Harnessing Your Personal Experiences to Improve Broadband Programs

What You’ll Learn

Speed is so 2020. To connect with today’s broadband subscribers you need data-driven storytelling, persona-based service tiers and the know-how to read digital body language. Calix’s Naylor Gray shares insights from the 2024 update of Calix’s e-book, “The Definitive Guide to Subscriber Experience.”

Guest Speaker

Naylor Gray

Show Notes

Transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Intro: A production of Pioneer Utility Resources. StoryConnect, helping communicators discover ideas to shape their stories and connect with their customers.

Megan McKoy-Noe: We are all subscribers, so how can you harness your personal experiences to improve your broadband programs? That’s what we’ll be talking about on this episode of The StoryConnect Podcast. I’m your host, Megan McKoy-Noe, one of the storytellers at Pioneer Utility Resources. And I am joined by Naylor Gray. He’s the associate vice president of brand and content marketing at Calix. He is in the process – this is very exciting – in the process of updating Calix ebook, The Definitive Guide to Subscriber Experience. Which if you have not seen it before, I know we’ve had him on the podcast a couple of years ago to talk about this, it is excellent. And he shared key takeaways at the 2024 Calix Marketer Summit, which was hosted at the National Rural Telecommunications Council’s Sales and Marketing Conference in Texas. Naturally, we invited him onto the podcast to hear all about the latest trends. Naylor, thank you so much for joining us today.

Naylor Gray: Hey, thank you for having me.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Now, before we dive in to all the details and subscriber experience, I want you just to explain, for folks who have not had the chance to meet you before, a little bit about your role at Calix and how Calix partners with utilities.

Naylor Gray: Absolutely. So my role at Calix is pretty easy to explain. I get to tell all of the great customer stories that we hear from our customers out in the field. And what Calix does, Calix helps utilities become broadband service providers. So we have an ecosystem of partners and our own end-to-end solutions that help utilities design, fund, build, operate and market their own broadband services.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Ah well, that is fantastic. I know I’ve enjoyed learning a lot about what Calix does. Pioneer works with Calix to help people strengthen their storytelling, so it is always a treat to learn from you, naylor. Now, many utility pioneers, they’ve been living in the fast lane when it comes to broadband, installing fiber, connecting communities with a promise of fast internet access. But things are changing. Now, the story is shifting away from speed, and it really doesn’t matter as much as it seemed to maybe when folks were first getting going. How do subscribers value speed, price, and service?

Naylor Gray: That’s a great question. So I think speed is really just a start. And honestly, I think most subscribers don’t even really understand speed. Once you get past a gig of speed, is there really any use case?

Megan McKoy-Noe: What is a gig?

Naylor Gray: What is a gig? And you know, and how is it going to change anything? Here’s what subscribers know. They know when their internet works. They know when their Zoom calls go well. They know when they have low latency with their games. And they know when their, you know, the key scene in a movie, the big reveal, is not all of a sudden interrupted by buffering. You know, so they want internet that works well. And I think they’re also tired of being sold things that they don’t want, like a landline or a cable TV package. So I think really it’s about moving beyond speed and establishing a value based offer. And a value based offer just simply looks at the subscriber and offers them a tailored package that meets their lifestyle.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Wait, are you saying that you’re going to just think about what I personally need and actually help me just with that? No extra servings of stuff on the side?

Naylor Gray: If all broadband service providers could do that, we would be amazing companies, and we would be some of the highest rated companies in the country. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and we’re on a mission to fix that.

Megan McKoy-Noe: We’re on a mission. We are on this mission together, Naylor. I’m excited about this. So you wrote the first version of Calix’s Definitive Guide for the subscriber experience back in 2022. We are now in the middle of 2024, and I was wondering, because you’ve been tracking this for a while now, what are the biggest shifts that you’ve noticed in the subscriber experience expectations that folks have versus what they’re actually getting?

