When it comes to supporting ISP subscribers, the type of equipment they use in their home network makes a significant impact on support agents’ ability to help. Even if ISPs provide a singular managed router for subscribers during the installation, there’s still a strong likelihood that they’ll introduce their third-party equipment (like range extenders or mesh WiFi systems) to their home that your managed system can’t monitor.
For managed and non-managed ISPs, customer premise equipment (CPE) lead to a lack of consistent visibility in their subscriber’s home network, increasing handle times and repeat calls for WiFi issues.
Ultimately, most ISP subscribers will have different devices controlling their in-home WiFi experience, which we call CPE fragmentation. So how do ISPs resolve the CPE fragmentation issue to better support their subscribers? Let’s dive in a bit deeper.
The effects of CPE fragmentation on subscriber support
Take an ISP that supports three different routers as an example.
Each of those routers has its backend system that provides various levels of visibility into the subscriber’s network. Because of this, every support call your agents take has a few minutes of added time as they try to sort out which dashboard they need to go to for that subscriber. In addition, each system might provide information differently and with a unique set of identifiers.
Now you have a situation where, with every call, the agent needs to invent a new troubleshooting process based on the WiFi diagnostics available.
And that doesn’t even account for ISPs with subscribers who aren’t on your managed systems. Suppose you have a portion of your subscriber database that you have no visibility into. These subscribers could be on legacy devices your company no longer supports or have replaced or modified their issued device with a third-party system.
In that case, your agents end up playing 20 questions with the subscriber and depending on the technical aptitude of both the subscriber and the agent, it leaves room for miscommunication and misdiagnosis.
Suppose agents don’t have the necessary data to resolve WiFi issues remotely, or they don’t feel comfortable doing so due to a lack of technical knowledge. In that case, you will see far more instances of your ISP customer service teams taking calls where the issues aren’t a network problem but rather a WiFi problem.
You’re likely also going to see more unnecessary tech visits for WiFi issues that, quite frankly, should be resolved at the tier one level. These escalations remove your team from doing their core jobs and increase subscriber frustration from being passed around to varying agents.
RouteThis Resolve: The solution to the CPE fragmentation problem
At RouteThis, we believe the answer to the CPE fragmentation problem is a software-based, CPE-agnostic solution. And when we say CPE-agnostic, we mean it doesn’t matter what CPE your subscribers use; there is no equipment necessary, and it works on an entire subscriber base regardless of the current hardware.
You need something that allows ISPs to override the fragmentation CPE has created so that they can access the correct information about any subscriber’s home network using the same path every time, whether the subscriber is unmanaged, has legacy devices, or uses third-party equipment.
You’ll see the impact on unnecessary tech visits with a powerful solution to get those diagnostics without CPE but also simple enough for agents to quickly and confidently use on support calls so they don’t need to escalate to tier two or three or roll a truck.
That solution is RouteThis Resolve, the industry’s only mobile-based WiFi support platform. With RouteThis Resolve, agents now have the visibility they need into any home network, regardless of their CPE, to quickly identify, resolve, and prevent WiFi connectivity issues.
Here are just some of the benefits our customers typically see with our CPE-agnostic WiFi connectivity troubleshooting platform, RouteThis Resolve:
- 20% reduction in call times
- 50% reduction in unnecessary tech visits
- 30% reduction in support costs
In addition, the RouteThis Resolve software is easy and fast to deploy. You don’t have to wait years as you might with hardware deployments.
In most cases, you can be up and running with the software in under six weeks and be able to use it with any subscriber right away.
These factors turn into significant operational expense (OPEX) savings and can drastically improve subscriber satisfaction.