Case study:

Leading U.S. Cable Company Drives Service
Level Improvements and Cost Savings with
LevelOne Broadband Agent.

Challenge

As demand for High-Speed Internet services has continued its steep rise, a major U.S. cable company sought to augment its call centers with a self-service offering for technical support. The goals were clear: to reduce the cost of customer care and at the same time improve service levels provided to its subscribers.

Support for internet subscribers is particularly challenging. The root cause of a problem may be located beyond the cable modem, as PC settings and home networking issues are frequently at fault. Adding complexity is a growing variety of cable modems, diagnostic knowledge required to cover a wide range of potential issues, and mix of operating systems and home networking devices that demand support tailored for many variations.

The project team also wanted to ensure that call center agents would be an integral part of the solution. Requirements included ensuring that caller experience was optimized by eliminating the need to repeat descriptions or diagnostic procedures if a transfer was required. Enhancing agent productivity was also a priority.

Solution

SpeechCycle’s LevelOne Broadband Agent was selected because of its proven ability to recognize and resolve a wide range of High-Speed Internet technical support issues. In exactly 90 days, the product was customized for the company’s business logic and branding using SpeechCycle’s on-demand hosted service to handle calls.

LevelOne Broadband Agent is currently fielding hundreds of thousands of calls per month, solving customer issues such as lost, slow, or intermittent internet. Email problems are also in scope including Web mail access and “can’t send or receive,” as well as providing assistance with email setup and password reset.

Integration with the company’s systems enable SpeechCycle to determine important information such as the subscriber’s brand of cable modem and signal levels going to the home without asking the caller. Subscribers remain engaged with SpeechCycle’s Automated Agents for a remarkable average of 6-8 minutes due to the specific questions and responses that are perceived by callers as personalized for their problem, and automated corrective action such as resetting IP addresses that demonstrate progress.

The Automated Agent also offers interactive assistance for troubleshooting that might include rebooting a network router or delving into the Windows Internet Connection Wizard on their PC. Callers are always in control, with an ability to have instructions repeated or reach a call center agent at any time.

For calls transferred to live agents, integration with CTI provides detail of what has already occurred as well as a next-step suggestion to save the agent the time needed to scan the list of diagnostics already attempted.

Results

Benefits to the MSO continue to be: