Serviceability Analysis
Integrated Serviceability Reports
Don't guess how close your customers are to the network... KNOW!
Know where your subscribers are and be able to service them accurately, promptly, and efficiently without the need for truck rolls.
To deliver the best possible service and discover additional opportunities to grow your cable or telecommunications business, you need to quickly identify your commercial and residential customers as well as those who are NOT YET your customers. Are they potential voice, video, or Internet clients?
A business serviceability analysis is the ideal solution to place network intelligence right on the desktops of people from all areas of your enterprise including: engineers, field technicians, customer service specialists, sales and marketing representatives, fiber splicers, network operations support, etc. All it takes is a standard Web browser such as Internet Explorer.
Precise information on serviceable addresses leads to:
- Customer acquisition: Respond quickly to service orders and customer questions; increase installations; and rapidly locate potential commercial customers for high-speed Internet access, including video and voice, to initiate immediate service
- Efficient sales and marketing: Plan in-person sales calls by finding high concentrations of serviceable business customers; focus marketing campaigns where they'll have the most impact; target marketing to addresses that may have been looked over in the past; and, target possible revenue sources both in residential and commercial accounts
- Cost savings: Get accurate reporting of subscription services without the need for further field visits, reducing exploratory truck rolls by an estimated 70 percent
Increase Customer Base, Savings
Let's take a closer look at three ways a serviceability application can help you grow:
1. Customer Service
A customer calls with a service request. While the caller is on hold, the representative quickly uses a sophisticated address-parsing engine that finds the address. Even if the address isn't in the billing system, the application will search the road and parcel networks to find the correct location.
Depending on whether the address is found, and in which source, the system then calculates a serviceability probability. A list of the services available is calculated based on proximity-to-plant and a graphical representation of the analysis displays in a small window.
If the address wasn't in the billing system, the serviceability application automatically adds it. The customer service representative can then request a service connection.
You have another customer for a new service!
2. Subscriber Penetration
Another opportunity for subscriber penetration is to leverage data in network maps for cost savings by reducing costly truck rolls, and increasing customers by knowing precisely which services are available to them.
By using actual engineering maps to calculate serviceability and by measuring the distance to the plant instead of the distance to the nearest existing customer, you will be given the addresses of commercial areas not yet known with astounding accuracy: +/-15 feet instead of the +/- 150 feet standard for geocoded addresses.
This table shows potential additional annual revenue that can be found by targeting addresses found to be serviceable according to the engineering maps, but have not been recorded as such in the SMS. Therefore, they have NOT received marketing materials.
| Total Homes Passed | Number of Serviceable Addresses Missed in SMS (assume 5% unmarketed addresses) | New Subscribers after Marketing Services (assume 10% penetration) | Additional Annual Revenue (assume $55 per month per subscriber*) |
| 100,000 | 5,000 | 500 | $330,000 |
| 250,000 | 12,500 | 1,250 | $825,000 |
| 500,000 | 25,000 | 2,500 | $1,650,000 |
| 1,000,000 | 50,000 | 5,000 | $3,300,000 |
*Source: Kagan World Media, "Financial Profile of a Cable Subsrciber," 2003.
Because incremental costs of data analysis are very small for each additional subscriber in the database after the initial system has been established, the rate of return for large systems can be extremely high.
3. Post-construction Service Activation
When plant construction has finished, it's in the provider's interest to begin marketing and selling new services available from that plant as quickly as possible. This requires:
- Accurate knowledge of which addresses are affected
- Awareness of services being offered
- Timely notification, even before the completion of construction, to begin marketing and ensure prompt service hook-up
Using network mapping tools to monitor, record, and reconcile construction activity, and to automatically publish this where needed, throughout the enterprise, lead times will be effectively reduced before marketing and service activation.
Bulk Serviceability Reports
Running a quarterly serviceability analysis will ensure you have the latest in rapidly changing network and business data. SPATIALinfo can perform bulk serviceability analyses and billing system address clean-up of residential and commercial addresses for entire regions. To quantify the gains attributed to this process, one company's Seattle market, alone, reported at least 10,000 new subscribers as a direct result that led to an additional $8.6 million in revenue (Sean Bristol reported in Communications Technology, August 1, 2006). If your serviceability information is due for a refresh, bulk serviceability analyses enable you to:
- Utilize and enhance existing geographic and customer billing data
- Integrate traditionally disparate data sources
- Produce serviceability reports based on various, user definable parameters such as streets or boundaries
The parameters can be adapted to your data to provide the most up-to-date and accurate serviceability report.
