Riesige Steinstufen symbolisieren die Herausforderungen der AltNet-Anbieter im Vereinigten Königreich

20.03.2023

Challenges for AltNet Providers

Options for consumers are increasing in the UK on their choices for gigabit services at home and will continue to grow. Whilst I am on the lookout for the best deals, a provider that invests in its customer service is at the top of my list. This made me think about how the growing ISPs are identifying the best process to help their customers when they need it.

Challenges for AltNets

The UK telecoms and broadband industry presents many challenges to new and young entrants, including overbuilding by incumbents, future market consolidation and price erosion, limited availability of trained labour and acquisition of land access rights. However, raising awareness, producing high user satisfaction, and offering pleasant, distinctive client experiences for their services may be the biggest barrier to their commercial success.

Customer Satisfaction

Consumer broadband satisfaction rates have decreased by as much as 11% for some of the top providers over the past five years, according to OFCOM’s 2021 study of UK broadband ISPs. These results were significantly influenced by the COVID-19 challenge. As a result, altnet providers can take use of Openreach, its partner ISPs, and Virgin’s churn, but it will be challenging to acquire “new” customers.

Overcoming Hurdles

Altnet providers will also have to deal with logistics for installing services, locating and setting up CPE (Customer Premises Equipment, such as routers), onboarding customers, demanding survey questions, regularly postponed installation dates, and support via live and assisted channels.
All of these elements, along with Openreach and Virgin’s possibly aggressive wholesale pricing, have a negative impact on the business case and OPEX profile for altnets while also making it more difficult for new ISPs and resale partners to differentiate themselves from the competition by offering simpler and much better customer experiences.

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Steps to identifying CX challenges

Here at Conntac, we believe that three areas in particular require attention in order to assure a best-in-class client experience, assuming that altnet providers can overcome some of the supply-side and demand generating challenges.

1. Ensuring network Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) following COVID-19 bottlenecks.

2. Services, customer journeys, and touchpoints that are better structured to foster understanding, trust, and the capacity for problem-solving (by the customer or the provider) across the customer lifecycle.

3. Orchestration of support and engagement to provide clear, uncomplicated, and accessible self-service customer interaction pathways with first-touchpoint resolution and elimination of numerous handovers.

Let’s explain each of these topics and then go into greater detail about them.

Quality of Experience

After COVID-19, demand levels have increased and there is a greater reliance on Technology, media and entertainment, and telecommunications (TMT) services, therefore customers’ main concerns when making purchases are broadband quality and consistency.

Additionally, as resilient connection is increasingly needed for digital and smart home services, providers must monitor both QoS and QoE and handle them on a per-customer, per-service basis. This strategy can assist altnets in avoiding expensive truck rolls, customer support calls, and/or furious customer tweets that could harm their net promoter score (NPS) and word-of-mouth reputation.

Altnet providers must concentrate on CX metrics, engagement tracking, as well as network KPIs while proactively identifying and resolving disconnections, slow response times, frame freezing, and similar problems in order to monetise the customer experience, prevent churn, and increase Customer Lifetime Value. While root cause analysis and rectification tracing can help handle complaints linked to network difficulties in the home, analytics, AI, and consumer education can assist in identifying and predicting poor QoE. The inclusion of customer expectations throughout is essential.

The development of 5G FWA (Fixed Wireless Access) as the main broadband household connection in the future may be accelerated by the availability of backup connectivity choices, which are a positive interim step. However, unless providers can distinctly identify linked use cases, it can jeopardise the profitability of fixed infrastructure expenditures.

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Customer journey and experience implementation

Altnet providers must implement simple customer journeys that improve the on-boarding, technical support experience while seamlessly integrating with backend systems, including all pertinent OSS & BSS business processes and components, once they have generated demand among potential paying customers, or RGUs as they are known in the industry.

Conntac’s solution has learnt what processes work and can be simply integrated from the start of this process since feedback received from clients and customers enables providers to simplify complicated procedures and increase customer experience through self-service.

Joint initiatives like customer-centric journey analysis, design and re-engineering, test and learn, and best-practice implementation frameworks can help soften the blow of service launches while empowering users to become more adept at interacting digitally with apps, configuring services, and resolving issues on their own, keeping customers satisfied and the operation profitable in the process.

In Summary – AltNets will face fierce competition

Altnet service providers have given a market that had previously been largely stagnant more energy. Growth of the industry is all but guaranteed thanks to government backing through Project Gigabit, which will inject an additional £5 billion until 2025 to help operators as they roll out across the final 20% of rural sites. Altnets will face fierce competition, and consolidation is unavoidable.

Altnet providers may almost likely succeed in the UK market by providing “great essentials” that are clear to convey and simple for clients to grasp, together with dependable service performance and smooth sales, onboarding, and support journeys.

With the MyProvider App, AltNets and regional ISPs can overcome these challenges. Learn more about the MyProvider App.

Author: Stephen Hopson