Tag Archives: Business

Are You Spending too Much on Mailings?

English: First 4 digits of a credit card

English: First 4 digits of a credit card (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I look at client’s books, one expense that I almost always think is too high is what companies spend on mailings for billing and marketing. Every carrier has tight budgets these days and so it is important to get by with less. Anywhere you can cut back on an unnecessary expense goes straight to the bottom line. There are some fairly easy things that can cut down on the postage, supplies and labor that goes into the mailings you are doing today.

Simplify Billing

Go Paperless. One of the first questions I always ask is if a company has given their customers a chance to go paperless for billing. I know in my personal life that I have been able to go paperless for every monthly bill I get except my electric bill. And even they let me check my balance on-line. I am sure that a number of your customers now pay their bills by electronic checks and don’t return a payment in the envelope you provide for them.

So you need to give your customers the option of going paperless.  Most companies who have done this have been able to cut down on the number of bills that they mail out by 50% – 70%. Some companies have carried this to an extreme and now charge extra for a paper bill as a further incentive for customers to go paperless.

Bank Debits / Credit Cards. You might also want to consider giving your customers the option to pay by bank debit or credit card as a way to get more of them to go paperless. This also improves your cash flow significantly. But it also means you have an extra obligation to keep their banking information very safe.

Typical credit card fees are around 3% of the bill, so take that cost into consideration when looking at this option. The credit card fee is a bargain compared to cost of mailing for a customer with a $50 bill. It’s not much of a bargain for a carrier paying for a DS3.

Portal. I recommended in an earlier blog that you create a portal so that customers can look up their current and past billing and payment history on-line and also can add or drop products. Such a portal makes it easier for customers to pay you electronically and will help you go paperless.

Simplify Your Products. I never miss a chance to say that you should simplify your product offering to make your billing easier. The easier the billing the easier it is to go paperless.

Marketing and Mailing

A lot of carriers still use mailings as their primary tool for marketing. What they fail to recognize is that there is a large percentage of their customers who never read bill stuffers. And so they end up spending a large portion of their marketing budget trying to sell to only a subset of their customers while another subset of customers never even gets their message.

I am surprised by the number of companies that don’t take the time to measure how successful their mailing campaigns are. It’s easy to tie specific mailings to offer codes so that you know where customers got your message.

I am not saying to not conduct mail campaigns, but also to email these to customers when possible. Emailing cuts down on postage and printed materials and means you can do more campaigns for the same money. And you will reach more customers.

Bill Stuffers and Newsletters. Companies often say that they don’t want to go paperless because they want to continue to send bill stuffers and newsletters to their customers. But bill stuffers and other marketing materials can all be sent to a lot of your customers electronically.

One thing to remember is that today a lot of people are looking at emails on smartphones. Your web page and any advertising materials need to be put on the web in both normal html and also in a phone-friendly format. Otherwise you will have ignored a percentage of your customers. Your bills, newsletters, portal and everything marketing related needs to be able to be seen at a decent size on a smartphone to be effective.

Data Back-up

There is a tremendous amount of free on-line storage available today. Just last week Flickr began offering their customers a free terabyte of storage. There is also a thriving new industry of data centers that are offering deals for businesses to back up their data on-line for affordable prices. So you might suppose that there is not much of an opportunity to provide off-sight storage for your customers. As attractive as some of the on-line storage prices are they don’t shut you out of this business. I have a number of customers who are making money by providing storage for customers. So let’s look at how they are doing it.

First, you have to recognize that there is an ever-increasing need to back-up data, including from many businesses that would surprise you. There are a number of businesses that are now creating mountains of data. And with the impending creation of the Internet of Things the need for storage is going to continue to grow.

Storage is getting cheap and customers will certainly keep a copy of their data on site. But no storage device is foolproof and there is always the risk of storage device failure, fire, flood or other damage to local storage. So the smart business will also store their data somewhere off-site.

While there are many web-based companies that will store data, you will find that many customers would prefer to store their data with somebody they know and trust. When they send their data out into the cloud they really don’t know where it is going and what is being done with it. And there is always the chance that the company that stores their data will fold and the data will be lost someday.

So the number one sales pitch to make with data back-up is that your customer already knows and trusts you. You can show them your central office or headend if they want to see it. Data centers spend a lot of effort showing customer that their data is very secure, but the chances are that your existing central office is already secure enough for most customers. There is also less of a chance of data being hacked in your central office, simply because hackers aren’t looking at you as a target.

