By David Dzienciol, Chief Customer and Commercial Officer
Managing extraordinary growth is a great problem to have but, at the end of the day, it’s still a challenge which needs to be met with innovation, transparency and flexibility.
When you’re an ISP focussed on differentiating in a fiercely competitive market, quality infrastructure at the core and operational best practise is critical to success.
There is no advantage to just doing the same thing as a competitor. Brands need to forge their own identity, approach things differently and stay focussed on exceeding customer expectations around reliability, flexibility and customer satisfaction.
Focussed on the customer
From the beginning, Aussie Broadband (ABB) set out with an objective to be the premier broadband services company in Australia connecting households and business to the National Broadband Network (NBN).
It’s well on the way to achieving that by utilising colocation services from NEXTDC and taking advantage of efficient, cost effective, high performance interconnectivity opportunities within our ecosystem to build the resilient network upon which its glowing reputation depends.
Historically, NBN resellers have struggled with confusing, expensive, and inflexible wholesale pricing. End-user complaints to the industry watchdog were running rampant and rollout delays were mounting with solutions based on “mixed technology” architectures.
The mission this Aussie success story embarked on involved taking on some of the biggest names in their industry. They had a clear plan and a stated mission to improve customer outcomes and flexibility from the public backbone and private network assets that are the lifeblood of their business.
In the crowded world of orchestrating and provisioning consumer and enterprise, cloud and digital interconnectivity services, there is one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb – ABB’s mind-blowing reputation for staying focussed on their customers.
Founded in 2008, not only have ABB grown steadily, they have dramatically reduced churn statistics in an industry known for high customer turnover and low customer satisfaction.
We’ve all read and heard tales of poor broadband service, inconsistent network performance and underwhelming post-sales support; but ABB stands proud as an undeniable beacon of reliability, stability and invention. And, truth be told, the results in terms of growth and customer satisfaction speak for themselves.
From a starting base of 27,000 customers in June 2017, ABB surpassed 100,000 customers in January 2019. The next 240,000 customers took less than two years to acquire.
The reason why they’ve grown so quickly is easily seen in their customer satisfaction ratings. At the time of publishing, ABB holds a 4.6-star rating from 5,523 reviews on ProductReview. By comparison, their nearest larger competitors’ rate between 1.6 stars and 2.0 stars.
Any way you look at it, that’s an impressive score – it clearly demonstrates they’ve made their mark on their industry and their customers – so they’re doing something right. In terms of ISPs, they have an almost cult-like following, creating the type of disruption needed for a young fish to make a big splash in an enormous pond.
Carbon and MyAussie
ABB’s commitment to advancing the quality of user experience around broadband connectivity (and support) extends well beyond lip-service. By leveraging infrastructure visibility and sharing real time network performance data with customers, ABB has created shortcuts to incident identification, root-cause analysis and problem resolution.
They’ve dedicated significant resources to building innovative, customer-facing tools – such as the Carbon service management platform and their award-winning MyAussie app – that automate troubleshooting, empower customers to make changes and provide audit trails of engagement.
The real kicker is ABB put control back in the hands of the customer. They provide genuine convenience, which is at the heart of driving their loyalty and satisfaction metrics – something which most companies dream of.
Carbon allows customers to have clear visibility into the virtual connectivity and private cloud infrastructure platform built by ABB.
Meanwhile, MyAussie brings similar functionality to mobile devices, allowing customers to report and often resolve technical issues from the palm of their hand, wherever they are at whatever time.
Tracing faults is a constant challenge for ISPs, and Carbon and MyAussie short-circuit the manual tasks at the heart of this. Enabling customers to “kick” their connections – a process that restarts a service all the way through the network, rather than just at a modem level – is pure genius!
It ensures they can proactively monitor and troubleshoot the connectivity solutions integral to the way they live and work, whilst building a log of all efforts already undertaken when service calls need to be escalated. Such automation is only possible because it can place 100% faith in the integrity of its colocation services and network architecture.
As a result, these reliable platforms help to dramatically speed up customer resolutions and reduce the amount of repetitive manual tasks undertaken by ABB’s support staff.
Infrastructure is the key
At the front end it has great people providing localised support driving ABB’s outstanding customer experience metrics. At the back end, it plans strategically to eliminate risks of downtime and poor network performance by ensuring its infrastructure platform is highly resilient, visible and secure.
Now dealing in 100GBps connectivity solutions (and moving towards 400Gbps to meet demand) at the core of the network architecture, ABB embed themselves within connected ecosystems to ensure they have proximity to key interconnection points of the large carriers. This is one of the lynchpins of ABB’s success, and how they achieve the exemplary performance, reliability and efficiency that is synonymous with their network.
Resilience and intuitive tools
ABB’s technical success in meeting customer needs and expectations is fundamentally achieved through clever, resilient network architecture and intuitive management tools and processes that provide visibility, flexibility and agility.
True differentiation in a highly competitive market comes through also making this intuitive service management governance available to customers in the form of easy-to-use, self-service support.
The result? Faster incident resolutions for customers at the same time as productivity gains and root cause analysis for the support teams.
Connecting with the ecosystem
As a start-up to scaling up business, ABB partnered wisely, empowered customers to easily select best-fit services, then delivered productivity gains within their own operations from the way these services are provisioned, upgraded, and supported.
If scaling your infrastructure in to meet growth is a challenge for your organisation, reach out to our team.
