Build Broadband Customer Loyalty and Boost Your NPS With These 5 Tips

As a broadband service provider (BSP), an exceptional subscriber experience is your ultimate mission. Ensuring subscriber happiness builds long-term loyalty and therefore should be your top priority. And for good reason. Higher levels of satisfaction and loyalty correlate with higher growth and profitability. According to Bain & Company, B2B loyalty leaders tend to grow four to eight percentage points above their market’s annual growth. 

Satisfaction and loyalty contribute to many other positive business outcomes. Want to reduce subscriber churn, cut subscriber acquisition costs, grow customer lifetime value, and increase subscriber referrals? Develop a subscriber experience strategy that will delight and keep them coming back for more. 

Focus on Subscriber Experience—and Achieve 356 Percent Higher Than Average NPS 

The first step in developing a subscriber experience strategy is understanding all the touchpoints that your subscribers have across the different organizations within your business. You then need to measure subscriber perceptions of transactions with your company, how they felt about the interactions, and their views of the experience you deliver. According to a 2021 study from Omdia and Calix, almost 50 percent of BSPs use customer-focused metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores to gain insight on subscriber happiness. But getting this baseline is just the start of the journey. You need to use these powerful indicators to monitor subscriber sentiment on an ongoing basis and make necessary improvements across your business.

We recently spoke with Nick Colton of ALLO Communications (ALLO) and Sharon Hayes at Horry Telephone Cooperative (HTC) about their companies’ approach to NPS. These long-standing Calix customers have made NPS a key part of their overall subscriber experience strategy—and the results have been phenomenal. Each with a staggering NPS of +73, ALLO and HTC boast satisfaction levels up to 356 percent higher than the industry average NPS.  

Drawing on more than a decade of experience with NPS, they shared lessons they’ve learned along the way. Here are five of their best practices to help you succeed with NPS. 

1. Ensure you have top-level buy-in. An NPS program is a company-wide commitment to examining and improving subscribers’ perception of your services, your employees, and your brand. It is critical that the entire organization aligns behind and participates in the effort. That starts at the top—leaders need to be champions. 

2. Map activity to the subscriber journey. Treat each step along the subscriber journey as an opportunity to gauge satisfaction. Welcome them to your family with a post-installation survey. Check in with them after you send them their first bill. Get their feedback after your support team closes a trouble ticket. Make sure subscribers are aware of new services. Celebrate your subscribers’ service anniversary or even their birthday. Each of these touchpoints allows you to reinforce your commitment to subscriber satisfaction. 

3. Make it easy for subscribers to provide feedback. To increase subscriber response rates, keep the feedback process simple for subscribers. Don’t include too many questions on surveys. Use the channels customers are most likely to respond to. Encourage subscribers to participate by offering bill credits or other incentives. 

4. Analyze the data and create actionable recommendations. Once you’ve collected feedback, analyze the data to identify strengths you should amplify, as well as areas for improvement. Use it to develop actionable recommendations, such as providing additional training to increase agents’ knowledge in specific areas, or modifying bill inserts to keep subscribers informed of new developments. 

5. Focus on converting the detractors. All subscribers are important. But it’s particularly critical to focus on converting your “detractors” into either “passives” or, even better, “promoters.” Unhappy subscribers are more likely to share negative opinions that can impact your brand. Further, it costs significantly more to acquire new subscribers than it does to retain your current base. Take time to follow up with and “make it right” with any dissatisfied subscribers. 

Besides these key takeaways, Nick and Sharon stressed the importance of evaluating and evolving their NPS programs. They take a cross-organizational approach in examining their processes to ensure they’re getting the information they need. They take advantage of technology to simplify and automate how they compile and report NPS. And they love the partnership with Calix Premier Customer Success Services in helping them advance and refine their NPS programs. 

Watch the replay of the webinar “How To Know if Your Subscribers Love You,” to learn more about how your broadband business can achieve and benefit from a higher NPS.