Naylor Gray: Yeah. So the first shift that we really noticed, it was during the pandemic, and customers started to describe themselves by how they used their Internet. Like, I work from home, or I’m a gamer. Like, people literally started to, you know, that was part of their description. And that movement has really taken hold and it’s sustaining itself. So when we wrote the first subscriber experience ebook, we kind of observed that. And we also observed that the best way to reach a subscriber was to sort of meet them where they were. And I think that that has now taken hold, and subscribers are really expecting their providers to sort of not only understand who they are in their lifestyle, but they also want them, they want their providers to know them better and only offer them the things that they might want that would improve their life. And that’s really, that’s the fundamental concept of a value based offering.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I like that. Now, you mentioned knowing more about them and what they might want. And that’s all in the data, right?

Naylor Gray: It is.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Data is a treasure trove, and data driven storytelling is really trending right now. Thanks in no small part to how Calix and other software companies are tracking and helping different communicators, the utility pioneers out there, really interpret that data and learn how to use it. So I’m curious about the types of data that you feel have the most value for utility pioneers, which is what we call everyone that is a member of our cooperative. So what has the most value, and how easy is it for communicators to use the data to drive a better subscriber experience?

Naylor Gray: So I think there’s kind of three broad classes of data that you want to look at. And broadly speaking, you want to understand your subscriber satisfaction. Are they happy with you? Are they happy with the service? And there’s different ways to measure that. It could be a net promoter score. It could be customer satisfaction. It’s also important to understand their purchase behavior. What are they a customer of? What have they actually bought from you? And it might be shocking to hear, but I’ve worked with really large service providers, tier one companies, and they don’t really understand who their customers are because they don’t actually know what they’ve purchased. So, you know, the first two, it’s really important to understand their satisfaction. It’s really important to understand their purchase behavior. And then the third category of data is really big and broad. And it’s kind of emerging. But it really encompasses digital body language data and demographic data. And what I mean by that is as a subscriber.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I have to know.

Naylor Gray: Yeah. As as a subscriber, how many devices are connected in my home? What is that telling you about me? Am I hitting usage limits? You know, am I a family? Am I in a house? Am I in an apartment? You know, these are all examples of sort of digital body language and demographic data. And I think these are all three areas that you need to understand. How well you can unlock these insights really depends on what kind of capabilities you have as an organization or what kind of software you’re running. Because it’s not easy to see this.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Well, and sometimes it can come down to just asking what data is available because it might be there, but you might not know about it. I know I was talking, I interviewed Brianna Wall on the podcast a few months ago from Oklahoma Electric Cooperative, and she said that she reached out to NISC, who helps power some of their solutions and said, “What data do I have? This is what I want.” And they found an easy way for her to be able to view it. The data was there; she just wasn’t seeing it until she specifically asked for it. So sometimes asking for the data, reaching out to your Calix partner and saying, “What can I see? What is out there?” That’s often the first step, just knowing that you need to ask. And I am now fascinated Naylor. I think “digital body language” is my new favorite phrase ever. I have not heard that before so is that?

Naylor Gray: Well, I didn’t make it up, but I’ll claim credit for it.

Megan McKoy-Noe: What? No. You can totally claim credit for that.

Naylor Gray: Okay, it’s mine now.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Yeah, I just hadn’t heard that before, so I think it’s fascinating to think about, you know, what they’re telling you without saying anything.

Naylor Gray: Yeah. And this is really the basis behind the Calix cloud. You know, we offer cloud software, and it’s really designed for functional roles within the organization. If you’re in operations, what do you need to know about the network? If you’re in customer support, what do you need to know about how the network is behaving in the subscriber home? And if you’re in marketing, you need to understand how can I engage with the subscriber. So these are these are ways that we help our customers unlock that data.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I love that. Now I’m curious, you’ve talked about value-driven services and value-driven experience for subscribers, right? How does that data, the database storytelling, really help you shift from connecting homes, which is what a lot of folks have focused on doing. You know, we just have to drive up our take rates and get everybody, get the whole area built out. Well, that’s done now. So how can you shift your focus using this data to delivering more personalized managed services, really focusing on the value that you’re bringing?

