The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch. The Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software.
Joe Coldebella:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Broadband Bunch. We are at Fiber Connect 2022, and I’m with Jeff Boozer and Guy Bevente, and they just finished a panel discussion on Fiber to the Home, What’s Next. We just wanted to get you guys for an almost after-the-event recap, just to get your impression on how it went, what you guys talked about, and just to get some general impressions. First, Guy, I’ll start with you.
Guy Bevente:
Okay.
Joe Coldebella:
Just go ahead and just give a quick little recap.
Guy Bevente:
Sure. Well, first thanks for having me, Joe. It’s always a privilege here. I thought the session went very well. I think the audience was engaged, and we got a couple of good questions. For my part of the session, you know, Fiber to the Home, Now What, I focused on automation really more from an IT perspective, and reflecting back on some of my past years at AT&T and even with some of my current clients, and really providing some insights on where should you focus automation, or what automation techniques bring the greatest value and also make the greatest impact.
Guy Bevente:
I highlighted three areas. One was moving to an omnichannel strategy, right? This is where you don’t look like three, or four different companies but, whether a customer is doing business with you online or through a call center, a store, or whatever the experience may be, you look like one customer to them. There’s consistency. I shared some of the benefits that we saw and also some of the things that you should look for. I could come back to that in a minute, but that was the first.
Guy Bevente:
The second one that I shared that, from my experience, provided some of the greatest value had to do with our focus on personalization. This is how you introduce an experience for the customer that really feels like it’s about them, right? Most of us have shopped on a website like Amazon and we know what personalization now means, but what we saw is that you achieved greater loyalty, greater stickiness with your customers, when you introduced personalization and shared some feedback on some of the things to do and look for that we can touch on.
Guy Bevente:
The final one that I mentioned had to do with user experience, and what I shared in the session is that I was even surprised by some of the returns and the impact that we had from a UX focus because really UX is not the automation itself but it’s more focused on the design, using concepts that are design-based thinking, putting the customer at the center. Those three areas, my feedback to the audience was that once you’ve put the … you can call them essentials … table stakes systems in place like ordering, billing, provisioning, and activation, then focusing on these three areas, based on my experience, you get some of the greatest payback.
Joe Coldebella:
Yeah. One of the things that I gravitated towards was in terms of that you said to think mobile first, and I thought that was a really great kicking-off point because the world is all mobile now. We live first on our device and then we go from there. Talk about that a little. That would be awesome.
Guy Bevente:
Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, mobile-first, actually it’s not so new of a concept. I brought it into play when I talked about what are the things to look for, the enabling actions. My suggestion was when you move to an omnichannel where you start introducing a true digital channel, that mobile-first is a concept that basically says if you think about your smartphone … which some people call a small screen … and then you think about your iPad … people call that a midsize screen … and then, of course, your desktop or laptop that’s a larger screen, but if you force your design to really be streamlined for a small screen … right, that’s where the mobile-first comes in … you really are forcing some disciplined design principles where you’re going to make it very streamlined, very simple, and you’re really going to get some customer adoption much faster.
Guy Bevente:
Because let’s face it. At the end of the day, most of us who have been in design and implemented systems in the past, have this bad habit, right? You think you’ve got to cram all this stuff on the screen. All of a sudden it looks like a mess … and Jeff over here, you can’t see him, but he’s nodding next to me because he’s seen this, right … you have all this stuff that, at the end of the day, you probably already should know about your customer, shouldn’t be asking again, or quite frankly, isn’t relevant for that customer journey as they’re buying from you online.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s great. Mr. Boozer. With your talk, what were some of the key takeaways that you wanted to share with the audience?
Jeff Boozer:
Well, first of all, let me start by doing a little lighter thing. I want to thank the people at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. If you don’t know, this is occurring on June 12th, and it’s 100 degrees outside and you could hang meat in the conference room.
Guy Bevente:
Which was a good thing.
Joe Coldebella:
Absolutely, yeah.
Jeff Boozer:
That said, so thanks to those guys for finding all that air conditioning. I think the thing that struck me the most is listening to the three other guys, starting with a conversation about testing of PON units and things at the end of the network, going to a guy talking about how to do PON architecture to a guy talking about the omnichannel experience, for a guy that comes in and promotes platform concepts for broadband operations. It struck me that everything everybody talked about really needed a platform.
Jeff Boozer:
It just drove home to me that some of the things we promote and we do on a daily basis, it just drove home to me how relevant that is to everything that goes on the broadband operations side of things. I thought that was encouraging for us, and I thought that was something that a lot of the people in the audience were picking up on that, is a good move forward.
Joe Coldebella:
Just in terms of your talk specifically, what are some of the highlights to share with us?
