Best Practices & Considerations in Wi-Fi Managed Services

Wi-Fi managed services and emerging technology in general represent a new way of deploying customer services, conducting operations, and providing ongoing support. Internet service providers are likely to experience common challenges when approaching these technology types. Many of the top challenges that companies experience are common across all technology initiatives, and not necessarily specific to any one. To generate a return on investment in new technology, avoiding costly missteps, BSPs must adhere to best practices.

Identifying Top Priorities

Executives across industries emphasize that deploying new technology begins with planning and strategizing, ensuring that key considerations and goals are accurately identified and defined, stakeholders and support teams are aligned and on board, and processes and project requirements are clearly understood. BSPs must conduct research, both internally and externally. Internally, to identify their own specific needs and priorities, and externally, to identify trends and benchmark against competitors. This process may be a larger lift for smaller BSPs that lack needed internal expertise and resources. These BSPs will oftentimes seek guidance from external experts to help them to identify top needs, best practices, and steps to optimize people and processes.

One key example of the benefit of Wi-Fi managed services is that of precise insights and analytics into residential network behavior and network outages. Access to this data allows BSPs to precisely know and account for the types, locations, and network capabilities of internet-connected devices within the home and estimate and plan for network traffic patterns. In order for BSPs to fully make use of these insights, they must be equipped with cloud-based systems to track and manage their subscriber experiences. These systems incorporate analytics capabilities able to interpret and analyze subscriber data in a user-friendly way. Without such capabilities, BSPs risk being inundated with a firehose of data that they have little means of making sense of.

BSP support teams use these cloud-based support systems to deliver troubleshooting and maintenance for customers and even drive mobile app self-service solutions, allowing BSPs to reserve truck rolls for more severe issues requiring a field technician on the ground. To properly capitalize on this advantage requires that BSPs align their support teams with customer success related services, making use of change management and business transformation best practices to to ensure new technology is not seen as a threat, but rather an opportunity.

These issues range between technical problems, network issues, customer service, and billing problems. These issues are a key cause of dissatisfaction among home internet households, with consumers who experience multiple issues throughout the year rapidly losing patience with their BSP. Poor customer service is highly likely to cause dissatisfaction and result in lowered NPS. Remote technical support and self-service solutions are key in helping to prevent dissatisfaction among customers.

Over half of home internet households report experiencing at least one issue with their home’s internet service in the last 12 months.

Improving Time-to-Market

Time-to-market while deploying new solutions has historically been a challenge for BSPs and for vendors. Managed services can enable a faster time-to-market, allowing BSPs to roll out white-labeled or co-branded solutions without needing to develop them in-house. These solutions are highly scalable and include vendor support, in particular customer success and enablement services that help guide BSPs through new product introductions and provide best practices for business transformation and growth. The timeline of deploying of these managed services has also been greatly reduced compared to years ago, when integrations took more than six months on average to complete. Since then, vendors have worked to streamline the deployment process through pre-integration strategies, completing much of the generic integration work ahead of time.

An additional consideration is deciding between an in-house router/gateway solution from a vendor or choosing an open integration approach capable of making use of existing router/gateway deployments. In-house solutions tend to offer more robust feature sets and capabilities than existing CPE deployments and are more easily integrated into technology stacks. The primary benefit of using existing CPE is cost-savings, through avoiding deploying new devices. With many BSPs having delayed their CPE upgrade cycle, benefits are tilted towards vendors offering in-house solutions. Before deciding on a solution, BSPs must evaluate the availability of vendor devices – the supply chain crisis is continuing to play a role in CPE availability. Compliance with industry standards is another key differentiator, ensuring compatibility with third-party products and systems.

?Working with Vendors

To deploy new edge solutions, it is vital that BSPs select a suitable vendor. Vendors must offer valuable solutions with proven ROI and a quick time to market, integrate well with BSP internal systems and processes, and provide mission critical long-term support and partnership. Coordinating multiple vendors may be a challenge for BSPs, given the complexities involved in integration, solutions management, and coordination. It is easier to either have a single vendor capable of coordinating third-parties or to have a single vendor offering the full suite of desired services and products. This also plays an important role with regards to support, as having a single support partner dramatically simplifies support operations among growing operational and customer complexity.

When selecting a vendor, BSPs must take care to ensure that their internal roadmap and their vendor’s roadmap are aligned. Collaboration and partnership between a BSP and its vendor help to align these visions, resulting in vendors developing solutions that provide value to BSPs and in BSPs being able to deliver solutions that provide value to subscribers and ROI to the company. With many BSPs looking to expand greenfield operations and move into unserved or underserved areas, the ability to scale to serve these new customers is another key factor for success.

Differentiating the Experience

While revenue generation is a key consideration when looking for a solution to deploy, the overall internet service market is growing more competitive. To attract and retain subscribers, BSPs must be prepared to employ a variety of new solutions. An increasing percentage of BSPs are offering select managed Wi-Fi services to customers as part of their standard tiered offerings, to raise satisfaction and better differentiate themselves from competitors.

For BSPs employing this strategy, the use of a cloud-based support solution for network visibility and improved customer support is becoming increasingly critical. By leveraging their cloud-based support solution to automatically identify local network outages or other problems, BSPs can address factors impacting the service before it escalates to a support call from the user. End-to-end visibility into subscriber experiences allows customer service representatives and field technicians to understand the root causes of customer service issues within the home and network, from the WAN to the residential gateway, in-home Wi-Fi experience, internet-connected devices, and individual applications. Proactively identifying and resolving issues results in greater customer satisfaction and retention, while reducing the cost of operations.

Both ongoing consumer trends and upcoming use cases point to the need to prepare for a more connected world delivered by managed Wi-Fi and value-add services. Connected devices and services are part of today’s lifestyle, and effectively supporting both is critical to a BSP’s success. BSPs looking to compete with Tier 1 providers must provide differentiated experiences through their service offerings and the quality of their customer’s experience.

This is an excerpt from Parks Associates white paper, Revenue at the Edge: Wi-Fi Managed Services and the Subscriber Experience, released in partnership with 凯易讯 .

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