It’s no secret the pandemic had a major impact on the way operators interact with their customers, but Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge put some numbers to that trend.
Rutledge told investors during a UBS conference that 60% of all transactions, including service requests, appointment scheduling, self-service connects and changes in service, are now fully digital. That means “there’s no human intervention in that transaction,” he said.
Before the pandemic, Rutledge said around 40% of its customers utilized its self-install option. That jumped to 90% to 100% “overnight” as Covid hit, despite Charter not having the operational platform in place to make that leap how it might have otherwise wanted to. Now, the self-install rate is hovering around 80%, he added.
“The opportunity to digitize the business is actually taking activity out of the business, it’s taking physical activity out, it’s taking cost out, which makes us even more competitive in the long term,” Rutledge said.
Even so, Rutledge indicated Charter expects to continue serving customers by phone for the “foreseeable future,” in part because it doesn’t want to leave any customers confused or dissatisfied.
“We think that we’ll continue to serve significant amounts of people by telephone because the products are complex,” he explained. “Broadband is complex and the broadband house now has got multiple components to it with pods and with full coverage throughout the house and the property and telephone and mobile.”
The cost of high splits
Rutledge also touched on Charter’s previously announced plan to invest in high-split architecture to boost capacity on its network, noting it’s a relatively inexpensive opportunity.
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“It’s more like what we did with DOCSIS 3.1 which took about $450 million in capital. We did that in two years and took capacity up. It’s more than that, but it’s a lot, lot less than any kind of alternative infrastructure,” he said.
The CEO said the shift to high splits will provide multi-gig downstream and gigabit upstream speeds, enabling it to deliver a symmetrical gig product or a multi-gig downstream offer.
“We don’t really have any products that need that capacity right now and we’re doing very well in the marketplace competitively without that capacity,” he continued. “But in terms of today we’ll start augmenting our plant with high split.”