Another advantage of storing data locally is that the data is on-net between you and your customer. This means that you are going to be able to stream their data quickly to them in case of a recovery much faster than is going to happen over the open web. You have a direct connection to your customer, which is something nobody else can claim, and if large amounts of data are going to be exchanged this is a significant advantage. If the worst happens and they lose all of their local data, you can have them up and running again very quickly if you back up both their content and operating software.

There are a number of options on how to store data for your customers. First, you can just host a second version of the same servers they have at their business. This allows them to always have a mirror back-up of everything they are doing. Customers who want to do this are the best candidates for local storage because they are going to want to be able to occasionally visit the servers in your office. In this scenario it is typical for the customer to pay for the server.

But you can also get more efficient and put multiple customers into one large server or series of servers to save money on hardware and software at your end. In this case you can provide a mirror image of their own server, but to do so on a server that you share among multiple customers.

The last option is to store just their data and not their operating systems. Companies that generate a lot of data will often do this and will even store data at more than one location.

And you don’t necessarily have to do all of the sales for this business line, you can partner with local IT firms to jointly offer this product and let them do the sales for you.

One new way to sell local storage is to combine it with a security service. More and more homes and businesses are installing cameras. These cameras now can be reviewed remotely and a customer can check in back home on their cellphone. You can enhance this product by recording and storing the video images from the cameras which lets customers get a physical image of intruders or other anomalies at their home or business.

Unified Communications

One of the most powerful feature sets available today is unified communications. Yet very few of my clients are selling it today. But if your customer base includes businesses or a lot of residential power users then you need to include unified communications in your product portfolio, and you need to sell it.

What is unified communications (UC)? UC is the integration of real-time communication services with non-real time services. Real time services include such things as voice telephony and VoIP, instant messaging, speech recognition, data sharing, collaboration and video conferencing. Non-real time communication services are often packaged under the name of unified messaging and include such features as voicemail, email, SMS and faxes.

There is no standard set of features that are included in a UC package and it seems that every company that offers it does it a little differently. So a carrier must typically build this product by tying together all of the components and features you already have available into a bundled product. Most carriers who own a softswitch and a voice mail server are capable of creating a basic unified communications product.

There are numerous value propositions that UC offers to end user customers:

  • Brings the ability to delivery any communications medium to any device, anywhere.
  • Extends the corporate network so that mobile customers can be productive from anywhere.
  • Gives the freedom to each individual UC user to tailor the product for the way they can best use it.
  • Can add telepresence technologies to let a UC user check the availability of other resources in his network. For instance a user can see if somebody is available to talk before they try to call them, eliminating the voicemail chain.
  • Can add collaboration and data sharing components which will make employees far more productive. Good collaboration software gives users the ability to share and work together on any document from any software platform simultaneously.

The value to a customer of UC is that it allows the customer to send a message on one medium and receive the same communication in another medium. This frees a customer from any restraints imposed by location or device and the perfect UC product will deliver any communications path to any device anywhere.

For example, a customer can receive an email on any device of his choice and also has the option to have the email content delivered as a standard email, or as a voicemail or text. Normally the customer can receive the medium, in this case an email, live in the medium for which it was intended, but can also opt to receive or store the email on a non-real time basis in any other medium.

The control for making the desired choices is given to the customer. To continue with this example, the customer can set up his UC to always receive emails in a certain format, for example, as a voice mail he listens to on his cellphone, or he can change his options on the fly during the day.

UC is a very powerful product for customers who grasp it and use it. It can make a customer sticky to your network if you give them the freedom to have complete control over their communications.

How do you create a UC product for your network? The first step is to decide what you want to offer. Not every UC system tries to deliver every communications product to every device. Many UC products instead are crafted to satisfy specific customer applications. If you own a softswitch you probably already own many of the components needed to build a simple UC product. For example, there are various features built into the feature packages on a Metaswitch that can be combined to create a decent UC product. And if you only have a few business customers who will be interested in UC, this might be sufficient.

The other alternative is to buy a UC product from somebody else’s platform. Today there are numerous companies who have assembled UC products that function on their own platforms. As a carrier you can access these platforms on a wholesale basis and buy ready-made UC products for your customers rather than build your own UC products from scratch.

There has been a lot of industry activity in developing UC products in recent years. Since March 2008 there have been several open source UC projects based on Asterisk that has led to the creation of open source UC product lines. In May 2010, the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) was created to develop standards between technology companies for UC and to create interoperability profiles, implementation guidelines, and best UC practices. The original founding members were HP, Juniper Networks, Logitech, Microsoft and Polycom.

