Self-Service for Broadband

By: Bruce Bahlmann - Contributing Author (your feedback is important to us!)

Created: December 22, 2000

Providing various forms of self-service to broadband operators who offer services to multiple subscribers have become increasingly popular. One area of self-service that is of particular interest to broadband operators is installation. What was once known as “Auto-Provisioning” has now branched off into a multitude of different installations options for broadband operators – each installation option requiring a varying degree of broadband operator involvement. As a result, a whole spectrum of installation options have evolved for prospective subscribers ranging from totally subscriber driven installs (known as self-install) to the traditional broadband employee driven installs. Some of examples of these installation options are summarized in Table 1. 

Table 1: Installation Options

 While the need to bring on subscribers quickly and painlessly is an honorable goal, complications still exist that prevent these methods from making appreciable impact to a broadband operator’s annual installation rates. Some of these complications include: 

• Constantly Changing Requirements – Broadband operators regularly change their minimum requirements for service to keep up with changes/improvements in technology. As a result, subscribers with CPEs as little as a couple years old do not qualify for some services – e.g. memory and/or disk upgrades are needed to join certain services.
• Lack of Broadband Ready CPEs – Subscribers often face varying challenges when activating a service that requires any type of additional hardware to be added to their system (especially anything that requires its enclosure to be cracked open). Installing the hardware may only be half of the challenge as conflicts with existing hardware can make configuring the new hardware on the CPE an extremely complex experience – professional help is sometimes needed in these cases.
• Availability – Broadband operators still are not able to offer their services to all their subscribers. Whether it is an area that is not yet upgraded or too distant from the place where the service originates, the availability of service does not cover 100% of the broadband operator’s territory. As a result, there are complications where potential subscribers want the service but can’t yet receive it or are asked to join some waiting list.
• Accessibility – Broadband operators attempting to wire each residence for broadband face several unknowns. Since wiring in residences can range from connecting a simple jumper from the outlet to the broadband service hardware (modem, service unit, etc.) to completely redoing the residence wiring up to the tap, drop, or demark – this can add significant time to an install. Also, depending on the building location, building code, and signal level, some areas in the residence may not serviceable.

Withstanding these complications, broadband operators have forged ahead with attempts to quickly ramp up subscriber growth in their new services. To accomplish this many broadband operators have done extensive field studies to better understand critical aspects of their subscriber installation process. These field studies have delved down to excruciating detail the installation process and exposed the ugly truth about their traditional installation methods that most new service installations are based. Having worked with individuals conducting these studies it was evident that several areas were taking significantly more time than was expected. For example, a typical (average) install was just over 2 hours yet many were significantly less (around an hour) while others were significantly more (3-4 hours, some went beyond 4 hours). The major causes for this large variation in installation times were the result of complications during the install. Of these complications, wiring and hardware installation/configuration proved to be the most time consuming.  

Successfully negotiating these complications has become a priority of broadband operators who are exploring a number of new products on the market that attempt to speed and automate some aspects of the installation. However, a majority of the new products on the market have elected to correct everything but wiring and CPE hardware installation/configuration. As a result, the benefit from these products will yield far less than additional installation(s) per technician per day. Once more, since these new products still require the broadband operator to visit the home and perform the wiring, there is not much gain in the overall installation efficiency. That is because the expense of getting the technician to the subscriber’s residence is still required (so as to complete the wiring) and from that point on it is of minimal significance if one can save 5-10 minutes on each install. What is required is a minimum savings of 30-45 minutes per install to achieve the desired goal of one additional install per technician per day. Lets take a closer look at what kind of savings we are talking about. 

