
Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
In this episode of the podcast, Chris sits down with Christy Batts, Chief Broadband Officer at CDE Lightband, and Amanda Cherry, Customer Experience Supervisor, to explore the exciting developments in Clarksville's municipal broadband network. They discuss the town's transition from Active Ethernet to XGS-PON, a significant upgrade that promises multi-gigabit symmetrical speeds and increased efficiency.
Christy and Amanda share insights into the challenges of upgrading 30,000 customers while maintaining high service standards and the ongoing efforts to future-proof Clarksville's network. They also delve into the unique aspects of operating in a military town, the importance of underground infrastructure in new developments, and the innovative use of AI for customer service training.
Tune in to learn how Clarksville is setting a new standard for municipal broadband and ensuring a robust, reliable service for years to come.
This show is 32 minutes long and can be played on this page or via Apple Podcasts or the tool of your choice using this feed.
Transcript below.
We want your feedback and suggestions for the show-please e-mail us or leave a comment below.
Listen to other episodes or view all episodes in our index. See other podcasts from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
Thanks to Arne Huseby for the music. The song is Warm Duck Shuffle and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license
Christy Batts (00:07):
It is one of the fastest growing markets in the region, and that's what we do every day is just continue to try to provide strong, solid services and grow the business.
Christopher Mitchell (00:17):
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for a Local Self-Reliance, and I'm recording on site where I'm checking to make sure my levels [00:00:30] aren't peaking. We are here at the Gaylord Opryland, is that right? Yeah, and I'm here with Christy Batts, who is the Chief Broadband Officer at Clarksville, CDE Clarksville, Department of Energy, electricity,
Christy Batts (00:46):
CDE Lightband,
Christopher Mitchell (00:47):
CDE Lightband. Yes. So that's the broadband product, the fiber to the home product. That's correct. And you are a three show veteran I think.
Christy Batts (00:55):
Think Yes. Three shows,
Christopher Mitchell (00:56):
Yes. So it's wonderful to have you again. And then you've brought with you [00:01:00] today Amanda Cherry, who is the Customer Experience Supervisor for CDE Lightband. Yes. Wonderful. We are going to be talking about several different topics after we remind everyone what Clarksville has been up to for what, 15, 20 years now? 15 years, 17 years,
Christy Batts (01:16):
Right? At 17 years. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, it's been a while.
Christopher Mitchell (01:20):
It's great. And how long have you been doing it?
Christy Batts (01:23):
I've been with them from the inception, so I was brought in day one for the build out.
Christopher Mitchell (01:29):
But you weren't running it [00:01:30] until 10 years ago? 15 years. Was that
Christy Batts (01:32):
About? I was there about a year and then took over running it.
Christopher Mitchell (01:37):
Okay. I remember it had some problems and then you took over and then there were no more problems ever again.
Christy Batts (01:43):
Well, that's a nice way of saying yes. That's the pretty way of saying
Christopher Mitchell (01:48):
It, I'm sure. I'm sure you're much more modest than that though.
Christy Batts (01:52):
There were a lot of problems, but we worked our way through them with a lot of work from a lot of people, not just me.
Christopher Mitchell (01:57):
Yes. So we're going to talk about an XGS [00:02:00] conversion from active ethernet. We're going to talk a little bit about undergrounding and new construction being underground, and then we're going to talk about training that y'all are doing. This is not the ordinary show I've asked you to. We're going to go into the weeds a little bit of running a network, a mature network. But before we do that, Clarksville is not your average town. You got the military base. Its like many cities is thriving right now. So just give us a little background on [00:02:30] Clarksville for people who aren't familiar.
Christy Batts (02:31):
Sure, yes. For those that haven't listened to me before, Clarksville is about 40 minutes to the north of Nashville, right on the Tennessee Kentucky border. We're home to Fort Campbell. It's actually Fort Campbell Kentucky, only because the senator years ago in the forties lost the coin toss and the Tennessee Senator lost and the post office was put on the Kentucky side because it borders both Tennessee and Kentucky, but it's home to the hundred first Airborne [00:03:00] Division and fifth special forces. And so we have a huge military population, plus we're also home to Austin P State University. It's one of the fastest growing universities in Tennessee. We're a population of just at 12,000 students when I went there, that was not that many students and we're famous for having the best, most recognizable cheer of any university in the US and by Sports Illustrated [00:03:30] every year. And that is, let's go p.
Christopher Mitchell (03:33):
Alright.
Christy Batts (03:34):
We've been in the business with the electric company's, been in the business for broadband since 2007. Went through all of our growing pains and challenges and stuff. We're pulling about a 35% penetration of the market today. It's one of the fastest growing markets in the region, and that's what we do every day is just continue to try to provide strong, solid services and grow the business. We average about [00:04:00] 700 new customer installs a month. There's a lot of work that goes on behind making that happen and has been consistent with that pretty much from the inception.
Christopher Mitchell (04:11):
And you've had to deal with, because of the military base, you have to deal with a lot of starts and stops.
