Business Intelligence Reporting for ISPs: Turn Data Into Insights

Business intelligence reporting helps Internet Service Providers turn raw subscriber, platform usage, and financial data into decisions that grow ARPU, reduce churn, and drive operational efficiencies. Sonar's embedded reporting module delivers that intelligence directly inside your Sonar instance, with no separate analytics stack required.

Financial health is the cornerstone for an Internet Service Providers' capacity to deliver a quality customer experience, remain competitive, and continuously fuel growth. To stay profitable and be viable, the decisions you make are only as good as the information you use to make them. Business Intelligence tools provide a comprehensive view of your organization's data by collecting and analyzing subscriber information, platform usage, and financial data.

Sonar's reporting module gives you data-driven intelligence at your fingertips, providing an accurate and holistic view of your business. These reports are available in an easy-to-understand format directly within your Sonar instance and are accessible to anyone with the appropriate user permissions. Using Sonar's reporting will provide your organization and each department with valuable insights to improve not only how your business operates, but also the experience you're delivering to customers.

How Can Your ISP Leverage Sonar's Embedded Business Intelligence?

Sonar's Business Intelligence Reports Dashboard

Business Intelligence has a complicated history as a business focus. When it first appeared, Business Intelligence was a means of sharing information across different organizations. Modern BI is a more flexible tool, designed to provide a robust self-service analysis tool, and Sonar's BI reporting perfectly encapsulates that idea. Every department in your organization can benefit from either the default reports, or by obtaining report licenses through Sonar, the robust custom report builder.

Because Business Intelligence is a catch-all term for various processes, the best way to understand how Sonar's BI can benefit your organization is by approaching the tool from the bottom up - examining the available reports and how they can be used to establish a detailed roadmap to success as an Internet Service Provider, increase Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), drive operational efficiencies, leverage cost savings, and improve your bottom line.

Use Business Intelligence to Enhance Customer Acquisition

Sales and Marketing teams currently have access to more information than they ever have before when it comes to customer acquisition. Unfortunately, information availability doesn't always correlate with making the most effective use of that data.

Customer insight is a key competitive advantage, and if you aren't positioned to take that advantage, you leave yourself vulnerable to service providers who are. Using Sonar, your sales and marketing teams will be able to create detailed reports to strategically target existing and prospective customers.

Sonar's reporting module will enable your organization to run reports that can help expose trends on new sign-ups, trends within serviceable areas, or trends with disconnections within specific service areas. Additionally, by using Sonar's reporting to examine historical sales, your marketing team can easily distinguish which promotions, packages, and campaigns were most effective at acquiring or retaining customers.

Finally, reports can also be created to benefit your sales agents more directly by allowing an in-depth look at acquisitions and providing incentives or commissions accordingly while eliminating the need to manually track sales or leads entered into the system.

Use Business Intelligence to Refine Customer Experience and Reduce Churn

Retaining customers is a key aspect that separates good service providers from those that fail, and a major way to retain customers is by providing an amazing customer experience. Defining a good customer experience can be difficult, but with Sonar's Business Intelligence, your organization can ensure that the customer support team is as good as it can be.

Whether you choose to use reports on average call times, ticket ages, or average responses to reach a resolution, the business intelligence module has reports that will allow you to monitor customer interactions in-depth.

Ticketing Data Insights

Using Sonar's reports, you can analyze how your support agents are handling various scenarios, and use the results to improve training or improve your messaging to customers to reduce repeat issues. Leveraging Business Intelligence can help reduce overall call times, reduce the number of emails exchanged in a ticket, and report on customer saves during retention opportunities.

Use Business Intelligence to Increase ARPU and Target Offerings

By using Business Intelligence, you can target customer service subscription trends to build strategic service offerings. This will allow your organization to create a better customer experience and increase ARPU. By analyzing your most popular packages and services, you'll be able to identify other products you can bundle for promotion. You'll also be able to identify which packages and services gather the most interest during certain times of the year to offer seasonal promotions. Lastly, you can use Sonar to use meaningful data to identify low-selling packages to make improvements.

This means that every service your organization offers can be targeted to the right audience, based on identified trends in the serviceable area, current subscription levels, and submitted customer feedback during interactions with your team.

Additionally, because reports can be created using any data points in your instance, Sonar's reporting module can be used for revenue verification reports as well. For example, if you've recently built or acquired a new infrastructure location, reports can be created to confirm profitability through subscribed customers, subscribed services, and network usage rates. This can be expanded to a variety of revenue concepts, and can also be used to generate invoiced revenue reports to support your accounting team. Whether you're generating reports to enhance your service offerings, or for an overview on customer churn.

Use Business Intelligence to Target Network Maintenance, Upgrades, and Expansion

When you're planning to grow your business, you need to consider the expansion from several different perspectives; not only will the location of your expansion matter, but when you expand, and what equipment you place at the network site also needs to be considered. Using Sonar's reporting module you'll be able to strategically monitor your existing deployments to determine capacity issues, monitor lead accounts to plan new deployments, and historical usage to plan network maintenance.

Making sure your network can deliver consistent service to your subscribers will help to ensure customer retention and reduce customer churn. When generating reports for your network, you can easily schedule them to run and send to every user that needs them.

Sonar's BI can also enhance the experience of your dispatch and field technician teams by enabling reports on average handle times across geographic location, job type, or dispatch time. Additionally, reports can be created to automate adherence reporting, ensuring your technicians are taking all of their allotted break and lunch times throughout the day while completing their assigned work. You're also able to leverage the reporting to identify jobs that fall within the same network site, potentially identifying a trend or faulty hardware before it becomes a disaster.

Use Business Intelligence to Improve Inventory Management

Leveraging Business Intelligence to optimize operations extends beyond tracking employee performance and customer interactions. Establishing a secure supply chain will allow your organization to continue to scale and grow while acquiring new customers. Using the reporting system, you'll be able to consistently track existing inventory in your Sonar instance, and when inventory is low, the report can be sent directly to your procurement team to address shortages. With approximately 5800 fields that you can report on when it comes to inventory procurement, manual tracking is a thing of the past.

Inventory Report

Another way BI helps build your business is through reports that allow your organization to manage inventory returns. This may mean tracking particularly defective hardware models, or simply inventory that is being retired, in either case, Sonar's reports can help you automate the process. You can use BI in Sonar to report on Inventory COGS, undeployed inventory by warehouse, or RMA status by inventory make and model.

Paving the Future to Growth with Business Intelligence

Sonar's mission is to make sure your organization can grow. Whether you're expanding your physical footprint by taking advantage of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) and creating reports to identify eligible installations in a given census area or reporting on specific revenue trends - whether as a summary or in detail, Sonar's reporting module will allow you to create these reports. With countless connected fields and infinite customization, everything from account invoiced revenue to detailed taxation records can be viewed and exported from right within your instance.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is business intelligence reporting for an ISP?

For an Internet Service Provider, business intelligence reporting collects and analyzes subscriber information, platform usage, and financial data to give a holistic view of the business. Sonar's reporting module delivers these insights in an easy-to-understand format directly within your Sonar instance, accessible to anyone with the appropriate user permissions.

How does BI reporting help ISPs increase ARPU and reduce churn?

By analyzing subscription trends and your most popular packages and services, Sonar's BI helps you bundle offerings, run seasonal promotions, and improve low-selling packages to increase ARPU. Reports on call times, ticket ages, resolution times, and network capacity help you refine customer experience and keep service consistent, which supports retention and reduces churn.