Because UC can be done in many different ways and can include numerous product components you can save a lot of time before trying to create a UC product by talking to CCG.

What’s the Right Number of Staff?

NYC: American Intl Building and Manhattan Comp...

NYC: American Intl Building and Manhattan Company Building (Photo credit: wallyg)

Over the years a lot of my carrier clients have asked me what the right number of staff should be for their organization. And of course, to some extent the answer is – it depends. There are differences between carriers that make it hard to compare two companies that might have roughly the same number of end-user customers.However, even with that said there are some general industry metrics that I have used during most of my career as a guideline when I want to examine the level of staffing at a given company. These are metrics that I gleaned from my mentors in the industry, and it is a little surprising to me that these metrics still seem to be a good guideline thirty years after I first heard about them. A typical telecom company is far different today than they were thirty years ago, but they still have the same basic functions that need to be done – administration and back office, technical, install and repair, customer service, and sales and marketing.

The general metrics I have always used as a starting point to look at an individual company is as follows:

Small Carrier               – Under 15,000 customers

Medium Carrier           – 15,000 – 50,000 customers

Mid-size Carrier          – 50,000 – 250,000 customers

Large carrier                – Over 250,000 customers

The metrics for the right number of employees is expressed in terms of the number of employees per customers. Basically, the larger a company gets, the more efficient they ought to be in terms of that metric.

Small Carrier               – 175 customers per employee

Medium Carrier           – 350 customers per employee

Mid-size Carrier          – 500 customers per employee

Large carrier                – No idea

These metrics apply roughly at the midpoint of each range. This means that one would expect a carrier with 7,500 customers to have about 175 customers per employee and one with 32,500 to be at 350. It’s straightforward math to see the metric for any company by knowing the number of end-user customers they serve.

There are factors that can change these metrics for a given company. For example:

  • Side businesses. Many carriers run side businesses in addition to their core business. These might be such things as construction or telephone system sales. As long as these side ventures are paying for themselves, then the employees engaged in these business lines would not be considered as part of the metric.
  • Geographic spread. A carrier that has to cover a large geographical area is going to need more technicians in trucks than a company that is geographically concentrated. A company with widely dispersed exchanges is also probably going to need more inside techs.
  • Outsourcing. One has to look at what functions are outsourced. For example, a company that is providing its own help desk or NOC is going to be different from one who does not. In looking at staffing, though, one has to always question whether the company should be doing functions internally that could be better outsourced.

In my career I have rarely seen a carrier that is understaffed, but it is fairly common to find companies that are overstaffed according to these metrics. If a company looks at these metrics and finds itself to be overstaffed, the question is what to do with that knowledge. What I have found is that workforces tend over time to find ways to justify themselves. When there are too many staff internal processes will be less efficient than at other companies and the employees will have found tasks to keep themselves busy. These inefficiencies can be of many types including things like inefficient paperwork for installation and repair, excess record keeping for time and materials, or excess testing and maintenance being performed.

Another common issue in companies with too many staff is that every job is in a silo, meaning that each employee only performs the tasks for their own job description and do not do tasks outside of their silo. Silos are necessary for large companies but they can be poison to smaller ones. It is very rare for the amount of work needed to match up exactly with the number if silos, and so you end up with staff who don’t have enough work within their silo to fill a full day. In smaller companies a better structure is one where employees wear many hats and are able and willing to kick in around the company where needed. I know that I am visiting a very competitive company if I walk in and find an outside installer manning the phones because somebody called in sick. That is the kind of teamwork that is needed in smaller companies to be efficient.

It often requires an analysis by an outsider to spot these kinds of inefficiencies because over time it’s easy for people at a company to think that the way they do things is the only way. I have worked with many companies over the years who have undertaken to reduce staff to be more efficient and I cannot think of one of them that was not a more profitable and efficient company after the transition. It is never easy to make a decision to reduce staff, but it is sometimes exactly what needs to be done to have a better and more profitable company. But before using these metrics to reduce staff get an outside opinion because these are ideal metrics and there are reasons why you might need a different number of staff than suggested by these metrics.

The Right Way to do Customer Surveys

Customers

Customers (Photo credit: Vinqui)

Carriers are always being advised to find out what their customers really want and one of the best tools to do that is a well-designed survey. I use the term well-designed, because you can’t put any credence into the results of a survey that is not done correctly. I see many surveys done incorrectly, with the results being that a company will act on the results of a survey that may not reflect what customers really want. There are a number of steps that must be taken to get an accurate and statistically representative survey.

