How Quality of Experience Reduces ISP Customer Churn

For ISPs, improving quality of experience (QoE) for subscribers directly reduces tier 1 support calls and lowers customer churn. Prioritizing interactive traffic and measuring experience from the subscriber's point of view keeps customers satisfied even when the network is congested.

Customer satisfaction is the driving force behind increasing revenue. For some industries, a small increase to client satisfaction can result in increasing revenue by as much as $1 billion annually, according to Forrester Research. For smaller companies this same correlation exists, albeit on a smaller scale, but the impact is no less significant. In fact, about 84% of companies reported seeing an increase in revenue after working to improve their customer experience, and companies that provide a superior customer experience report bringing in 5.7 times more revenue than their competitors. With numbers like these, it's easy to understand why 81% of companies view customer experience as a competitive differentiator. Therefore, as customers' needs and demands change, it is imperative to find new ways to remain competitive and deliver a quality customer experience. Which is why having a solution that could identify and correct quality of experience issues, resulting in lower churn, a lessened burden on your tier 1 support teams, and increased profitability would be really great news, right? Enter Preseem.

What is Preseem?

Preseem is a networking solution developed specifically for Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) that not only provides vital quality of experience information across your towers, access points, and subscribers, but also allows you to optimize the quality of experience delivered by your network. By collecting billions of metrics directly from subscriber traffic and network elements daily, such as packet loss, TCP round-trip time, jitter and throughput, Preseem extracts the data you need in order to proactively identify potential for a poor subscriber experience and allow your tier 1 support teams to quickly determine whether the issue is resulting from a problem in the network or the customer's home. Unlike traditional network monitoring tools based on ICMP and SNMP, which can provide misleading data about the customer's actual experience due to their limited granularity and infrequent polling, Preseem measures the quality of experience from the perspective of the subscriber; so you can be confident that your customers are receiving the best possible experience and maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction.

As many WISPs can vouch for, a tool that can enforce subscriber plans while managing the ever-increasing load of bandwidth-heavy applications is greatly needed. With Preseem's quality of experience optimized shaping, you can help eliminate those tier 1 customer support calls regarding slow speeds and streaming issues. Through the use of Active Queue Management techniques, Preseem prioritizes interactive traffic, such as VoIP, DNS and gaming, leaving them unaffected by heavier applications, such as streaming videos or large downloads. Meaning not only can you lessen the burden on your support team, but you can achieve high link utilization and a great quality of experience during the busiest of times, even when the customer's own internet connection is congested. And to top it all off, you can do so without needing to invest in multiple complex and costly monitoring and traffic shaping tools.

Sonar + Preseem: a bidirectional OSS/BSS integration

Preseem sends all of the metrics it collects to the Preseem cloud, which can be connected to the billing system of your choosing; although Preseem offers integrations with many, they have more Sonar deployments than anything else. This is largely due the platforms being bidirectional and so easy to operate. Preseem pulls a significant amount of data from Sonar Software (i.e. IP addresses for each subscriber, their plan upload/download speeds, etc.) and key pieces of critical data are pulled in and also displayed within Sonar; this includes one-click navigation between Sonar and the Preseem application for access points and subscribers links, giving you fingertip access to real-time data insights.

With the applications being bidirectional, it also means you have a single point of data entry for any subscriber plans and network inventory; so as you make changes within the Sonar application, these changes will be reflected immediately within Preseem, eliminating the need for duplicate efforts and repeat data entry. By combining the two forces you can have optimized quality of experience plan enforcement, including the blocking of delinquent customers, providing the flexibility you otherwise wouldn't have and making life easier for your tier 1 support teams while ensuring the best quality of experience for your customers.

How to set up the Preseem-Sonar integration

To make things even better, setting up the Preseem-Sonar integration itself is an incredibly quick and easy process. There are only 2 steps needed to enable this integration within Sonar:

Provide Sonar with your Preseem API Key: this allows Preseem to deliver information back to Sonar and is where you can toggle to enable it

Create a read-only user account from your Sonar instance to provide Preseem: this allows Preseem to query Sonar for information (i.e. upload and download limits based on the data service assigned to the account)

To learn more about the integration, including a step-by-step guide on the setup process, take a look at the document on connecting Preseem to your Sonar system, available in our knowledge base.

If you're a WISP, Preseem can help you to deliver great service by measuring, analyzing and improving the quality of experience for your subscribers. Many customers can already attest to the significantly positive impact that implementing Preseem has had on their business; overall, Preseem customers report seeing a 25-50% drop in support calls as well as a 28% drop in churn, resulting in impressive cost savings and improved customer retention. Combine that with the power of Sonar software, and you can lessen the burden on your support teams, increase retention rates by utilizing bandwidth efficiently, and ensure that your customers are receiving the optimal experience. To learn more about how the Preseem-Sonar integration can help you tap into your growth potential, visit our integrations page https://sonar.software/integrations

Frequently asked questions

How does quality of experience reduce customer churn?

Measuring and optimizing quality of experience from the subscriber's perspective lets you catch poor experiences before customers complain. Preseem customers report a 25-50% drop in support calls and a 28% drop in churn, which improves retention and reduces cost.

Why is measuring QoE better than ICMP and SNMP monitoring?

Traditional ICMP and SNMP tools have limited granularity and poll infrequently, so they can give a misleading picture of what subscribers actually experience. Preseem measures quality of experience from the subscriber's point of view using metrics like packet loss, TCP round-trip time, jitter, and throughput.

What does the bidirectional Preseem-Sonar integration enable?

Because the platforms are bidirectional, you get a single point of data entry for subscriber plans and network inventory. Changes you make in Sonar are reflected immediately in Preseem, eliminating duplicate data entry and supporting optimized plan enforcement.