Telenet: Customer Care in the Broadband Era
Telenet is a multi-service cable operator with annual revenues of €502 million ($627 million) and a network that covers 2.5 million homes in the Flanders region of Belgium. It’s a growth company, poised to drive the high-speed market. The signs are already there.
Not only has the number of Telenet subscribers skyrocketed from 20,000 in the year 2000 to over 500,000 by the end of 2004, but the company’s growing capabilities give it tremendous potential market reach: an extensive fibre network combined with a triple play of offerings—high-speed Internet access, telephony and, soon, digital television. Together these give Telenet the ability to reach 95 percent of the overall market with a wealth of new services delivered over a single cable connection. Its home turf, Flanders, now has the largest penetration of any region in Europe, outpaced globally only by South Korea and Canada.
Providing the lion’s share of the Flemish market with such services over one pipe is a tremendous responsibility. It means the company must satisfy a broad range of customer demands across a broad range of offerings, from high-speed gaming to television over the Internet to always-on business services. Above all, Telenet must do this by making it look easy. Its invisible competitive edge will help it do this.
“Month after month, our customer satisfaction research confirms the high levels of trust consumers place in our services and our company,” said Jan Vorstermans, senior vice president of Networks & Customer Operations at Telenet.
“In fact, in some instances, our brand is so strong that children tend to speak of the ‘Telenet’ rather than the ‘Internet’,” confirmed Paul Van Cotthem, senior vice president of Telenet’s Residential Market Division.
Ironically, flawless customer support behind the brand is the very thing its competitors often neglect. “Prices are going down very quickly, and some service providers have chosen to cut service areas to continue to make money,” explained Vorstermans. “In some cases, this has lessened the quality of their services, which of course leads to upset customers. Service providers have traditionally not invested in good customer care centres, and yet the majority of customers need a lot of care when a problem occurs.”
The continuing challenge, however, is to protect that brand reputation in the brave new world of broadband, where offerings are based on complex, interlocking technologies masquerading as simple, easy-to-use services. Because the majority of its recent subscribers have little to no experience using the Internet in new and different ways, the service itself needs to be simple and dependable, while it continues to offer more sophisticated offerings. If there are any problems, they must be easy to solve. If not, the cost of providing support becomes prohibitive, risking both the bottom line and the company’s trusted reputation.
“Great brand, great product, great service is what we continue to believe in,” insisted Van Cotthem.
The need for self-managing broadband
Telenet’s superior service begins the minute the customer subscribes. Engineers are quickly sent to customer sites to install and configure equipment. While this enables customers both to rapidly maximise their use of their Telenet services, such as email, and to customise their own service settings, many were still calling Telenet’s contact centres a few weeks after the installation.
However, “In many cases, they were calling about a local problem, not a network problem, but the customer didn’t know that,” said Vorstermans. “Twenty-five percent of calls made to our contact centre were of this nature. It was beginning to drive up our customer care costs.”
In addition, even when enquiries to the contact centre were about Telenet’s product or network, determining the exact issue could be a long and costly process. Certain problems were tough to troubleshoot over the phone because technically-unsophisticated users didn’t have the skills to help technicians solve even rudimentary problems. Still, too many calls left customers frustrated and left Telenet with increasing support costs that hit the bottom line. Not to mention a brand reputation that could be at risk.
Although all service providers face this dilemma, Telenet saw the problem as an opportunity to provide an added value to the customer experience. They recognized helping customers with a wide range of problems, even non-Telenet issues, was a great way to build on their reputation for customer support. Moreover, it would help retain customers who would now look to Telenet for answers on a range of problems or additional services.
The dilemma, however, was whether it could be done affordably.
The approach Telenet took was novel. “We decided to embed self-management into our service in order to give customers the tools to fix these problems for themselves,” said Van Cotthem.
The solution was innovative: software from Motive Inc., an Austin, Texas-based company. Through intelligent automation, Motive’s broadband self-management software removes many of the manual tasks required to configure network services, troubleshoot and resolve problems.
The first step was for Telenet to develop a business case for deploying Motive software, based on achieving hard-cost savings and satisfaction improvements. The goals were to reduce the number and length of calls to contact centre analysts as well as increase customer retention rates.