Adequate sample size. You must complete an adequate number of surveys to get the results you want. Most business surveys are designed to get results that are 95% accurate, plus or minus 5%. What this means that if you were to give that same survey to every customer you would expect the same results within that range of accuracy. Most businesses and political surveys find that to be accurate enough.

There are several online websites available that will calculate the size of the sample needed. Most people find the number of needed samples surprising. To get the 95% accuracy, if you have 1,000 customers you need to complete 278 surveys. If you have 5,000 customers you need to survey 357 of them, and with 20,000 customers it’s 377 surveys needed.

I often see companies conduct surveys that produce far fewer completed surveys than these sample numbers. Such surveys are valid, but the amount of accuracy is not as trustworthy. For example, if you have 5,000 customers and you complete only 100 surveys, the results could still represent a 95% accuracy, but only within a range of plus or minus 10%. That doesn’t sound a lot less accurate, but it means that there is almost a one in five chance that the results do not reflect your whole customer base.

Random. For a survey to be valid the people surveyed must be selected at random. If you are surveying your own customers it’s easy not to be random. For example, if you send out a survey in your bills, the results you get back are not random. They are biased by the fact that people who either like or dislike what you asked about are the most likely to respond while people who feel neutral about the topic are likelier not to. The only really reliable way to get a random sample is to call people. And even then you have to choose the numbers randomly.

Calling has several issues. You must consider the Do Not Call lists that the federal government has established for people to opt out of getting solicitation calls. You are allowed under these rules to call your own existing customers, but you are not allowed to call potential customers who are on the Do Not Call list.

Second, you need to deal with cell phone numbers since many customers no longer have landlines. To get an adequate sample you need to somehow call people with both types of phones. You are not legally allowed to make solicitation calls to a cell phone number unless the person has given you permission to do so. Hopefully you will have customer records that provide a contact number to call for each customer, and any customer who has given you their number has given you permission to call them even if it is a cell phone number.

Non-biased. The questions you ask must be unbiased, which means that they are not worded in such a way as to elicit a certain response. This is why so many surveys you take seem to be somewhat bland, because the questions are written without flowery adjectives.

Interpreting the Results. Companies often misinterpret the results of a survey. The 95% accuracy that is the goal of the survey only applies to the primary questions you ask. For example, if you gave a valid survey to all of your customers and asked a question such as if they would be interested in buying cellular service from you, then the response to that question would be 95% accurate. However, companies often try to interpret a survey question at a deeper level. For example, they might look at the results of the same question for men versus women respondents and say that one group is more likely to feel a certain way than another.

And you can’t make those kinds of interpretations with any accuracy. In this example the survey is an accurate representation of how all customers feel because you sampled enough customers to get a statistically valid result. However, if half of the people you surveyed were women, then your survey of women is only half as big as the overall survey, and correspondingly less reliable. In this example it wouldn’t be a lot more unreliable, but if you try to really subdivide the sample population the results become nearly worthless. For instance, if you try to analyze the results by various age groups of ten years each you will find that you can’t rely on the results at all.

Survey fatigue. Another common problem is survey fatigue where a survey is so long that a lot of people hang up in the middle of it. It’s important to try to keep a survey under five minutes or this will happen a lot.

Summary. If you are going to spend the time and money to do a survey then you should spend the extra effort to do it right. Make sure your sample size is adequate. Make sure the survey is given randomly. Make sure the questions are unbiased. And keep it short.

And as a reminder, CCG has done hundreds of surveys, so one way to make sure it’s done right is to engage us. We can help at every level from helping write the questions setting sample sizes or even making the calls.

Should You Build a Cable TV Headend?

I still meet new businesses all of the time who are just entering the cable TV business for the first time or who are opening up remote markets from their service core. In the past it was a no brainer to build a new headend for a new market as long as that market had enough potential customers to justify the capital outlay. But I find myself hesitating today when I am asked the question of whether one should build a new headend. I don’t think the answer is an automatic yes any longer and there are a number of reasons for this.

Transport. One huge consideration is bandwidth transport. It always makes more sense to use the signal from an existing headend somewhere as long as you can get the signal there for less ongoing cost than building a new headend. The amount of bandwidth needed to transmit a full channel line-up is huge and can easily require at least 100 Mbps. The bandwidth varies a lot depending upon the specific method that is being used to send the TV signal to customers. For example, the bandwidth needed to send a lineup that has both analog and digital tiers will be larger than a lineup that is all IPTV. And the amount of bandwidth is even greater if you want to transmit video on demand.