Naylor Gray: So let’s pull on the thread a little bit and talk through an example here. So let’s imagine a subscriber home. And you’ve got insight into the home to understand how many devices are connected to the network in that home. So I’m going to say if you look into a subscriber home and there’s fewer than 20 devices that are connected to the internet, they probably don’t have super sophisticated needs. They’re probably fairly straightforward. And if they’ve got more than 20 devices, they’re probably pretty sophisticated. And if they have more than 50 devices, they’re probably some kind of technophile. So what does that mean? Well, let’s look at another example. We have customers. They’re offering Arlo cameras as part of a package. So Arlo cameras,they’re connected cameras. They have doorbell cameras. They have outdoor cameras, indoor cameras. They connect to the network. You access it through an app on the phone. So when you go to market an Arlo camera, it’s probably good to know, does this household already have cameras or not? And then let’s synthesize this understanding with the number of devices in the home. So let’s go back. You know, it’s a home with fewer than 20 devices connected. None of them are cameras. So this is a great prospect maybe to tell about Arlo cameras. And at the same time, let’s imagine if they’re not super sophisticated, maybe what they really want is a white glove service to come and install those cameras for them. You know, so that’s an example of using data to tell a story. And then we’ll continue to tell the story. They’ve got lots of devices, and maybe they have a competitor camera that’s already installed. This is an opportunity to come in and have a more direct conversation and present the competitive benefits of why maybe they would want to rip and replace and put in an Arlo camera and come up with a new camera within their home. So this is all examples of using data to put together much more personalized offers.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Yeah, I hadn’t heard of rip and replace before, but it makes so much sense. It’s a completely different story that you want to share with those folks versus the folks that maybe you’ve never had a camera before. And they’re just thinking, “You know, maybe, maybe I should. Maybe security is the next way to go. Maybe, you know, my broadband access makes it easier to install something like this.” So I love that you guys break it down in the guide by those kinds of experiences, and the questions you should be asking yourself. One of the other areas, and I’ve been talking to a lot of folks about really boosting your broadband connections and your marketing and taking it to the next level. And as I’ve interviewed folks about this, I’ve looked at the tiers of service. Some people have their tiers of service based on speed, and I think that kind of is how we all, a lot of folks got started, and they’ve carried that on over. But as you said, Naylor, and as a lot of other folks have said, speed is just not – it’s good to know, but that can’t be the only selling point. So some folks are starting to deliver, starting to create some different tiers, focused more on the experience, as different tiers of service based on different personas. We had Chris from CL Tel, who talked just about personas-based marketing, really great conversation that he had with Andy. So I’m wondering what you have seen with service tiers, and how those are mirroring the subscriber experience?

Naylor Gray: Yeah, this is the fun part of our jobs where we start to see these concepts come alive. So here’s what I’m seeing. We’re seeing our customers. They’re starting to really embrace more sort of value-based offer tiers. So perfect example, I’ll call it the guardian plan. So here’s what a guardian plan is. It’s directed at parents with children. And if you’re a parent with children in the home, then you’re going to want a combination of managed Wi-Fi, some sort of app that you can use to manage the network. That includes parental controls, so you can manage the amount of time spent on the internet and what content’s available by device or person. You can also put prioritization. So if I’m working from home and I have children, I can say my phone call is going to take priority over any other traffic on the network. And then lastly, you can also include – yes.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I have an idea.

Naylor Gray: Yes, I can prioritize my device to be the most important thing on the network.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Yes, so this answers a question because my husband and I both work from home. I see an instant reason that I might want this. And it’s like the the old thermostat joke, you know, who’s messing with the thermostat when two people are in the house. Now, it’s going to be who’s prioritizing their broadband speeds over and their experience over the others. Oh, I love this.

Naylor Gray: As parent, as the one that pays the bills, you get to prioritize your Zoom call over YouTube or Twitch or whatever it is that your kids want to do. So, and then lastly, cyber protection to make sure that your network is protected from malware because while your computer might be protected, is your Nest thermostat? Is your smart TV? Is that, you know, internet controlled light bulb? None of those things have protections built in. You need something at the network level.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I love that, so that’s the guardian approach.

Naylor Gray: That’s the guardian. So I could do the same thing with gamers, by the way. I could go through and say, “I’m going to offer you managed Wi-Fi. I’m going to offer you the best gear for your house. I can make sure that it’s placed correctly so that you can get the best signals. I’ll give you an app to manage the network. I can give you controls to prioritize your gaming console over everything else. And I can also make sure that the rest of your house is protected with cyber protection as well.”

