSL is constantly evolving to provide the very best applications and services to customers. This includes improved safety and security features with pop-up ad blocking, enhanced parental controls and anti-virus protection. SBC Yahoo! DSL also offers SpamGuard, firewall protection, extra online storage, gaming options, and business applications for the workplace.

But ensuring a superior customer experience means more than just providing a wide array of compelling content and applications. Another critical factor to the SBC success is making the ordering, provisioning, installation, and ongoing use of DSL Internet access service as convenient as possible.

“We give customers a lot of different choices,” said Weber. “They can call us directly or go online through the company’s Web site to order service. And we don’t stop there. We know it’s important to have a strong presence in places where customers buy their electronics, so we have worked hard to build a network of retailers that offer SBC Yahoo! DSL.”

SBC companies have agreements with leading retailers to offer SBC Yahoo! DSL in more than 2,000 stores such as Best Buy, RadioShack and other stores throughout the company’s 13-state region. The company has also built relationships with online computer retailers including Dell and Gateway so customers can order DSL service at the same time they order a new computer.

Once the order is made, provisioning averages just five days, with more than 95 percent of customers choosing to self-install their SBC Yahoo! DSL service via automated installation software from Motive, Inc. The software verifies the DSL line is working, configures the modem, and checks the customer’s PC configuration to ensure it will not slow or stop the service. The self-installation kit also guides customers through the installation process with step-by-step illustrations. The entire process takes approximately 30 minutes.

“Self-installation was an evolutionary leap,” said Weber. “It enables our customers to get their service connected faster, easier and at a much lower cost than what we previously incurred.”

Simple ordering and installation tools are only part of the story. Keeping customers—from single PC home subscribers to home-networked customers and businesses—up and running is just as critical. Especially when an increasing number of glitches, viruses, changes in the subscriber environment and application downloads threaten to jeopardize service.

The same Motive software allows the SBC Yahoo! DSL service to be self-managing, able to identify issues with a customer’s environment and fix them before any problems ensue.

According to Weber, the software makes this turnkey. “At customer install, our service takes a snapshot of system settings. If any of those parameters change, we can notify the customer and fix the service proactively before the customer even realizes something like email doesn’t work.”

In the event customers need to call for service, the same software ensures a better experience. Customer service reps can remotely access data from both the customer’s home as well as from the SBC network to triage, diagnose and fix problems, fast. For SBC companies, that means cutting time on the phone asking customers to describe problems and walking them through resolution. Instead, the built-in management intelligence in the broadband service automatically generates a set of on-screen instructions for both the customer service rep and the customer to run a fix, as opposed to sending customers to a lengthy knowledgebase or manual.

“When you have three and a half million customers and you can shave even 20 seconds off every call, that’s a huge benefit,” said Weber.

Looking Ahead
When you combine widespread accessibility with a premium customer experience, nobody comes close to matching the SBC Yahoo! DSL success. And customers can expect even more in the future.

“We’re working hard to make DSL the broadband technology of choice by delivering levels of access, content, customer service and value second to none in the marketplace,” said Weber. “Leading technologies like Motive’s is helping to make this possible.”

And even as self-healing and self-managing morph into more sophisticated versions of their present selves, Weber sees customer care as the foremost priority.

“We will never totally eliminate the human touch when it comes to supporting our customers,” he says. “But when we apply a human touch to building better technology solutions that have enormous impact on the customer experience, our future growth comes together.”