I am thrilled to welcome you to the inaugural issue of the Customer Support Beacon. Calix Services is passionate about helping you accelerate your business. In developing our latest addition to the Beacon newsletter family, our goal was to provide you—customer support leaders—a trusted source for the insights and best practices that you can use to build a proactive, efficient team that delivers amazing experiences and wins subscribers for life.

What to Expect From This Newsletter

Each quarter, the Customer Support Beacon will share success stories and lessons from innovative service providers just like you. We'll also delve into industry best practices and the latest tools from Calix and our partners that will enable you to:

• Accelerate the deployment of the latest and greatest technologies
• Roll out new services and applications that will excite subscribers
• Arm your frontline team with data-backed insights to optimize customer support
• Excel against key customer support metrics and drive operational savings
• Increase subscriber satisfaction to reduce churn and build loyalty

New for 21.2
Our 21.2 quarterly release delivers numerous enhancements geared specifically for customer support teams—all with the end goal of maximizing your organization’s efficiency. For example, new integrations between Calix Support Cloud and CommandIQ® give customer support representatives (CSRs) direct visibility into subscriber settings in the “My Priorities” capability of ExperienceIQ™, enabling them to work directly with the subscriber to view or change their device or traffic prioritization settings. In addition, the new Wi-Fi performance dashboard enables CSRs to proactively identify and resolve common issues such as signal strength, interference, and channel utilization to reduce inbound calls. Finally, the recently launched GigaSpire® BLAST u6x is also fully visible within Calix Support Cloud so that CSRs can maintain a world-class  experience across the entire GigaSpire BLAST family. Calix customers have already seen significant boosts to operational efficiency, such as achieving 74 percent first call resolution rates and 26 percent reduction in truck rolls, all while providing exceptional services that excite subscribers and grow their businesses.

In This Issue

In our first issue of this newsletter, we’re excited to tell you how you can use real-time intelligence and data-driven insights to get unprecedented visibility into your subscribers’ networks. We'll also show how we’re helping you empower your broadband subscribers so they can "self service," lowering your operational costs and elevating their experience. Click on the links in the table of contents to read these great stories:

• A conversation with Nick Colton, director of technical support and IT at ALLO Communications, and Christina Wilson, regional vice president of customer success services at Calix. Calix solutions have allowed ALLO to cut call times by 30 seconds per call, increase their ticket-close ratio to 60 percent, and dramatically reduce unnecessary truck rolls. Nick also offered insights into his team’s experience with the recently redesigned UX/UI for Calix Support Cloud and the significant impact it will have for his team and for subscribers.
• Insights from author and customer experience professional, Joseph Michelli, who outlines the steps to delivering an engaging subscriber experience and shares how Starbucks took the customer experience to a whole new level and built a juggernaut in the process.
• Four recommendations from Calix vice president of product management, Supriya Iyer, on how you can use our latest enhancements to Calix Support Cloud and CommandIQ to optimize your customer support team and deliver an experience that excites subscribers.

Calix and our entire community are here to help you achieve your customer support goals. If you have questions or feedback about how we can help you meet and exceed your objectives, please get in touch—I’m on email at martha.galley@calix.com or you can connect with me on LinkedIn.