Megan McKoy-Noe: Do you have one for wives of gamers? Is that another tier? Yeah, I think we should talk offline.

Naylor Gray: I think we’re working on that one. It’s still in the lab.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Okay. Good. Excellent. Because I see possibilities here. And yes, my husband is a gamer and works from home, which makes life interesting for all of us. So I love that. I love thinking, and I tease because it’s fun, but really it’s thinking about how you experience things. And it’s not about the speed, it’s about the experience, which you have said in the guide. And I again, highly recommend the guide. The one that’s available right now was updated in 2023. And you said later on in 2024, the new guide is going to be available. So we’ll let folks know.

Naylor Gray: That right. We want to update it every year.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Yeah, yeah. And I appreciate that y’all do that. Something else that I have read in the guide that you’ve covered before is brand voice. And you mentioned that in addition to the values-based offerings, which I think are critical, but you also say it’s important to consider your brand voice and who your brand is seen to be in your community. Could you talk to me about what role your brand voice plays in how people feel about you?

Naylor Gray: Yeah, I think this is hugely, hugely important. And everyone has a brand voice, whether they realize it or not. They just might not realize what their brand voice sounds like. But essentially your brand voice is just about capturing the distinctive traits and personalities of your organization. And many of our customers are smaller and this brand voice is vital to who they are within their overall community. So a couple of examples. We work with a customer based out of Colorado. They have a very quirky brand voice. You know, and they’ve trained their customer service reps, not to be customer service reps, but to be Wi-Fi wizards. And they’re there to field any and all incoming questions. And they’ve shared with us that they literally have a subscriber who will call-in to get restaurant and movie recommendations, and they accommodate it because that’s part of their brand voice. Just standing out and being different.

Megan McKoy-Noe: And their magic, so it’s fine.

Naylor Gray: That’s one example. And then we have another one based out of Michigan, their brand voice really reflects the values of their community. It’s about thrift. It’s about hard work. It’s about growing a job base, and then investing profits back into the community. And one of the things they did that really exemplified that brand voice was they shared a story on their Facebook page, and it was about one of their linemen that discovered it was an injured baby, bald eagle. And they rescued it, sent it to a rehabilitation center where it recovered, and then was returned back to the wild in a healthy condition. And it was almost a metaphor for who they were within their organization. And they shared that on their Facebook page and got really good, you know, sort of feedback from their customers on that. It was really amazing.

Megan McKoy-Noe: And that’s true. I mean, that has nothing to do with broadband access, right? It’s a bald eagle, but it has everything to do with how people feel about you. And that really is what a lot of this comes down to, creating a way for people to feel about you, creating your brand in the community so that they trust you. And it’s not about price, because if you start competing with other, if there are other broadband providers that move into your area, and you began competing on price, and nobody wins. I mean, maybe some of the customers win shortly, but then the service won’t be as good, right?

Naylor Gray: Nobody wins when you’re competing on price. But, you know, if you’re competing with the tier one national company, and you’re the one that’s saving baby bald eagles, and they’re the ones that you know are trying to sell you landlines, who do you think’s going to win?

Megan McKoy-Noe: The eagle savers, every day.

Naylor Gray: Every day. Who doesn’t want to save bald eagles?

Megan McKoy-Noe: So I love that you get to tell your customer stories nationally, and you work with broadband providers across the nation. So I was hoping you could maybe share a story or two of how a utility shifted their focus on the subscriber experience and the impact that change made on their take rate in the community.

