This post is sponsored by Teleste Intercept.
The cable industry charts significant customer churn rates often exceeding 20%. Many customers switch service providers because of network problems.
“Our studies show that Intelligent Networks technology delivers cost and time savings that drive better customer experience, which is key to reducing churn,” said Hanno Narjus, CEO of Teleste Intercept and senior vice president of network products for Teleste.
The intelligent connected optical node (ICON), a 24/7 probe in the CATV network, is an example demonstrating what Intelligent Networks mean in practice. The ICON complements PNM tools and full-capture cable modems to deliver salient business benefits.
Other business benefits of Intelligent Networks include:
- Improvement in customer service. Intelligent technology gives your help desk team better visibility into network performance and empowers them to provide better and more satisfying customer service. Help desk teams are now reinforced by automated functions to quickly address problems, so you get more service uptime with faster intervention. As a result, 30% of customer calls are pre-empted entirely, giving your help desk staff more time to deal with complex customer service issues that require human interaction.
- Increase in NOC efficiency and network uptime. Data gathered by intelligent technology makes it faster and easier to guide network technicians while reducing truck rolls by 60%. You can cut repair time by an average of 30 minutes and slash node area breaks by 150 minutes on average. Many intelligent features are enabled by electrical controls that replace traditional plug-in modules, benefiting technicians not having the needed plug-ins on site.
- Avoiding 100% of seasonal maintenance visits. These visits are expensive to perform and require service disruptions that disappoint customers. Intelligent network devices and automated operations complete tasks faster, less expensively and more accurately than human technicians. Your crews are then freed up to focus on jobs that require their expertise, making them more effective. Many operators use automated operations during large network upgrades, when skilled CATV field technicians are spread thin and deadlines loom closer. In practice, even non-CATV experts can install ICON devices.
- Decrease of power consumption by 20%. More complex network devices require more power. Operators struggle to manage power and performance growth in ways that are beneficial to business, customers and the environment. Using intelligence to reduce bias current in network devices decreases power consumption without sacrificing service quality. Nodes and amplifiers capable of adapting to external changes yield significant cost improvements. By leveraging unused network frequencies, these devices can save up to 30% of the power consumed by the amplifier modules.
“It’s a common misconception that intelligence means complexity, it means automation,” Narjus said.
As such, intelligent nodes can be deployed to any CATV network without changing network architecture — a clear financial win.
“When you factor in these operational efficiencies and total cost of ownership, Intelligent Networks technology is actually very cost effective,” he said. “The savings in operational and lifetime costs clearly pay dividends.”