Christy Batts (04:17):
Yes, we do. It's a real high churn market, but to our credit, once we have them, unless they move out of the area for one reason or another, our retention levels are really nice. We're tracking a [00:04:30] below 2% churn. So I'm pretty pleased with how that manages for us as well.
Christopher Mitchell (04:35):
And then we talked in a previous show about something that one of the first things when I'm looking for examples of municipal broadband and how it can benefit the community, I almost always turn to Clarksville because you've done a really good job documenting how the revenues from telecom have helped to lower the energy bills with new substations and your whole new campus being rebuilt and not having to go to the debt market [00:05:00] because of the cash from the telecom business,
Christy Batts (05:02):
Because of the funds that we generated. Because the electric utility owns the fiber plant. So we lease that from them. So we provide them with right at about $9 million a year in revenues. And through that, over the years, they've been able to build three new substations, refurbish two substations, and build an $8 million campus improvement project for their main offices all out of cash and not [00:05:30] having to go to the bond market. Yeah,
Christopher Mitchell (05:32):
That's wonderful. But now we're going to talk about the less fun things. So you built originally with active ethernet, and one of the things that I've always heard about building a network like that is you could always just switch in the future if you wanted to. And I feel like people would often say it that way. You could just switch. So you're going through a switch. And so I don't know if Amanda wants to go or if you want to lead into it, Christy, but why you switching from active ethernet to XGS-PON?
Christy Batts (06:00):
[00:06:00] Well, we actually wanted to have active ethernet systems are really fabulous systems. They're pretty scalable. You can do pretty much anything you want to 'em, but they're also very costly to maintain. It's a big plant, 37 different hub sites, all of those things that go along with it, multitudes of switches to serve the customers. So when we looked at the XGS-PON, it delivered what was my number one priority, multi-gig services. So we're now delivering two and a half gig services and we can do beyond [00:06:30] that on a commercial basis, which I wanted to make sure we stayed consistent with. It's symmetrical, which is also one of my hot points. But it also allows us to consolidate the system down as we transition. So we're able to eliminate some hub sites, eliminate the footprint of switches, the multitude of things, the failure points, all of those things that you get efficiencies from an XGS-PON system. But it is challenging and that's what Amanda and her teams deal with every [00:07:00] day is how we literally reinstall all 30,000 of our customers all over again. And so I'm going to toss it over to her and let her kind of talk about what they're challenged with on a daily
Christopher Mitchell (07:14):
Basis. Excellent. And I'll prompt you in a second, but for people who are XGS, what is all this? You just simplify it by saying the network had been one in which you had one fiber that went all the way from a person's home or a business back to [00:07:30] a centralized type facility, one of these hub sites. And that fiber wasn't shared in any way. And the way you architected it, you've got 37 different hub sites, XGS-PON generally that you're using that where one fiber could be shared among multiple people and then split further closer to the home or the business. And that can just result in fewer hub sites and things like that to worry about. So if you're not super technical and you're confused, don't worry about it. But the stuff we're about to talk about [00:08:00] is not for technical people as much.
Amanda Cherry (08:01):
Exactly. That's where I come into play.
Christopher Mitchell (08:04):
So basically you come into work one day and you're told, Hey, what if we switch out the equipment in 30,000 different locations?
Amanda Cherry (08:10):
Yes. And such a very small percentage of our customer base even understands what we're talking about when we call to try to explain why we need to come into their home and do all this extra work. So we really have to sell them on the benefits of future proofing their Internet, their home Internet. It's going to change how they go into the future with us. But that is a challenge [00:08:30] for my technical support staff, it's basically scheduling a brand new install where the customer has to be there because we're going to bring their outside equipment inside of their home, and that's going to probably require some drilling. So no one's really raising their hand and volunteering for that unless they really understand the business. So my team does a wonderful job at really leaning into the benefits and helping them understand that this is going to help them for generations, the road. This is our future.
Christopher Mitchell (08:57):
I have to assume. I mean, [00:09:00] you might know the figures off the top of your head, probably more than 10% of people won't even answer the phone.
Amanda Cherry (09:04):
No, that's the hard part is to get someone to, and also if you set up your electric with us, think about it, maybe one or two decades ago you don't have your home phone anymore. And sometimes that's what we have on record. So getting in touch with them is one of our biggest barriers, honestly. We also do text message and emailing, so we tackle everything that we have for the customer, but getting in touch with them is the number one problem. But once we do [00:09:30] get them on the phone, my staff is great at helping them understand that this is a benefit to them.
Christopher Mitchell (09:35):
Is there anyone that's really excited and knows what you're talking about? Does that happen? You
Amanda Cherry (09:39):
Know what, yes it does. Especially when we soft launched our two and a half gig service, we thought it would make a small ripple in the pond and it did not. It was a huge ripple.
Christopher Mitchell (09:51):
Okay. So I'm just trying to think of what I've heard from other numbers. If you had more than a hundred subscribers, I would be surprised
Amanda Cherry (10:00):
[00:10:00] For two and a half gig. Yeah. What are we up to now? 300 I believe, right? Yes. Yeah. So no two and a half gig was huge. And honestly, a lot of people that changed over to two and a half gig really wasn't sure that they needed it, but they wanted it. They wanted to have the newest, coolest thing. Of course, we're happy to provide that. That's what we're here for, to stay on the future
Christopher Mitchell (10:23):
For the older product line. The ActiveX, sorry, active ethernet ActiveX. I've been thinking [00:10:30] too much about the early days of the Internet lately. When you were doing the active ethernet for those customers, did they often bring their own modem or were you supplying that?