The price of transport varies widely by location due to the availability of fiber, but overall there has been a big reduction in transport prices. The long-haul transport business has gotten very competitive and there are a host of companies that sell not only bandwidth, but also dark fiber or fiber lamdas. Also, a number of new middle-mile networks were built with federal stimulus grants and those networks, by definition, have to offer reasonably priced bandwidth. In many cases I am seeing transport as a good alternative to building a new headend, whereas a few years ago building a headend almost always looked like a lower-cost alternative.

Aggregators. You also should consider using a network aggregator. One that many of my clients use is Avail Media. Avail has aggregated a channel line-up that comes from the satellite directly in MPEG4 format, meaning that it can be taken directly from the satellite and used in an IPTV distribution network. The advantage of doing this is in the cost savings for the headend. A lot of the capital cost in a traditional headend is spent for equipment that translates TV signals from one format to another. The cost, size and power requirements for a headend drop significantly if the TV signals don’t have to be translated.

Of course, Avail and others aggregators charge a premium for getting the signal to you in the right format and you need to do the math to make sure that there is a net savings in equipment compared to their ongoing transport charges. But many of my clients have found aggregator arrangements that have saved them money.

Headend Sharing. Before I would build a new headend today I would always look around to see if there is an existing headend in the area that I could share. Generally, almost anybody except for the major cable companies would be interested in sharing a headend. Sharing a headend can help a headend owner offset the cost of running their headend while requiring very little ongoing effort after the initial connection.

There are a number of issues to consider when thinking about sharing a headend, but I have dozens of clients who have figured out ways to share. The biggest issue is the signal format. For example, it would make no sense to share an analog headend with somebody who is operating an IPTV system. The cost of translating channels from analog to digital would be almost as costly as building a new headend. There are also contractual issues with some of the programmers who make you jump through extra legal hoops before they will agree to let you transport signal from an existing headend to a different operator in a different market. But headend sharing makes a lot of sense and today, and sharing would almost always be my preference over building a new headend.

Other Issues.  There are always other considerations to consider. For example, if you share a headend or buy content from an aggregator you are still going to have to somehow insert the local must-carry networks onto your system. So you will need to a ‘mini-headend’ of some sort that lets you add your own content to the content that comes from somebody else.

Even if you share somebody else’s headend you might want to consider operating and inserting your own video-on-demand. This will cut down on the transport needed between the locations. If the market is large enough you also might want to consider inserting your own local advertising rather than inflict ads from some distant market upon your customers.

It’s Still a Regulated World

It seems like every few weeks I have a conversation with a carrier and in the course of conversation I find out that they are not in compliance with some regulation or another. It seems like a lot of companies that sell VoIP services, in particular, think that somehow that makes them immune from regulation.

But regulation has not gone away. If you bill an end-user customer for a voice, data or video product then there are regulations that you have to comply with. If you are an ISP for other entities, even if those entities are large, you are subject to some regulation. The only category of carrier that might not be subject to regulation is what I call a carrier’s carrier, and who only serves other carriers as customers. And in some states even they are subject to regulation.

It matters that you follow the rules. It seems like regulators at both the state and the federal level are getting surly about offenders and there some big fines being handed down to carriers who ignore regulation. I think the cost of compliance is cheaper than the cost of getting caught.

Here is a sample of the kinds of federal regulations that we see carriers ignoring. There are other state requirements that are also being ignored:

  • CALEA. There are significant obligations to be read to immediately give access of your customer’s voice and data records to law enforcement. You must have a manual filed that describes the processes.
  • CPNI / Privacy. You must have a manual and processes describing how you will protect your customers’ privacy.
  • Red Flag. You must have a manual and processes in place to demonstrate how you will protect your customers from identity theft.
  • Net Neutrality. There is very specific information about your company, your products, your network and your technology that you must inform customers about.
  • 21st Century Communications Video Accessibility Act. You must file a plan on how you will help disabled customers get access to voice, video and data products.
  • Universal Service Contributions. We find carriers that should be contributing to the USF fund who are not. The fines for getting caught for this can be huge.

I told my readers that I wasn’t going to write too many blog entries that are direct sales pitches for CCG services. I will admit that many of my blogs hint at the services we offer, but the main intentions of these blogs is to discuss issues for carriers that I think they will find to be useful. But in many cases CCG is able to help clients with a lot of the topics discussed in my blog.

