How RTC Leveraged Data-Driven Insights To Align Teams and Processes, Delivering Better Experiences
As a cooperative, RTC Networks’ north star is meeting the needs of our members and communities. But with increasing competition and evolving member expectations, maintaining satisfaction is tougher than ever. To stay competitive—and create exceptional subscriber experiences—we needed to enhance operational efficiency, equip our teams for success, and resolve subscriber issues efficiently.
Taking a Deep Data Dive To Identify Areas of Opportunity
To optimize our people, processes, and products to better serve our members, we turned to Calix for help. With support from our GM, we engaged with Calix Business Insights to conduct a Service Optimization Analysis. This comprehensive approach took the pulse of our support operations, examining employee sentiment, organizational alignment, technical knowledge gaps, and ticket-handling practices.
Calix built a clear picture of our strengths and weaknesses by collating cross-departmental data from employee surveys, Calix Cloud®, billing systems, trouble tickets, service orders, truck roll reports, and Calix University usage. Encouragingly, our survey confirmed that our employees overwhelmingly embrace our member-first culture. However, it also uncovered significant opportunities for improvements in staff training, internal communication, and processes.
The data revealed interesting insights:
- Repeat trouble tickets: 34 percent of our trouble tickets were for repeat issues on the same account, with 14 percent occurring within 30 days.
- Post-install issues: 10 percent of new installations submitted a trouble ticket within the first month.
- Gaps in employee training: While 85 percent of our team members reported feeling adequately trained, there was a clear desire for more specialized, hands-on training.
An Action Plan Rooted in Data-Driven Insights
We developed a targeted improvement strategy with Calix Success Guidance and Business Insights to address employee and member pain points. Our plan focused on three goals:
- Create role-specific training curriculum. We’re incorporating more practical exercises, real-world scenarios, and hands-on workshops that resonate most with employees.
- Improve internal communications. We established regular feedback loops to strengthen department collaboration and recognize employees who demonstrate strong support skills.
- Streamline our trouble ticket system. We are standardizing trouble ticket reporting and streamlining the troubleshooting process to help resolve issues faster and more proactively. One large component is simplifying the reason and trouble codes within our system—and so far, we’ve reduced problem codes by 35 percent and resolution codes by 21 percent.
These recommendations have been instrumental in shaping how we serve our subscribers. We’re also taking a more proactive approach to customer support—helping drive down repeat trouble tickets.
Embedding a Culture of Service Excellence
This exercise is sparking cultural change at RTC. We better understand how to empower our people to do great work. For instance, we found that our most engaged support staff regularly take advantage of resources like Calix Community and Calix University, giving us a blueprint to drive wider adoption across our teams.
RTC’s commitment to listening and adapting is essential to our subscriber-first strategy. By partnering with Calix to help identify actionable insights and a path forward, we embedded new approaches to deliver service excellence. And we’ve seen remarkable improvements, including a 12-point year-over-year increase in our Net Promoter ScoreSM (NPS®)—with customer service earning a 90+ NPS.
Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter Score℠ and Net Promoter System℠ are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
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