The Keys to Digital Home Success

By Kenny Van Zant, executive vice president of marketing & products at Motive, Inc.

The Digital Home offers consumers exciting new options for entertainment, education and work, giving service providers a tremendous opportunity to grow their customer base and increase revenues. By delivering a full suite of quadruple-play services (voice, video, data and wireless), providers can become an integral part of their customers’ lives and create strong brand loyalty.

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it sounds.  Deregulation and competition are giving consumers more choices than ever, and even the smallest service glitches can result in losing customers for the entire service bundle and risking negative impact to your brand.

Digital Home consumers are willing to spend money on innovative new services, but they have high expectations.  They want products delivered on their terms: “my services, my content, my time, my place, my way.”  These consumers have neither the desire nor the training to act as their own system administrators. They expect “dial-tone quality” for IP services, and devices that simply plug in and work.  While Digital Home consumers may be technically unsophisticated, they own a highly complex and interconnected network of devices and software.

Deploying and managing services across this network introduces new requirements that will be key to provider success:

Visibility
In order to effectively manage a suite of advanced services, providers must have visibility beyond the modem or gateway into all of the connected devices and services that run on the home network.  In a diverse home environment, this is likely to include multiple products, technologies, connections and communications protocols, all offered by a number of different vendors. To gain this visibility, savvy service providers need to embrace industry standards wherever possible and employ automation software that generates a graphical model of a customer’s network and services that can be shared with Customer Service Representatives (CSRs).

Device control
Seasoned providers already know that consumers are connecting to a dizzying array of network-ready multimedia devices.  But how then do they maintain control over the residential gateway and all of its connection points?  The key is to employ a vendor-neutral device management solution that automates manual processes and integrates with existing management and customer support tools.  Flexible service enhancements, the ability to remotely change settings, upgrade firmware and troubleshoot — without a costly truck roll — are essential.

Satisfying experience
Service complexity, interruptions, and slow or inaccessible customer service will undoubtedly lead to customer disappointment, and ultimately churn.  To ensure a positive customer experience, providers must build automation into services.  This gives customers a simpler set of steps for such processes as connecting devices, installing services, troubleshooting and resolving problems.  It also allows customers to more easily manage their own home networks.  It could even mean they are more likely to purchase other services.

To reiterate, the Digital Home is a valuable new business opportunity for service providers to offer quadruple-play services and beyond.  Winning the Digital Home requires providers to not only deliver compelling services, but to do so profitably and quickly in the face of increasing technical complexities.  Software automation and a range of new management tools can help providers improve visibility and control.  This empowers providers to deliver superior customer experiences by the millions, across millions of services and devices and meet the Digital Home challenge.