Jeff Boozer:
Well, the thing I didn’t say often enough during the presentation … it was a short time span … is the concept of merging NOC and call center is just fundamental to making things work going forward and deserves a session all its own, to be honest with you, because that ability to take all kinds of data about a subscriber and make that the core of making that subscriber’s experience the experience you want it to be, that’s an important concept, and it requires a lot of thinking and a lot of planning on the behalf of the operator to do it. Yeah, it just reinforced that I needed it. That’s something I wish I’d had more time to talk about.
Guy Bevente:
You know, what I thought was interesting, though, Jeff, that you did talk about, and I also saw as a common thread through each of the four actual presentations, was the importance of standardization.
Joe Coldebella:
That’s a really good point, Guy.
Guy Bevente:
Yeah. Yeah, although to Jeff’s point, we came at the topic, if you will, the Fiber to the Home, Now What, from actually four different angles, and somewhat intentionally. This common thread that you solve standardization really talked to the experiences that we all see. We reiterated and we got some questions on that, how important they are.
Guy Bevente:
Because ultimately, whether you’re talking about standardizing APIs … Jeff, you and I talked about how important it is to move to an open API architecture, but not just, hey, it’s open, but what are some of the standards … or some of the standards in data exchange or in some of the network OSS side to actually enable some of these devices like testing, regardless of what the standards are, the outcomes or the desire really focused on some of the same familiar outcomes, right? With the standards, you actually have a lower cost over time, mostly because of reuse. Because of standards, you actually get to some of that simplicity that I’ve talked about.
Guy Bevente:
I also mentioned one of the things that we saw was an improved time to market. We weren’t fixing things repeatedly. We were able to leverage some of the existing frameworks and such to actually go faster, and not have to fix something that was already invented, thought through, and developed in the past.
Joe Coldebella:
Then when you do something like that, is it one of those things where the ROI just explodes because you’re creating these standards, and then everything becomes much easier just in terms of expanding on as well?
Guy Bevente:
Yeah. Well, I mean, yes, it definitely explodes, but I will say this. I mean, the truth is it explodes at some point. I think it’s fair to say, from what I’ve seen from current clients and my own past experience leading the IT shops, as I said, we’re not the most patient people. We’re feeling the pressure of time, we all are, and it takes some time. It takes some time to create those standards. It takes just as much time, if even not more, to get people to adopt them, embrace them and use them. Then once you get to adoption, to answer your question, Joe, then you will see the hockey stick upon return on investment, but you really need to get to adoption before you can actually see that return.
Jeff Boozer:
I have a little different take on that. Not that it’s contrary, it’s a little different perspective on it. What I see too many carriers doing, and part of the point of the session itself or the topic itself was that I think we make decisions in this industry out of sequence, or in the wrong sequence.
Joe Coldebella:
Interesting.
Jeff Boozer:
Naturally so, but we tend to go solve pain points as spot solutions, and not see that pain in the context of the overall operations of the business or the long-term objectives and outcomes that you’re working for. That then ends up translating its way back into what Guy was just talking about, in terms of that it accelerates at a period of time. Well, that’s because, in my opinion, you made a decision that was a good decision to fix a problem, but you went along.
Jeff Boozer:
In order to really see the total return or the operations costs reductions to that, you had to go do some other things to make it work. If you had turned around and looked at it as a whole thing from the beginning, whether it’s API-led integration or putting platform capabilities in place or whatever, that would’ve been more of a straight line and less of a hockey stick. Does that make sense?
Joe Coldebella:
It does. Also, I’m still learning all this stuff as well.
Jeff Boozer:
So are we, by the way.
Joe Coldebella:
No, it definitely is a process, in terms of just everyone’s, to quote you earlier, herding cats, because it’s definitely a complex system.
Jeff Boozer:
There’s an old phrase that somebody used to beat me over the head with a lot when I was first becoming a manager. Are you working in the business or in the business? It really gets down to that. Most of us tend to get drawn into working in the business all the time. You know, we’ve got things that have to be done, issues that are …
Joe Coldebella:
The whirlwind.
Jeff Boozer:
Whatever it is, and that ability to step out and work on the business. What’s the big picture look like and how does this fit in, and how do you do those kinds of things? It’s something I think about a lot, and I actually thought about it twice in the middle of the session, going, “Yep, we’re talking about in verses on.”
Guy Bevente:
You know what I also thought about, as I heard one of the speakers talk about attracting talent and skill shortage and what you just said, Jeff, as managers, right? What do we do to get employees really excited about what we’re doing? You can get lost in the weeds. You’re working at such a low level, maybe fixing one of those point problems, Jeff, that you mentioned, but from my experience and some of the same, I agree with the lesson. Something you heard early, but one of the things I learned early as well, was how do you get every employee in the organization to really understand the purpose of what they’re doing, how it’s part of something bigger, right? It connects to the point that you just made.