CCG has three regulatory products that make it easy for anybody to stay in compliance with the rules. We have many clients who use CCG as their regulatory arm and many have said that it’s far cheaper to use us than to do it themselves. Here are the three products you ought to consider if you want to hand make sure that you are in compliance with the regulatory side of the business.

Regulatory Assessment. We will do a one-time assessment of your business and tell you every regulation that we think applies to you. Why guess if you are in compliance. For a modest fee we will make a list.

Regulatory Compliance Monitoring Service. In this service we develop a calendar for your company and we remind you of every regulatory deadline you must meet during the year.

Regulatory Compliance Filing Service. If you want it, we can create all of the needed paperwork and manuals, fill out the quarterly and annual forms and file everything for you. We think we have some of the best prices in the market for this kind of work.

If you want help to get into regulatory compliance or stay incompliance, give Terri Firestein of CCG a call at (301) 788-6889. We can help you take regulatory worries off your plate.

Customer Portal

I have talked in other blog posts how I believe that the successful residential service provider in the future is going to have a choice to make between being what I call a dumb pipe provider or a full service provider. And there are merits to both approaches.

But should you elect to take the service provider approach you will be selling many smaller and niche products to your customers instead of the handful of major products you sell today. It may be a decade until voice and cable TV become 100% commoditized, but every year there will be fewer and fewer customers buying those traditional products.

One of the tools that service providers are going to need for selling multiple services to customers is a customer portal. This is a website that allows customers to see a menu of what is available to them. Last week I wrote a blog entry about upselling your current products to your customers as a way to immediately affect bottom line and a well-designed portal is a great tool for enabling that process.

Here is what I envision as the perfect customer portal:

  • The ability for a customer to see what services they are already buying today.
  • An easy-to-use menu that shows what else is available, categorized to make it easy for a customer to browse your products.
  • Product descriptions that explain the benefits of each available product.
  • Ideally, a video or demo for more complex products showing how they works.
  • The ability to offer sales specials as a customer browses to entice them to try the product.
  • A tie-in to your provisioning system so that the customer can buy, or even just try the product as they shop.

There are a number of customer portals in the telecom world today and I have yet to see one that works in this ideal way. Just last week I went in and changed several things on my AT&T Wireless bill. I found a lower cost voice package and the portal let me easily change plans. But in doing to it deleted my text messaging plan and decided I desired to pay 25 cents per text message. That took a call to fix. And I wanted to delete a feature that gave me lower cost international calling and that also took a phone call to fix. There is nobody bigger than AT&T and they don’t have their portal figured out correctly. But what they did have was a lot better than nothing because it enabled me to familiarize myself with their various plans so I could decide what I wanted, without having to involve a person in that process. I was glad to have the portal, and I just wished I didn’t have to make two phone calls to finally complete what I wanted to change.

Some of the better portals I have seen are from the major cable companies. They often offer so many different programming packages that having them all explained on a portal is a great way for a customer to shop without tying up a customer service representative. But from what I can see, none of them yet give customers the ability to change products without talking to a live person before it is finished.

I think a lot of companies hesitate to build a portal because they don’t want to commit the resources needed to build the ideal one. But there is no reason to wait since even the largest carriers haven’t perfected the customer portal yet. There is nothing stopping you from starting your portal now to let your customers see the wide range of your existing products. Every one of my clients has a number of products that they barely sell. I believe that there are a lot more customers who would buy products like unified messaging if they understood what it could do for them and if they knew that you offered it. Think of building a portal as a way of communicating with your customers.

If you are going to start a portal or improve an existing one you should consider including some of the following functions:

  • Let customers check their bill on-line.
  • Let customers make a credit card or bank debit payment.
  • Let customers change product parameters like their Internet bandwidth.
  • Make it easy for customers to order Pay-per-view events.
  • Let’s customers place a tentative order even if that just prompts you to call them back.

So I recommend that you create a portal today that does some of these functions. There is probably not going to be some magic program available that is going to let you create the perfect customer portal all at once. Rather, this is likely to be an ongoing process. Because of that, do what you can for now, but do so in such a way that you are prepared to evolve your portal into a powerful tool for you and your customers.

Finally, I would note that there is an additional set of functions that are sometimes referred to as a customer portal. On smart switches you can build a web interface so that customers with advanced voice features can maintain the settings for those products. While this is certainly a portal function, this is more of an operational function and not a marketing function.

