Trustpower sees 47% call deflection and faster troubleshooting with RouteThis
Written by Giselle Rochford
Key Results from Using RouteThis
100%+
increase in customer self-service adoption
75%+
resolution rate with customer self-service
47%
deflection of technical support interactions
About the company
Trustpower is an Internet Service Provider (ISP) headquartered in New Zealand with more than 100,000 telecommunications customer connections, including phone and internet services to over 25,000 customers on Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB). It is also one of New Zealand’s largest providers of UFB over fibre.
The company selected RouteThis to help streamline its customer service offerings and improve user satisfaction by reducing delays and empowering customers to fix connectivity issues.
Headquarters
Tauranga, New Zealand
Industry
Power, Gas, Mobile & Broadband
Number of Subscribers
Over 100,000
Solutions Used
RouteThis Core, LiveView & Self-Help
THE CHALLENGE
Inefficient support model for troubleshooting in-home issues
Like most ISPs, one of the major challenges that Trustpower faces is ensuring that the company’s internet users always have reliable access to their broadband services. The internet powers everything we do, and when performance slows down, the average subscriber doesn’t have the ability to troubleshoot issues themselves.
In order to keep the world running, ISPs need to be constantly available to troubleshoot customers’ internet issues and solve problems. However, for Trustpower, the traditional call centre model wasn't adequate to meet customer needs. It was also expensive and inefficient for the company to operate.
Though Trustpower already had some tools for troubleshooting local area networks, they weren’t able to solve many of the kinds of problems subscribers were encountering and agents often had to collect information manually. Furthermore, sending technicians into homes was time-consuming, expensive, and disruptive.
Two years ago, Steve O’Donnell, Assurance Manager (Telco) at the company, started exploring other options to improve customer satisfaction and enhance troubleshooting capabilities.
THE SOLUTION
Using RouteThis to Enable Faster Troubleshooting and Empower Customers to Self-Resolve
Selected for functionality
Trustpower needed a way to reduce the volume of call-ins on almost all of their platforms and services. There were many factors behind this, including the desire to provide a more effective business solution for their clients so that their issues were resolved more efficiently.
After conducting a market survey, Trustpower narrowed their options down to two different types of platforms and decided to go with RouteThis because it gave them more functionality.
Successful onboarding and implementation
Once Trustpower selected RouteThis, O’Donnell noted that the implementation process was incredibly efficient and easy.
“The onboarding was actually quite surprising and pleasant. The team at RouteThis took ownership of our learning and the incorporation of the application into our services. All the training collateral was provided. We had folks at RouteThis who actually put videos together, and then sent them to our training people so that they could use them for all of our customer agents. It was a really collaborative effort, which worked out quite well.”
- Steve O’Donnell, Assurance Manager (Telco), Trustpower
Jason Moore, CEO of RouteThis, agrees: “We worked closely with the Trustpower team to ensure that we were with them every step of the implementation process. It is extremely important to us to support our customers from the very beginning stages of engagement.”
A seamless deployment
Trustpower initially planned on using the platform to check their end users' wifi capability. Once implemented, RouteThis allowed them to leverage a suite of tools to check network access, a customer’s hardwire capability, and how the network was set up.
As O’Donnell mentions, “That's all we wanted, so we just started using it for that almost right away. It's now the first thing that we do when we do our interrogation of problems, but we found that navigating network access and set-ups could often be confusing. All of a sudden with RouteThis, we were able to check that quickly and virtually.”
Trustpower then graduated onto using other aspects of the platform, including RouteThis’ LiveView, which enables agents to see what the customer is seeing via their smartphone camera — which O’Donnell says has been “a complete game-changer for us.”
Having network diagnostics, video capabilities, self-help/self-repair, and remote access all in one platform has provided Trustpower the single dashboard/pane of glass for all of their subscriber troubleshooting needs.
UNEXPECTED BENEFITS
Call Deflection During the Pandemic
“When we saw the monthly data that the usage on RouteThis went up from around 25 percent to the 70s, we understood that the platform had deflected a huge amount of people from calling us.”
Exceeding 2020 goals
Since Trustpower implemented RouteThis two years ago, it has seen the platform’s usage grow dramatically. The company’s goal in 2020 was to reach a 35 percent uptake. When comparing usage the week before New Zealand went into lockdown in March and the week after, Trustpower noted an uptake of 75 percent.
As more people remained at home, the increased wifi activity funnelled Trustpower’s users with questions or issues to their website, which then directed them to download the RouteThis app to conduct their own troubleshooting.
47% call deflection
From the beginning of March to the end of April, self-help diverted 47 percent of calls for support that would have usually been handled by their call center.
“There were many different types of support required once we went into lockdown for COVID-19,” says O’Donnell. “For example, the government in New Zealand mandated that utilities had to freeze prices, and we decided that we would take our caps off of broadband usage for the lockdown period. A lot of people started calling in about that. But for service calls, we didn't see any increase or any issues with people’s wifi connectivity.”
That was mostly to do with RouteThis.
As O’Donnell notes, “When we saw the monthly data that the usage on RouteThis went up from around 25 percent to the 70s, we understood that the platform had deflected a huge amount of people from calling us.”
Beyond in-home support
The company was also able to protect their last-mile service company providers.
Through the virtual support capabilities of RouteThis, Trustpower was able to eliminate the need for technicians to conduct on-site checks. Instead, customers could perform their own inspections of interface equipment and engage with support staff on the application. O’Donnell says that they had never intended to use the platform in this way, but it became an asset in reducing the potential spread of COVID-19.
THE FUTURE
Growing with RouteThis
With the successful performance of RouteThis in managing customers’ issues prior to and during the pandemic, Trustpower is looking forward to expanding the platform’s capabilities to better serve their users. This could be as simple as enabling customers to capture a video of their gas meters to send back to support agents, or as complex as verifying credit card information.
“We’re going to work with RouteThis to develop our own roadmap,” says O’Donnell. “We see some capability to use this technology within the other sectors of our business, including the wholesale mobile service and the electricity side of our business.” Moore sees the potential usages as well:
“RouteThis provides a real-time interface that empowers technicians, support staff, and customers to discover solutions to connectivity problems in the most efficient manner. This really opens a lot of potential avenues in providing outstanding support and customer experience.”
