WHITE PAPERby Karen KoshVP, Cable and Wireless January, 2016

Best Practices for Optimizing the Customer Sales-to-Connect Journey

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508.623.0810 | sales@onprocess.comOnProcess Technology, 200 Homer Avenue, Ashland, MA 01721

Product Knowledge/Setting Expectations With multiple sales channels – phone, retail, online, direct and channel – comes an inherent risk of inconsistent product and installation knowledge, and messaging about requirements and expectations. Sales associates sometimes exacerbate this risk by not taking time to fully explain product features and benefits or disclose key pieces of information. For instance, complex installations often require advanced preparation by the customer, who may not have been told what they need to do. In the case of home monitoring or security installations, the customer generally needs to have

Best Practices for Optimizing the Customer Sales-to-Connect JourneySelling and connecting customers to the broadband and wireless products and services they purchase should be simple. The customer selects an offering, such as in-home monitoring and security services, connected tablets, or internet, video, voice and data products. The provider installs or configures. The customer adopts, uses and pays. What can go wrong?

Quite a bit. The reality is that complex ecosystems and dependencies on multiple products, systems, sales and installation channels all collide to create breakage points in the sales-to-connect journey. On average, 15 percent of customers who agree to purchase in-home or in-business products and services are never successfully connected. The percentage is even higher for alternative sales channels and during rapid rollouts of new products and services.

Even when each functional area in the sales-to-connect process meets its targets, overall breakage averages 15 percent.

The lost revenue opportunity is significant. For a home security provider with sales of 5,000 per month and annual customer revenue of $500, a 15 percent failure translates to $4.5M per year. For a voice, video and data package with new sales of 20,000 per month and annual customer revenue of $1,000, revenue loss climbs to $36M.

Because ownership for key milestones is often spread across many point-of-sale channels, ordering systems and installation channels, visibility into breakage points is fuzzy at best. But the impact on broadband and wireless providers couldn’t be clearer. Lost revenues, elongated time-to-revenue and high operational costs makes this a very expensive problem, to the tune of millions of dollars annually.

Breakage Points and Impacts

So where are the breakage points? A quick look into the main milestones across the sales-to-connect journey highlights the most common problem areas.

The Sale

WHITE PAPER: Sales-to-Connect

internet and/or phone service installed. For a video, voice and data installation in a business, someone from the customer’s IT team must be available throughout the installation. The impact of miscommunication at the point of sale (POS) often isn’t apparent until further down the line when it manifests as missed customer expectations, excessive customer effort, billing problems, failed appointments and rework, frustrated installers who are paid on completed appointments, and cancelled orders.

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Sales OrderProcessing

98% + + =90% 95%

ScheduleManagement

Day of InstallCompletions

SuccessRate

85%

Sales Order Processing When sales orders are processed through multiple sources and systems, breakage often occurs. Some orders fall out ‘in transit’ between third-party POS and provider ordering and billing systems. Other exceptions are caused by system interruptions, conflicts between products and services, provisioning issues, missing information, customer eligibility problems and human error. While traditional channels may only experience marginal fall out, indirect and alternative channels often report breakage of up to 35 percent. In addition, as sales move through the process, order modifications can lead to sales channel conflicts such as order duplication and the inability to track the sale’s origin. Order breakage can delay time-to-revenue, drive high operational costs due to manual intervention, inbound calls and back office work to manage exceptions, and result in extended appointment times and failed installations. For many providers, problems with order processing net a two-to-three percent failure.

Canceled and Rescheduled Appointments Installation appointments are canceled and rescheduled for a number of reasons. Customers sometimes forget about appointments until they receive that friendly reminder, and then end up canceling. Conflicts due to hectic work schedules or providers needing to reschedule can result in multiple rescheduled appointments. Whatever the reason, these delays introduce the risk that customers will change their mind about the installation. This can be due to buyer’s remorse, fatigue with the process, competitive offers and more. Along the same lines, customers who call to cancel appointments often aren’t ready to commit to another date, and once the appointment has been canceled there is a good chance the installation will be significantly delayed or not happen at all.

Day of Installation / Activation Many providers report that at least 15 percent of installations fail on the day they were originally scheduled to be completed. Customers refusing the installation or not being home, technicians arriving late to appointments and incomplete installations that require a follow up appointment, all contribute to these failures. Installation fallouts are expensive—think stranded technician capacity, repeat appointments, inbound contact center and inventory carrying costs. It’s also important to note that, while providers consider an installation complete when the customer is ‘activated,’ most customers don’t consider themselves ‘connected’ until they’re using and fully benefiting from the product or service they purchased. This fundamental disconnect can lead to expensive service calls, remorse returns and a negative association with your brand that can influence the customers’ future buying decisions.

