NTL: Smart Service Fuels Broadband Growth

Rapidly growing demand for residential broadband service is driving explosive growth in the UK communications industry. NTL, the UK’s largest cable company, quickly became the country’s largest broadband provider in 2002 by leveraging Motive’s service infrastructure software to deliver automated, smart services to its connected customers. These services streamline the efficiency and improve the quality of NTL’s service and support offerings, enabling the company to grow rapidly without compromising customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Using Motive’s SmartActivation product, NTL first developed the NTL Broadband Installer/Checker, an automated service that guides new subscribers through the entire broadband activation process. Before NTL deployed the Broadband Installer/Checker, a typical NTL customer would call the company’s call center four to five times in the first month of service. According to Aizad Hussain, NTL Home’s Managing Director, those calls have now been reduced to around one call per customer. “In terms of the value that Motive has brought us, there’s been a dramatic improvement. We’re getting a 40% - 50% reduction in first 30-day calls. We’ve also seen a reduction in call duration, and a noticeable reduction in ongoing support calls.”

The increase in support efficiency is helping to fuel NTL’s growth. “We had a target last year to end the year with 275,000 broadband customers. We ended the year with 517,000,” says Hussain. “When you’re adding that many new subscribers every day, and you’ve got a call centre with a limited number of people, it can be an explosive cocktail. The Motive solution has given us the scalability we need to grow.”

In addition to helping NTL grow, Hussain views the NTL Broadband Installer/Checker as a strong competitive advantage. “Without this kind of automated installation process, we could not provision 1,500 customers a day,” says Hussain. With the Motive solution, as we’re out there competing for broadband customers, we know that our back office can fulfill those orders. As our rate of business has gone up, the volume of calls into our call centre has not gone up with it.”

Hussain also credits the NTL Broadband Installer/Checker with reducing customer churn. “We’ve certainly had a decline in the number of sales that were never converted from order to activation. Before, 10% of our broadband customers would return the product because they could not figure out how to install it. That’s a good measure of churn, and it is virtually negligible right now. It has turned into a seamless experience.”

UK Broadband Goes Mainstream
The UK’s largest broadband service provider, NTL Home, was the first to introduce broadband service to UK consumers in 2001. According to Hussain, the company has over 650,000 customers and added its last 100,000 new customers in just 60 days.

In the three years prior to the explosive roll-out of its broadband service, NTL acquired 29 companies. For any company, that kind of rapid growth can make it difficult to deliver high-quality customer service. Compounding the problem, NTL found that the profile of its customers was changing from technical-savvy early adopters, willing to work through complex installation and configuration processes, to less technical mainstream consumers.

To ensure a positive experience for all of its customers, NTL decided to develop an automated service solution that would guide its customers through complex broadband processes such as installation and configuration of their service. “The fact that we needed to deal with a lot of installations, and the fact that we had customers who expected a very simple plug and play experience, really pointed to a strong need for an automated solution,” says Bill Goodland, NTL Home’s Director of Internet Services.

NTL evaluated a wide variety of different possible solutions providers, and after an exhaustive search, chose Motive, the world’s largest service infrastructure software company and the leading provider of automated service solutions for the broadband market. “In comparative, back-to-back tests, we were very impressed with the Motive solution,” says Goodland. “We felt that Motive provided the best solution to help NTL support our aggressive growth plans, reduce our costs, and to improve the customer experience.”

Equally as important as the solution requirements was Motive’s proven experience in the Upon passing the qualification test, the NTL Broadband Installer/Checker guides the subscriber through the process of installing and configuring their new service.

“The Motive solution makes it very simple for customers to connect,” says Hussain. You just plug the disk in, and in minutes, all of the technical processes that you would normally have to perform manually are done for you.”

“It was important to us to find a solution provider who had a great track record, and Motive was unbeatable in that regard” says Hussain. “Almost every major US broadband provider was already a Motive customer. Once we had checked all of the solution requirement boxes, the ability to call up a long list of big-name broadband providers who were satisfied customers was the clincher.”

Addressing NTL’s #1 Call Driver
NTL found that initially, the majority of customer support calls came in the first 30 days of service, driven largely by questions and problems that arose during broadband activation.

“People were struggling with the technical knowledge required to configure their PCs, change all of the appropriate IP addresses, and establish connectivity,” says Hussain. “Our first goal was to make that process easier and more intuitive for our customers.”

To ensure NTL gets only qualified orders, the NTL Broadband Installer/Checker gathers relevant data directly from a subscriber’s PC environment and lets the user know whether it qualifies for the NTL service.

Improving the End-to-End Customer Experience
Having essentially solved the activation challenge, NTL isn’t content to rest on its laurels. The company is planning to extend its smart service strategy throughout the customer lifecycle to address ongoing service and support issues. “We believe that there’s an enormous amount of further scope there for us to continue to improve the customer experience and drive down operating costs,” says Goodland.

For example, a customer who installs new software on their computer may inadvertently change the settings that affect their connectivity to the Internet. Isolating the source of these problems often involves a lengthy and complex troubleshooting process with the customer over the telephone. For NTL, the average call coming into the technical support line is 17.5 minutes, and the first five of those minutes is spent collecting basic customer data.

Motive’s SmartCare product will help NTL solve many of those problems automatically. “We share a vision with Motive,” says Hussain, “That essentially the product should be so easy to use, you don’t even know when it’s fixing your broadband connection. With the Motive solution, we can actually self-heal problems before the customer even realizes there is a problem. What would have been a 20 minute support call to us, can now be just a button press.”

When live assistance is required, SmartCare will also help NTL improve the efficiency of the phone call. The solution gathers key system data directly from the subscriber’s PC and, if connectivity is present, asks the subscriber for permission to send it directly to an NTL customer service agent. If connectivity is not present, the Motive solution presents the relevant information to the subscriber with instructions for providing key details to the agent. “Imagine if our agents could begin a support call by telling the customer we’ve already run 20 tests, and have narrowed it down to two potential issues,” says Hussain. “That would be a fantastic customer experience. When you talk about customer service strategy and competitive advantage, it is a very powerful piece of the puzzle.”

Planning a Profitable Future
NTL plans to keep expanding its smart service strategy through its partnership with Motive. Part of that decision, says Goodland, is a result of the commitment Motive has shown to NTL’s success. “We were delighted with the way that the Motive team has worked with us to help us meet our service goals. We felt that they absolutely understand our business, and they have provided great people to support the direct implementation of the product.”

According to Hussain, the company’s strategy goes beyond using service automation to achieve operational efficiencies. He sees smart service as a way to drive profitable business growth. “Motive has some interesting ideas about how, in a simple, automated way, we can look at increasing our revenue per customer by selling customers incremental, premium services.

Many customers will want to buy a firewall, or a virus checker, or a parental control application. It could be quite appealing for us to be able to include options to purchase those services right at the point of installation.”

Why is NTL investing so much in service software, when many companies in the industry are reining in capital expenditures? “I think it was a very strategic decision,” says Hussain. “If you can take 4-5 calls, and turn those into one phone call, it doesn’t take a lot of mathematics to see that’s a good equation.”