LEADING NORTH AMERICAN CABLECO REFORMULATES ITS MOBILE CONTENT STRATEGY BASED ON IEMR'S GLOBAL CONSUMER PANEL
THE PROBLEM
Our client – a leading North American Cable MSO – was facing the challenge of OTT providers, including Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and many others in a hyper-rich media environment.
IEMR's Global Consumer Telecoms Survey showed that for our client's subscribers, over 29.1% of subscribers had either reduced, cancelled, or not purchased additional bundles from our client since subscribing to an OTT service. While the content offered by the client was viewed by its customers as being superior and current, compared to OTT players, over 69.1% of our client's customers felt that they were paying more than they should for our client's services.
Of those customers that had reduced or cancelled their service with our client, we found that a full 37% of these customers would have maintained their current subscriptions had their services been bundled, allowing them a single source to easily search, discover, and watch all their content (including OTT and online video content).
IEMR'S SOLUTION
IEMR undertook a large on-line and telephone survey
(N = 7,500) of our client's customer base, based on our Global Consumer Panel. In this survey, we found that both in-home and on-the-go Wi-Fi access was an important and valuable service that our client could provide to its existing customers as a defensive tactic to keep its customers from churning.
This Wi-Fi bundling must be fast, reliable, and preponderant in our client's service areas, with over 69% of our client's existing subscribers saying that they would not consider reducing their Pay TV subscriptions, if such Wi-Fi access was available to them.
We also found that the client's mobile content strategy must change. While its customers expected content everywhere, the client's BSS and OSS systems were not ready to deliver this content. Based on our research, we recommended that the client offer a seamless TV Everywhere app for its existing customers that allows them to access their already-subscribed content on multiple devices.
IEMR'S IMPACT
While our client was not ready for an all-encompassing digital transformation program which involved a complete overhaul of their OSS/BSS software stack and other business process transformations; it did implement Wi-Fi bundling and its TV Everywhere app as an essential component of its multi-play strategy. For its triple-play subscribers (broadband internet + TV + Mobile), the client offered IEMR's recommended TV Everywhere and free Wi-Fi bundling option. For this group of customers, as a result of IEMR's analysis, our client's churn rates reduced from 2.1% per month before program execution to 0.7% after program execution. Overall triple-play subscriber growth increased from 2.2% in 2014 to 2.9% in 2016 – a 31% increase in subscriber growth after program execution.