A typical technician works 8 hours a day 5 days a week or 10 hours a day 4 days a week – Tables 2 & 3 represent their potential productivity. When using traditional installation methods (i.e. limited automation) the number of installs a single technician could complete without using any overtime is shown below. Adding some automation (e.g. self-activation) could, at best, save the average installer 10 minutes on every install. However, on an 8-hour day this would merely provide them with an additional 20 minutes (if that) on their last job of the day. For a 10-hour day, this may provide an average installer with an additional 30 minutes on their last job – still not enough time to complete another job. In fact, if any of the day’s installs went south, the additional automation merely allows the installer to stay on schedule. While this too is important, it does little to actually increase an installer’s output or increase the number of installs the same number of installers can complete per day. The best that any 10-minute (or for that reason 20-minute) time savings per install could buy the broadband operator is the assurance that their installer will not require overtime to complete their jobs or be on-time for all their appointments. This result is far from the increased productivity that broadband operators are hoping for. 

3 Installs per day x 5 days = 15 Installs per week

Table 2: Technician who works 8 hours a day, 5 days a week 

4 Installs per day x 4 days = 16 Installs per week

Table 3: Technician who works 10 hours a day, 4 days a week 

For those installs that could potentially happen with little (if any) broadband operator intervention (i.e. the self install) lets take a closer look at what kind of increased productivity this represents. Self installs, while desirable by broadband operators are still quite complex to the average subscriber. In fact the potential number of self-installs in a newly launched service area represents only a small fraction of the number of potential traditional installs. Using numbers gained from actual field trials, the self-install subscriber population is as follows: 

Broadband Operator: Cable System with 1 million homes passed

Core Product Subscribers: 63% of homes passed or (1,000,000 x .63 = 630,000)

New Service Penetration: 14% of Core Product Subscribers or (630,000 x .14 = 88,200)

Self-Install Opportunity: 5% of the New Service Penetration of (88,200 x .05 = 4,410) 

What this means, is that out of a million homes passed only about 4,400 subscribers would be comfortable taking on the challenge of installing their own service. This represents less than one percent of the homes passed (0.441 %) or less than one percent of the core product subscribers (0.7%). If the system that provided this functionality cost you $500,000 you’d be paying about $113.38 per subscriber to make a self-install option available. If you still required a truck roll to complete the wiring for the subscriber your cost per subscriber just jumped another ($60) for a total cost of about $173.38* per subscriber (which is nearly three times that of a traditional install).  

*Note this cost assumes that each self-install goes off without a hitch. In actuality, some portion (typically 15-20%) is likely to fail due to the complications mentioned earlier. These will require phone support and/or a service call to resolve that are not factored into the costs stated. Broadband operators should be aware that no method of installing/configuring CPE hardware and software is foolproof and that when automated methods fail additional (perhaps even professional) help may be required to resolve the matter. 

There is a current need by broadband operators as well as subscribers for tools they can load on their CPE to assist them with the installation and configuration of data services. These tools must accommodate all the different platforms and enforce the minimum requirements of the broadband operator while standardizing the install. But what happens to these tools when automation ushers in a new wave of CPEs that are fully broadband ready. Does this mean that all these tools can do is perform local diagnostics? Either these tools direct the scope of work for every install or CPE companies automate install/configuration portion of installs for subscribers and require less if any 3^rd party assistance to install data services on any new CPE. 

This information begs the question, what is driving the need for self-service, could it be self-install? Having run a successful self-install field trial back in 1998 and saw first hand what was needed out of subscribers as well as technology (both CPEs and back office systems) to make the trial successful its no surprise to me that self-install has not yet reached the mainstream. In fact, it is completely unfair to compare self-install dialup services with that of broadband compatible self-install – both the size and complexity of these tasks are unequal (dialup is far more polished). Dialup self-install has been 10+ years in the making – easily 5 times that of broadband’s self-install. Even with self-install well into its toddler years (2+), the technology as well as its overall reliability is unproven and considered by many as bleeding edge. Could something else drive the need for self-service in broadband? What about operational automation needed to support increasing numbers of subscribers? The following summarizes a broadband operator’s quandary regarding the support of data services: 

Customer Care Call Volume: 26.18 calls per subscriber per year.