Naylor Gray: Yeah, so I’ll tell a story. It was a utility co-op that wanted to move into the broadband business. So when they decided they were going to do it, they had the wherewithal to realize that a utility company and how they relate to their customers is fundamentally different than how a broadband company would relate to their customers. So they took a very introspective approach to begin with. How were they able to communicate with their potential customers? And they knew who they were because they were already utility customers. But, you know, a broadband customer is a different thing. So they had to really change how they thought about their customers. And the best way to do that was they literally went on community listening tours, and they would go out to different communities, and they would meet members of the community. In many cases, it was their own family members that would show up to these events, and they would find out what was important, and they would listen. And then they kind of audited how they could communicate back to these people going forward. Was it in person? Was it electronic? Was it through the website? And they used that to keep their communities up to date while they were building the broadband network out. And then once they launched, what they had learned was most people were really looking for just general peace of mind. They just kind of wanted to know that their internet was going to work, that everything was going to be fine. And, you know, and their data and their children would be safe. So they created a peace of mind package. And what the peace of mind package was whole home security. It was parental controls, and it was no charge service visits. It was also layered on managed Wi-Fi. And then in order to access some of the parental controls, you need an app to download it. So this is important because they had a really big service area. And so this peace of mind required the subscribers to use the app to manage the home network. And what they realized was when you had your members engaged like this, and they were using the app, when a trouble arose and, you know a call came in, almost all the time, they could diagnose the problem remotely and fix it remotely. So they had it was like an 80% reduction in truck rolls in households where they were using the app. And they also at the same time managed to maintain a 90 Net Promoter Score, which is very high. You know, that’s higher than Apple computers. So they did this combination of community listening, building offers that match the community. And then it was also practical because they just had a really big service area. So managing these service calls was a big, it was very important from an OPEX standpoint, and they just kind of mixed all that together into their brand and their offerings, and they created something that their customers love.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Peace of mind. I think that is brilliant. Thank you so much for sharing that. You’ve also, I’m sure, seen some really interesting brand loyalty programs with the folks that you work with. Could you share a good example with us?

Naylor Gray: Yeah, I will, and this is what’s really fun. I work at Calix, and I get my internet from a Calix customer. So I can kind of see both sides of this. So my internet provider, they provide a referral program. So there’s me. I’m always excited about all things internet, and I’m always telling –

Megan McKoy-Noe: I can’t imagine why.

Naylor Gray: Yeah. I’m like, “Hey, did you download the app? Did you get the fiber internet? Did you sign up for the cameras?” I mean, you know, every day I’m out there, you know, kind of flogging, you know, internet and services to my neighbors. And what’s really cool is my provider has a referral program, so all I have to do is just go on the website, and I just log my referral. It’s a very simple form. I fill it in, and then I get credits back for doing it, but I don’t do it for the credits. I also do it because it’s just genuinely fun to share the information with my neighbors, and then they can also pay it forward. And it becomes a little bit infectious, like they sort of tell people. And then pretty soon, through word of mouth, you know, sort of built on top of this referral program, they’ve kind of thoroughly covered a neighborhood, which is super cool for them.

Megan McKoy-Noe: So do you put in the information when you have a neighbor that you think would be a good fit for a service?

Naylor Gray: Yes. [inaudible]

Megan McKoy-Noe: So it’s not the neighbor saying – okay, I wasn’t sure if it was the neighbor. Because sometimes when I’m filling out – not for broadband – but for other programs, they’ll ask me, who did you hear about this from? And so it’s up to me to put that in. But I like that it’s up to the person who was referring someone to enter that in.

Naylor Gray: It’s a little more secure when you do it that way, because there’s nothing, there’s no doubt, because I’ve proactively entered the information myself.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Okay. Very, very fun. Well, on the podcast and I know you’ve been on before, so you probably know as a friend of the pod, but we end each episode with a reminder to keep telling your story. How does a subscriber experience tell your story?

Naylor Gray: Well, I think the subscriber experience is so important because you know what? We’re all subscribers, every single one of us. And for me, I’m able to work remotely and maintain a really high quality of life. And I can do this because my provider offers me fiber internet with managed Wi-Fi. I can control the network from an app on my phone. It’s protecting me from cyber intrusions. I have connected cameras to see who’s outside while I’m on the calls or away from home, and I would just challenge everyone to think of yourself as a subscriber first, and then start to bring what you want into the services that you’re offering back out to your members or your subscribers to improve the quality of their life, in the same way that my provider has improved and improved the quality of my life.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Oh, I love that. Well, Naylor, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story with utility pioneers. He is Naylor Gray from Calix and I’m your host, Megan McKoy-Noe at Pioneer Utility Resources. And until we talk again, keep telling your story.

Outro: StoryConnect is produced by Pioneer Utility Resources, a communications cooperative that is built to share your story. StoryConnect is engineered by Lucas Smith of Lucky Sound Studio.