How PTCI Is Making 2024 the Year of the Subscriber

Don’t lead with speed; make it personal. That was the message many marketers delivered at Calix ConneXions 2023. If broadband service providers (BSPs) want to maintain relevancy and avoid commoditization, they’ll focus on services subscribers want—and avoid wars over speed and price. Many BSPs took that message to heart in 2023, overhauling their go-to-market (GTM) strategy by creating product offerings that focused on the daily lives of their subscribers.

Making the Move to Persona-Based Marketing  

As a Calix Customer Success manager, I work alongside broadband marketing leaders to make this shift a reality—aligning their organizations as we shape future product strategies. Panhandle Telephone Cooperative (PTCI), a Calix partner since 2019, is a great example of a BSP making the move to persona-based marketing as part of a comprehensive review of their GTM strategy. Their story demonstrates how Calix can work with you to simplify, elevate, and differentiate your product offerings, ensuring you meet the needs of your unique subscriber demographic.

Standardize the Subscriber Experience by Simplifying Your Offerings

Founded in the 1950s, PTCI is a pillar of the communities they serve across Oklahoma and Texas. However, like many long-established BSPs, they found themselves weighed down by too many plans and offers—some of which had been around for 17 years. This complexity could overwhelm subscribers while internal teams were burdened with the time-consuming regulatory filing required for every flavor of every plan. PTCI realized they needed to focus less on legacy products and, instead, reenergize their focus on the subscriber experience. 

We leveraged Calix Engagement Cloud to help PTCI identify subscribers that were having a sub-optimal experience, or “silent sufferers.” The powerful insights revealed which subscribers were consistently experiencing a poor Wi-Fi signal, hitting their service tiers, and actively looking for alternative providers. During 2023, PTCI focused on addressing this issue, executing targeted marketing campaigns to right-size their lower tier plans, and ensuring packages matched subscriber usage patterns for the best possible user experience. 

Using personalized messaging for different segments such as “gamers” and “work-from-homers,” PTCI achieved a 75 percent upgrade rate. They also increased their CommandIQ^® attach rate by 233 percent and grew ProtectIQ^® and ExperienceIQ^® adoption by a staggering 1,033 percent—delivering a much-improved subscriber experience.

Personalize the Subscriber Experience by Elevating Your Messaging

Having consolidated their product offerings, PTCI is now committed to crafting persona-based packages tailored for different audiences. Their 2024 goal is to launch an entirely new, differentiated offering strategy, grounded in data, aligned to subscribers’ lifestyles, and embedded across the entire organization. 

Here’s how we’re approaching this with PTCI:

1. Let data be your guide. Leveraging the data and insights at our fingertips, we’re building a detailed picture of PTCI subscribers’ and prospects’ lifestyles, habits, and preferences. Calix Engagement Cloud provides all the intelligence you need to segment your audiences and develop personalized offerings. By including prospects in this process, PTCI will stand apart from the competition and supercharge their acquisition plans.

2. Choose your personas wisely. Different personas work for different organizations. Successfully rolling out new persona packages starts with understanding the unique needs of your subscribers and your organization. Amplify your messaging around how you can make individual subscribers’ lives easier. For PTCI, this means considering packages that include “Connected Family” (focusing on online safety) “Pro Gamer” (focusing on low latency/jitter) and “Everyday Essentials” (focusing on affordability).

3. Create an action plan. Shifting to persona-based selling takes time. Digest and analyze the data. Include key functions in your organization to test your new personas. For example, equipping customer support representatives (CSRs) with “needs assessment” questions will help them map subscribers to the right persona. PTCI plans to record CSR calls and use AI to identify keywords to route subscribers accordingly. 

4. Don’t go it alone. Customer Success “walks the walk” with our BSP partners. From data analysis to persona recommendations to ready-made, customizable campaign assets from the Electronic Content Builder (ECB), we’re here to support the execution of your differentiated offering strategy. For instance, the Calix Web Builder makes it easy for PTCI to create beautifully designed web landing pages for their new persona-based offerings. 

    

Make 2024 Your Year of the Subscriber 

“Speed-first” marketing campaigns are over—79 percent of GMs believe they will beat the competition by offering managed services that enhance subscribers’ connected lifestyles. As a marketer, you can be the change agent within your organization by aligning your teams around the creation of persona-driven campaigns. PTCI, poised to launch a series of innovative packages built around personalized experiences, has proclaimed 2024 as their “Year of the Subscriber.” By focusing on value, relationships, and a service that is second to none, they’ll compete and win in an aggressive marketplace. What will you do this year?

To learn more about creating differentiated offerings, listen to the webinar, “Refine Your Offer Strategy” from Calix Customer Success.