Should you Build a WiFi Network?

Free Wireless (WiFi) Minneapolis Hotspot in Su...

Free Wireless (WiFi) Minneapolis Hotspot in Sumner Field (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For years I have had clients who have been building WiFi networks and then trying to figure out ways to make money with them. For the first time I think there is now enough opportunity to sufficiently monetize a WiFi network to make it look like a good investment. The following are some of the ways that other carriers are making money from WiFi. A good business plan will probably need to combine several of these together to make a viable business.

Cellular Data Upload. The biggest use of WiFi is becoming the uploading of cellular data to the network. Most cellular carriers sell data plans with low caps and they want and expect their customers to use WiFi to keep data traffic off the cellular networks. In most places the cellular networks are not nearly robust enough to handle all of the data they would need to carry if it wasn’t for WiFi. There are two different possible ways to monetize this.

If your service area has enough customers of one or more of the major cellular companies, the carriers might be interested in buying wholesale access into your WiFi network. This is something that is happening in big cities, and in many places the cellular carriers are deploying the WiFi directly. But there are now a number of markets where cellular carriers are buying bulk WiFi access from other carriers.

However, deals with cellular carriers are not yet something that has been commoditized, and the alternate plan is to sell data plans directly to cellular customers in your town for their smart phones. Many cellular customers already have WiFi in their homes, but with a city-wide WiFi network they could then get the WiFi benefits anywhere in town. Statistics say that 85% of cellular data is used in the home territory and you can sell data for less than the cellular carriers and make good money at it.

MVNO Wireless. Even better than selling cellular data to others is consider offering your own wireless plans using an MVNO. In this scenario you buy bulk cellular minutes, text messaging and cellular data and then package them your own cellular plans. If you have a city-wide WiFi network you have a big advantage because you can make sure that your cellular customers use your network for both voice and data when that is possible. This means that you can charge them cellular-level pricing for traffic that you are delivering at landline costs. The margins on MVNO wireless are already decent, but combining it with a robust WiFi network really enhances the bottom line.

Broadband Alternative. There are now a significant number of customers who don’t want traditional broadband delivered by wireline. In addition to smartphone users, there are many customers who now use pads and laptops instead of traditional PCs. So you can sell WiFi business plans as an alternative or as an adjunct to your existing data plans. WiFi-only plans can be priced similarly to traditional low-level landline plans and you might sell a ‘portability’ additive plan to your normal landline data customers. Finally, you can sell hourly, daily and weekly WiFi to visitors or occasional users.

VoIP / Local Only Phone. In every market there are customers who almost never leave town and with a WiFi network you can give them a much lower cost portable phone alternative than using a traditional cellphone carrier. This essentially is a cordless phone that will go anywhere in the town. You also can use WiFi to give local phones to kids and others for low prices, saving parents the cost of pricey cellular family plans.

Public Safety. Most towns and cities would be interested in using your network for public safety and public works. With a citywide WiFi network you can give all city employees access to data anywhere in town, making it easier for police and fire to operate using pads but also improving the productivity for inspectors and other city workers who are mobile in the town. You should be able to sell bulk access to the city and local utilities, particularly if you will arrange a QOS arrangement to give public safety a priority for the network when they need it.

Workforce Needs. And of course, a city-wide WiFi network will also increase your own productivity since your own installers and salespeople can always be connected to the network with a pad or smartphone. This is not a revenue opportunity but rather can save you money.

There certainly some issues to consider and it would make sense to pre-sell to the larger WiFi users before you build the network. But if you can sign up a cellular carrier or the City government as anchor tenants then you can build knowing that these other revenues will materialize if the network is built with good coverage.

Like any business there are operational issues to consider. For instance you will want to insure that only people who are paying for your service use the network so you will want a secure system to validate users and be prepared to boot off customers who give away passwords to others.

From a technical and cost perspective it has never been easier to get into the WiFi business. The price of equipment has dropped and it has become more science and less art to keep the network functioning well.

My Take on the Internet of Things

I think there might be as many different predictions about the Internet of Things as there are bloggers and pundits. So I thought I would join the fray and give my take as well. The Internet of Things is that it is going to involve a new set of technologies that will enable us to get feedback from our local environment. That is going to allow for the introduction of a new set of tools and toys, some frivolous and some revolutionary.

I have read scores of articles talking about how this is going to change daily life for households. The day may come when our households resemble the Jetsons and where we have robots with more common sense than most of us running our households, but we are many years away from that.