“The business case was important. It enabled us to quantify upfront the potential for direct business impact,” explained Van Cotthem.
A strategic synergy
To achieve its strategic vision of offering excellent end-to-end customer service tailored to the needs of the broadband era, Telenet worked closely with Motive. Together, they developed a solution that simultaneously removed the service management burden from both customers and Telenet analysts by building management automation into the broadband service itself. As a result, customers and analysts alike were given a set of tools called ‘Telenet EasyCare’ to perform a range of problem remediation and configuration tasks on their own. Like Telenet, Motive shares a strategic vision of self-management that empowers customers, strengthens customer retention and results in bottom-line growth.
Van Cotthem says that it was easy to show Telenet’s senior executives the value of Motive’s self-management approach and demonstrate why Motive was a partner who understood Telenet’s key business issues. “Our CEO saw the solution and thought it was a great idea to pursue, so we held focus groups to validate it and discussed it with our analysts, user group and customers.”
Reduced customer care costs
Self-management software is the backbone of broadband-era support. It gives customers additional tools to oversee their individual broadband experience. Conversely, by automatically and proactively sniffing out and diagnosing problems in a customer’s PC and networking environment, Motive self-management software can quickly gather and deliver that critical information directly to support personnel. This saves them the time it would normally take to troubleshoot a complex problem.
In this way, Motive’s software is now helping both sides of the Telenet customer care equation—call centre representative and end user—speed up problem resolution time. In the process, Motive is helping Telenet turn its customer care efforts from a cost centre to a key competitive advantage.
From their desktops, Telenet customers can troubleshoot a number of common problems with only a few clicks: from a slow network to an application issue. Having such an easy-to-use resource on their desktops is one way problems get resolved more quickly.
For more complex problems, however, “The software also provides a diagnostic list to the contact centre analyst, who only has to direct the customer to a button on their PC to access a list of automated technical resolutions,” explained Vorstermans. “Conversations are much shorter and more productive, and neither the customer nor our analyst get as frustrated.”
“Above all, the customer feels as if there’s a doctor on their PC who perpetually diagnoses and cures their problems – even when they don’t yet know they have one,” added Van Cotthem. About 25 percent of Telenet’s customers have already used EasyCare and the numbers continue to grow steadily. The results? Overall, the volume and length of calls to Telenet have been reduced. Eighty percent of customers that use EasyCare do so successfully.
Reduced churn and higher recommendation rates
Telenet’s involvement with Motive has not only resulted in measurable cost savings. It’s also generating some impressive customer care statistics. When measured against average European customer churn figures, Telenet experienced only 7.5 percent turnover on an annualised basis, a figure which is best-in-class in the Internet industry. These results have supported Telenet’s drive to promote broadband cable access as a viable competitive alternative to Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) services over the incumbent’s phone lines.
Moreover, the company didn’t stop its own customer care efforts after deploying Motive software. “We continue to conduct monthly customer surveys to measure customer satisfaction and to improve products, processes and procedures at every customer touch point based on the feedback we receive,” said Van Cotthem.
And, the results of a “mystery caller” survey conducted by Call Metrics show that the quality of Telenet’s contact centre service has improved. Telenet’s total score was 79 percent, which represents a “very good and professional service,” when benchmarked against industry average results.
“Our broadband cable recommendation rate is now about 20 percent higher than in the DSL space, and I think these figures reflect the fact that customers are very satisfied with the entire customer care lifecycle,” said Van Cotthem. “Churn is a very important focal point for us because it costs us less to keep a customer than to acquire a new one.”
“We see a great deal of potential in extending our use of Motive software -- as the main communication vehicle to make announcements, extend loyalty bonuses, and potentially even support our wireless product evolution as well. This is something that our competitors don’t offer yet, although they’ve tried.”
And, of course, Telenet’s strategic partnership with Motive has helped it to protect its most precious corporate asset—its brand.
Future plans call for Motive to play a role in supporting Telenet’s new Digital TV service to support customers watching next-generation television.
The future is being delivered over broadband networks and Telenet is bringing that future to millions of subscribers. And not just in the form of new media and interactive applications. But, you can safely say, it’s also turning users into technical experts without forcing them to learn the technology.
In this way, Telenet is putting the digital future in the hands of the user.