Guy Bevente:
I just think that’s so important, right? If you’re working on a testing device, how is that part of something bigger than we do as a company? As we were leaving the session today, we had some people pull us over, and wanted to show us some of the things they were building. Some pretty cool toys, right? They’re pretty exciting. As I looked at some of those right … real-time, right, Jeff? We saw it in real time in the hallway. People were showing us some of the things they were working on. You know, I kept reflecting on, at the macro level, what’s the value proposition to the firm and to the customers, right?
Jeff Boozer:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good point. I mean, even someone who’s testing a new piece of equipment ought to have some insights as to how that contributes to the customer experience, which is ultimately …
Guy Bevente:
Everything, right?
Jeff Boozer:
Yeah. It’s ultimately what you’re trying to do, is to give a customer a great experience by providing whatever it is you provide, in this case, broadband service. Testing equipment with a little unique device that gives you data that you might not have otherwise seems kind of insignificant in the customer experience discussion, but no. That’s actually where it starts, having reliable equipment that delivers reliable service to a customer who’s depending on it.
Guy Bevente:
Yeah.
Joe Coldebella:
I just have one last question. This is just for my own edification.
Jeff Boozer:
We charge for that, by the way.
Joe Coldebella:
The check’s in the mail, Jeff. The check is in the mail. Just the idea of the importance of data collection for the customer going forward. Is that one of the key pillars?
Jeff Boozer:
Yes. Data is everything. Look at him. I mean, data is everything.
Guy Bevente:
I remind you of data? Is that what you’re saying?
Jeff Boozer:
Yeah. You do remind me of data often.
Guy Bevente:
A fit data element? I’m trying. No, I mean, I think it’s well said, nice and simple. Data is everything. I even touched on the importance of having clean data and accurate data. One of the comments I made in the conference is that from my experience, everyone’s so ready to race forward, and they don’t really focus on the data integrity issues that they have. It’s easy to overlook how important it is to take that cleansing step.
Guy Bevente:
In fact, we were talking about some of the products that are out there. If you think about them, including some of the ones I’ve seen here at the show, they all … not all, but many of them … are introducing machine learning, artificial intelligence concepts. Well, what are those built on? They’re built on data models, and not only collecting the data but having the right data, and then continuing to get smarter and help with things like self-healing, and self-discovery.
Jeff Boozer:
Yeah. If there’s one thing I could get through to every person in the industry that I have the chance to talk to, it’s if you can’t get to the data in your business, you’re ignorant, you’re flying blind, because the answer is in there somewhere. The sooner you can get some sort of access to all of that data, whether it’s just analytics to start with or it’s all the way to AI and machine learning and those kinds of things, you will fall behind in this business.
Joe Coldebella:
Okay. Yeah.
Jeff Boozer:
Very quickly.
Joe Coldebella:
Well, this is a first for us, in terms of just having a post-conference wind-down in our conversation. I know that we talked about it beforehand. I’ve had other panelists say that they would like to do something like this because I think the audiences absorb the conversation but the panelists do as well. It’s interesting because it’s almost like as soon as you get off the stage, you want to talk about what you just talked about because you’re hearing different ideas from the panelists and from the audience and then you’ve got these synapses firing. I don’t know. Hopefully, this becomes a segment for us as we take The Broadband Bunch on the road, just to get perspectives from the folks who are really in the trenches.
Jeff Boozer:
Yeah. I have to say, I do panels fairly frequently. I’ve never come away from a panel where I didn’t learn something as a result of participating, and that’s the excitement about it all. Like I said earlier, there are a couple of things that just dawned on me while I’m listening to everybody. I learned something. That’s where it’s worth it.
Guy Bevente:
A Lot of conversation happens after the panel discussion, right, as you’re walking out into the lobby.
Joe Coldebella:
No, it’s so true, because it’s one of those things where it’s like you say something, Guy, and then all of a sudden that snaps something for Jeff, and then all of a sudden this great cascade of ideas comes to mind. It’s like that’s why. It’s kind of funny that we come to a show about broadband, but it’s like it’s the in-person stuff that is really important.
Jeff Boozer:
It’s not just broadband as an industry or a technology, but it’s business and interpersonal relationships and management things that you pick up as well that are useful, not only in your everyday business life but in your professional life, and those kinds of things. Yeah. It’s worth doing. I definitely enjoy it.
Joe Coldebella:
Awesome. Well, with that, I will say this is the first of hopefully many … I guess, I don’t know, Chalk Talks or whatever. We haven’t come up with a name yet, but Guy and Jeff, thank you so much for your time and for your expertise. It’s always really appreciated. Thanks so much.
Jeff Boozer:
Thanks for the opportunity.
Guy Bevente:
Thank you, Joe. Appreciate it.
Joe Coldebella:
All right. Til next time. Thanks a lot, guys. See you.