Best Practices

Visibility The key to reducing breakage is to have a finger on the pulse of what’s happening throughout the sales-to-connect journey, in real time. How many orders are being processed by channel? How many have resulted in exceptions? What is the resolution rate? Which appointments have been canceled or failed? Which offers aren’t set up correctly in the ordering or billing system? Are any systems down? Best practice is to use a control tower solution that monitors actions and touch points, and provides real-time bulletins and escalations on issues as they occur. You gain instant visibility into specific and widespread breakage, and the ability to immediately apply upstream fixes to reduce fall out.

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Integrated Analytics To optimize sales-to-connect completions, use integrated, real-time analytics. This enables you to gain visibility into root causes, drive process changes and improve outcomes. For example:

• By continually analyzing sales order exceptions, scheduling failures and voice of the customer, you can quantify the size and scope of improvement opportunities.

• By conducting segmentation analysis by sales channel, sales rep, product / service, install channel and technician, you can pinpoint root causes for breakage, which can be addressed by technology /automation, tools, process changes and education.

• By using propensity analysis to identify customers most likely to have a failed installation or request a service call, you can target at-risk customers with proactive outreach—since reaching out to all customers is not feasible.

Data inputs change with the rollout of new channels, products and services. To fully leverage the power of analytics, adopt an integrated analytics strategy that continually assesses new data and drives new insights, instead of a point-in-time project approach.

Sales Order Management To help address the problem of POS-related issues causing downstream breakage, put tighter controls around sales commission pay outs. For instance, hold off paying sales reps and management until the products they sold are successfully installed. For a stronger approach aimed at retaining customers and revenue, only pay when products remain connected for 30 – 90 days. Having a centralized way to process and monitor sales order exceptions from all your channels in real-time is key to minimizing order breakage. Often, orders can be ‘fixed’ through automation without the customer ever being impacted. In some cases, however, manual exception processing or customer outreach may be required. To minimize costly and disruptive manual intervention, look to analytics to provide real time insights into root causes, which can then be addressed through automation, process changes and education.

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Schedule Management Scheduling has a tremendous impact on installation success. That’s why best practice is to validate appointment times and customer requirements at the POS and via follow-up outreach. Even a five point reduction in day of job failures can have a significant impact on time-to-revenue and operating cash flow or costs including stranded technician quota, excess equipment and contact center rescheduling. In addition, don’t wait for customers who cancel appointments to call you back to reschedule because, chances are, they won’t. Instead, reach out to them if you haven’t been contacted within a day or two. By doing this, a major broadband MSO experiencing 27 percent failure rates was able to realize a seven point reduction—and a $22 million increase in revenue, or 20 percent improvement in operating cash flow.

Day of Installation To minimize customer-related issues that impact day of install completions, follow these best practices:

• To reduce ‘customers not home,’ call customers on installation day to notify them when the technician will be arriving. Some providers now offer customers tools or apps that enable them to see where the technician is prior to the appointment so they can plan to be available for installation. Ensure that accessing this information does not require extensive navigation. Providing direct links via SMS is one way to make information easily accessible to customers.

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To find out how OnProcess Technology can help boost your sales-to-connect success rate, contact us at sales@onprocess.com, 508-520-2711 or visit www.onprocess.com.

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There’s a lot that can happen between order and installation/activation that can break a sale and cost you dearly in lost customers and revenue. By putting best practices in place for customer education and outreach, technician support, visibility and analytics, you can close that 15 percent failure gap, accelerate time-to-revenue and improve both your top and bottom lines.

• To improve the installation experience, reduce the need for return truck rolls and increase the likelihood of customers remaining connected, have your technicians validate the performance of installed products and services before leaving the home or business. In addition, make sure technicians demo key features and functionality.

• Technical issues and job modifications are common on the day of installation due to errors or miscommunications at the point of sale, inventory availability, up-selling services or just customers changing their minds. To improve the ‘day of install’ experience for customers, provide effective self-service tools and prompt inbound support for technicians needing technical assistance or order modifications.

• Follow-up with customers after the installation to provide education, make sure the installation went smoothly and that they are able to use, and are happy with, your product or service. This helps improve satisfaction and reduce remorse returns. In addition, leveraging analytics to identify which features and functionality drive ‘stickiness’ makes customer onboarding and education efforts much more successful for both the customer and the provider.