Install Cost: $99

Cost of Cable Modem: $150

Yearly Support Costs: $345.58* vs. One Time Install Costs: $249.00 vs. Yearly Revenue: $588.00 (based on $49/month) 

*Note this figure represents phone support only. There are other costs associated with supporting a service. As an example, supporting a data service would require paying for Internet connectivity, server and network maintenance on headend gear, etc. that is required to deliver the service. 

Essentially, it costs broadband operators more yearly to support their customers than it does to initially install them. As a result, the slow ramp up in the number of new subscribers has been a blessing for broadband operators. This has given them a chance to understand the actual requirements of the service as well as the needs of these new subscribers. Should automation actually provide a means for a broadband operator to rapidly increase their subscriber base most would feel significant growing pains in the areas of field services, operations, billing, and customer care. This is because these areas are best developed over time and as the result of planned capacity rather than out of necessity. What self-service does is it provides a tool for broadband operators to further augment their existing employee driven methods of installation and customer care. However, self-service cannot make a business case for itself on installs alone (because the low take rate and high up front cost of the technology). While one could argue that self-install would quickly pay for itself, the combination of factors such as the need for out-of-the-box support for all new CPEs and the elimination of minimum requirements will continue the low take rate on self-install. As a result, self-install numbers will continue to be merely a fraction of employee driven efforts for the foreseeable future. That is until all CPEs require little (if any) effort to enable them to operate on broadband. Until such time, self-install and self-activation (as explained above) will actually cost more per install than traditional efforts. 

One known business case of self-service for broadband operators is account maintenance. Account maintenance provides much needed relief to broadband operators’ customer care organization. Customer care currently consumes much of the profits generated by new service offerings and is in dire need of relief. Like the time spent on installations, broadband operators also have rigorously analyzed customer care. In response to the increased customer care call volume, these organizations have developed extensive web sites to provide everything from chat sessions to on-line Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). However, a significant number of calls into customer care are not trouble related but rather account related – which cannot be answered by generic information but require individual attention/handling. For example, lets look at some typical numbers below: 

Email Maintenance: 1.36 Calls per Subscriber per Year

CPE NIC Maintenance: 0.187 Calls per Subscriber per Year

Cost Per Call: $13.20 (Average call time 12 minutes @ cost of $1.10 per minute)

Conservative Estimated 20% of Subscribers Would Use Self-Service Account Maintenance

Cost Savings of Account Maintenance: $4.08 per Subscriber per Year 

The difference between self-service and other methods of increasing installation capacity is that focusing on primarily installs yields increasing smaller savings. This is because the number of current subscribers is more than the number of subscribers most broadband operators are planning to add in the coming year (i.e. the days of doubling the number of subscribers year to year is coming to an end). While it would be nice to bring more new subscribers on board quickly that effort is not without its own set of challenges. Once more, it is often more expensive to increase ones subscriber base when its capacity to serve them is not held in check. Self-service is best when it is combined with self-install and self-activation. In other words, self-service is best implemented when account maintenance is presented first, then self-activation, then self-install. This is because an important phase (recognition) of self-service is missed when self-service activation and account maintenance are not presented together (during the install and/or activation). Without this recognition phase the subscriber must be made aware that they can perform account maintenance after they have installed or activated. Promoting account maintenance after the fact (after installation and activation) is often much more difficult as it has less of the subscribers attention. 

While new products offer the broadband industry steps towards rapid subscriber acquisition, this quest for more subscribers will be short lived. One of the greatest assets of traditional broadband operators is its people and its tremendous capability to personally walk new subscribers through installations. Automation, for what it is worth, is only a convenience and can, at best, augment broadband employee driven efforts to install and support new subscribers. For it is the personal touch that differentiates one broadband operator from another. Subscribers don’t switch broadband operators or sign up for the first time with a broadband operator because they desire self-service. Instead, self-service in general is just a tool – a means of providing yet another way to take care of the subscribers. Having this tool, allows broadband operators to better serve their subscribers who if they’re happy have no reason to look to the competition. 

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