There will be lots of new toys and gadgets that will sometimes make our daily lives easier. For instance food we buy may have little sensors put into packaging that will tell you when your produce is getting ready to go bad so that you won’t forget to eat it. There will be better robots that can vacuum the floors and maybe even do laundry and walk the dog. But I don’t see these as revolutionary and probably not affordable for the general populace for some time. For a long time the Internet of Things is going to create toys that wealthy people or tech geeks will play with, and it will take years to get these technologies to make it into everybody’s homes. Very little of what I have been reading for household use sounds revolutionary.

The biggest revolutionary change that will directly affect the average person is medical monitoring. Within a decade or two it will be routine to have sensors always tracking your vitals so that they will know there is something wrong with you before you do. There will be little sensors in your bloodstream looking for things like cancer cells, which is going to mean that we won’t have to worry about curing cancer, we’ll head it off before it gets started. This will revolutionize healthcare to be proactive and preventative and will eventually be affordable to all.

English: A technology roadmap of the Internet ...

English: A technology roadmap of the Internet of Things. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I think the most immediate big benefactor of the Internet of Things is going to be at the industrial level. For instance, it is not hard to envision soil sensors that will tell the farmer the conditions of each part of his fields so that his smart tractor can fertilize or weed each section only as appropriate. There is already work going on to produce mini-sensors that can be sent underground into oil fields to give oil geologists the most accurate picture they have ever had of the underground topology. This will make it possible to extract a lot more oil and to do so more efficiently.

Small sensors will also make it a lot easier to manufacturer complex objects or complicated molecules. This could lead to the production of new polymers and materials that will be cheaper stronger and biodegradable. It will mean that medicines can be modified to interact with your specific DNA to avoid side effects. It means 3D printing that will feel like Star Trek replicators that will be able to combine complex molecules to make food and other objects. NASA has already undertaken a project to be able to print pizza as the first step towards being able to print food in space to enable long flights to Mars.

And a lot of what the Internet of Things might mean is a bit scary. Some high-end department stores already track customers with active cell phones to see exactly how they shop. But this is going to get far more personal and with face recognition software stores are going to know everything about how you shop. They will not just know what you buy, but what you looked at and thought about buying. And they will offer you instant on-site specials to get you to buy – ads that are aimed just at you, right where you are standing.

I remember reading a science fiction book once where the ads on the street changed for each person who walked by, and we are not that far away from that reality. There are already billboards in Japan that look at the demographics in front of them and which change the ads appropriately. Add facial recognition into that equation and they will move beyond showing ads aimed at middle-aged men and instead show an ad aimed directly at you. The Internet of Things is going to create a whole new set of attacks on privacy and as a society we will need to develop strategies and policies to protect ourselves against the onslaught of billions of sensors.

Probably one of the biggest uses of new sensors will be in energy management. And this will be done on the demand end rather than the supply end. Today we all have devices that use electricity continuously even when we aren’t using them. It may not seem like a lot of power to have lights on in an empty room or to have the water warm all of the time in an automatic coffee pot, but multiply these energy uses by millions and billions and it adds up to a lot of wasted power. You read today about the smart grid, which is an effort to be more efficient with electricity mostly on the demand side. But the real efficiencies will be gained when the devices in our life can act independently to minimize power usage.

Sensor technologies will be the heart of the Internet of Things and will be able to work on tasks that nobody wants to do. For instance, small nanobots that can metabolize or bind oil could be dispatched to an oil spill to quickly minimize environmental damage. The thousands of toxic waste dumps we have created on the planet can be restored by nanobots. Harvard has been working on developing a robot bee and it is not hard to envision little flying robots that could be monitoring and protecting endangered species in the wild. We will eventually use these technologies to eat the excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and to terraform Mars with an oxygen atmosphere and water.

Many of the technologies involved will be revolutionary and they will spark new debates in areas like privacy and data security. Mistakes will be made and there will be horror stories of little sensors gone awry. Some of the security monitoring will be put to bad uses by repressive regimes. But the positive things that can come out of the Internet of Things make me very excited about the next few decades.

Of course there will be a lot of bandwidth needed. The amount of raw data we will be gathering will be swamp current bandwidth needs. We are going to need bandwidth everywhere from the City to the factory to the farm, and areas without bandwidth are going to be locked out of a lot more than just not being able to stream NetFlix. The kind of bandwidth we are going to need is going to require fiber and we need to keep pushing fiber out to where people play and work.