New updates to the award-winning Calix Support Cloud enable support teams of all sizes to increase efficiency as their businesses embrace new managed services, including Calix SmartTown for community use cases—ensuring exceptional subscriber experiences, lower operating expenses, and growth

Calix, Inc announced that the award-winning Calix Support Cloud (Support Cloud) is the only solution that delivers insights to enable customer support across the industry’s most extensive portfolio of managed services. Calix introduced its 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th managed services last month at Calix ConneXions 2022. The growing portfolio enables broadband service providers (BSPs) to win in increasingly competitive markets by delivering managed services. These include social media monitoring (Bark), connected home security (Arlo Secure), connected device protection (Servify Care™), and scalable community-wide Wi-Fi for subscribers and smart neighborhoods (SmartTown™). To support business growth by increasing support efficiency, BSP support teams leverage Support Cloud, which provides increased visibility into the complete subscriber experience. Continual updates to Support Cloud make it easier than ever for BSP customer support teams to provide proactive customer support that contributes to an exceptional subscriber experience—all while reducing operating costs. This also extends to the Calix managed service, SmartTown.

Last year, New York-based Ontario & Trumansburg Telephone Companies (OTTC) added managed services to their existing Wi-Fi offerings to stand out in crowded Rochester and Buffalo markets. Specifically, they launched ProtectIQ® home network protection and ExperienceIQ® advanced network controls. They also engaged Calix Premier Customer Success to help them accelerate go-to-market times and get the most out of their technology investments. OTTC leveraged the full Calix Revenue EDGE™ platform—including GigaSpire® BLAST systems, Calix Cloud®, and the Calix CommandIQ® mobile app—to see several benefits. They increased customer support workflow efficiency even as they added new managed services. Meanwhile, Calix Marketing Cloud enabled OTTC to find the best households to target for new managed services and drive more subscribers to their personalized CommandIQ mobile app. This high level of self-service, paired with the tools and visibility into the subscriber experience in Support Cloud, enabled the OTTC customer support team to decrease operating costs. They reduced truck rolls by 19 percent and mean time to repair (MTTR) by 34 percent.

As a new function in CommandIQ, subscribers can now click through to their BSPs’ billing portal so they can easily and quickly log in to view billing details. Customer service representatives (CSRs) can configure their BSPs’ billing portal URL for display in CommandIQ through Support Cloud, resulting in convenience for the subscriber and lower inbound call volume. Support Cloud is also launching multiple enhancements to network operations features to make support workflows and reporting easier to manage, edit and maintain over time.

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Even as BSP offerings grow in complexity, additional enhancements to Support Cloud help reduce support operating costs by:

• Providing more support visibility into the complete managed services subscriber experience. Calix continually enhances Support Cloud to further enable CSRs and field technicians to support a growing list of managed services. CSRs can now support managed Wi-Fi experiences in community spaces with SmartTown. In the same system, they have increased visibility into residential subscriber experiences, like connected device protection from Servify Care. This results in faster troubleshooting.
• Enabling proactive monitoring and support for new markets with SmartTown. Calix launched SmartTown last month. Now Support Cloud is poised to help BSPs support Wi-Fi experiences at scale. Recent enhancements include proactive monitoring and support of the community subscriber experience, more insights, and troubleshooting tools.
• Leveraging the Revenue EDGE platform, including EDGE Systems, to deliver exceptional subscriber experiences. Calix has a growing portfolio of GigaSpire and GigaPro™ Wi-Fi systems that includes the upcoming u4g and just-launched p6he. These Revenue EDGE Wi-Fi systems integrate with Support Cloud to give CSRs end-to-end visibility into the subscriber experience. This means support teams can seamlessly provide proactive support. At the same time, subscribers can also self-service using the CommandIQ mobile app.
• Collaborating with Customer Success Services to support enablement and business growth for managed services. Calix has a dedicated customer support organization, Calix Customer Success Services (Customer Success). This award-winning team provides step-by-step guidance to help support BSPs as they grow their businesses. That support extends to all managed services Calix offers. New content is available to support SmartTown community implementation with hands-on technical workshops and new service introduction guidance.

Oklahoma-based Centranet also successfully leveraged Revenue EDGE to launch ProtectIQ and ExperienceIQ earlier this year, resulting in almost all their subscribers using these managed services. Part of their success is due to their 92 percent app adoption rate, which gives subscribers more control of their managed services experience and frees up CSRs to provide proactive subscriber support. This results in a better subscriber experience and fewer inbound calls. In a recent customer satisfaction survey, Centranet scored 9.5 out of 10.

“We understand that exceptional subscriber experiences are the most important differentiator,” said Mark Prather, president of fiber and technology at Centranet. “The more information and visibility our customer support team can access through Support Cloud, the more we are able to troubleshoot quickly for our subscribers while also increasing efficiency and reducing unnecessary truck rolls for our team. Support Cloud helps us ensure that the resolution doesn’t depend on how well a subscriber can describe the issue they are experiencing. With Support Cloud, our CSRs can see what is going on for themselves to ensure a better overall subscriber experience.”

“As BSPs launch growing portfolios of managed services to excite and delight their subscribers, customer support teams continue to play a pivotal role in driving these experiences,” said Martha Galley, executive vice president of customer engagement and services at Calix. “Innovative market giants are leveraging Support Cloud with guidance from Customer Success to increase efficiency while launching new revenue streams. Visibility and enhanced support tools enable even the smallest customer support team to deliver world-class support regardless of which managed service the subscriber uses. Centralizing customer support needs in one solution unlocks the pathway to growing businesses with new managed services.”

Every 91 days, Calix releases updates for its award-winning cloud and software platforms. This consistent cadence enables BSPs to further their transformations from utility providers into experience providers. In this way, even the smallest service providers get the opportunity to accelerate their innovation, differentiate, and become giants in their markets.

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