Christy Batts (10:39):
When we initially launched with Active E, it was a hundred percent bring your own device. We didn't supply anything related to manage services or routers. Now we've gotten into that business and since we've started the conversion and even with the active E, once we got into the business, more than 50% of our customers now are using our [00:11:00] router and it grows exponentially every month. Right.
Christopher Mitchell (11:04):
I reflect a little bit, and I'm curious. My friend Travis, who's on a lot of shows with us who runs USI Fiber in Minneapolis, they basically require that you use their modem and I wonder you're delivering 2.5 gig. You want to make sure they're getting it because they're probably going to measure it. So you want your own gear. So you said 50%, but is that an option still or do people have to take your gear?
Christy Batts (11:27):
Actually, no. If it's the one gig or 2.5 [00:11:30] gig, you're required to take our router because the first thing they're going to do is speed test that thing. And if they've got their router they bought, bought from the big box store, it's not going to work. So we do require 'em for that. We do give 'em a little bit more flexibility if they choose to have their own router. But the way we've packaged our services now, and quite honestly this is one of the things that Amanda brought to the table was we price it out with here's the bandwidth you are choosing. Here's [00:12:00] the price. It includes our managed Wi-Fi and all the app functions. If you choose to use your own router, that's fine, but the price does not change, and it makes a huge difference in the adoption rate.
Christopher Mitchell (12:10):
The
Amanda Cherry (12:11):
Customer education piece of a 2.5 gig customer is really crucial because they quite honestly don't understand that a lot of their home equipment does not get two and a half gig and their router, if they are insistent, no, my router is what I want to use, they don't understand that it only gets one gig. So there's a lot of customer education that goes [00:12:30] into those 300 customers, and there's a lot of call-ins from them for us having to explain a little bit extra. But once they get the right equipment, especially if they're hardline, obviously it's not an option, but once they get the right equipment, it does work well for them. But there's a lot of education that goes on the front end of that.
Christopher Mitchell (12:45):
They could always just put their router downstream of yours too. And then you'll still know if they're having problems. You can say, we're testing the device right now, our device, and it's working just fine.
Amanda Cherry (12:54):
Right, exactly. Yes, exactly.
Christopher Mitchell (12:56):
Yeah. I've gone through this as well because I'm looking at a new motherboard [00:13:00] and trying to find one that's 10 gig and trying to find a switch in the house that'll accommodate 10 gig and that sort, and then I have to get a card from my network attached storage. It's a whole thing and many families aren't going through that. So I'm curious then about the education process. Is that basically a script that your customer service person reads or how exactly does that work? And is it like a five minute conversation or a 10 minute? How does [00:13:30] it go?
Amanda Cherry (13:30):
Well, as far as sales on the front end goes, there is a loose script that our customer service representatives follow when they're going to sell those products to
Christopher Mitchell (13:38):
Them. Sorry, I meant for the transition is what I was thinking of. I keep going back and
Amanda Cherry (13:41):
Forth. Oh, for sure. No, yes, for the conversion, we do have scripts, and of course the conversation sometimes quite often leads off of that script. They have a lot of questions off of that. But yes, every representative has a script that they work off of. And then of course with our system, there's a lot of, if this, then that's, and so you kind of have to [00:14:00] tailor the conversation to the customer.
Christopher Mitchell (14:02):
How many conversions have you done?
Amanda Cherry (14:04):
We're at just over 7,000 right now.
Christopher Mitchell (14:06):
And have you had to change the process along the way? Are there things that you were doing that you had to change?
Amanda Cherry (14:12):
Absolutely. When we first started this process, we were doing how far, I don't dunno how far you want to get in the weeds with it, but we were cutting a cable. And so the customers that we would cut for that day were dependent upon the cable that we were cutting. And since then we have switched that and we found it's easier [00:14:30] for us to cut than cut them, put them on a splitter. It's a whole backend thing. But now we can treat it more like a true installation where the customer can pick from a wider array of dates or then us dictate the date that we're going to need to come into their home.
Christopher Mitchell (14:45):
Yeah, I was curious about that because I assume you want to go neighborhood by neighborhood, and yet not everyone wants be doing it. And so you're running parallel infrastructures. Do you still have people in the area that you started who refuse to switch over or have you been able to deal with them?
Amanda Cherry (15:00):
[00:15:00] I mean, yes. Don't you think? There's been a few that tried to hold onto it, but we've made it very clear that eventually you're going to have to change this.
Christy Batts (15:10):
And once we've actually cut that cable over, we've run into a few things where we've reached out and we've contacted customers multiple times. We've knocked doors, we've door hung, we even went really old school, which was also Amanda's idea, but it works with neighborhood signs that says, Hey, we're coming. [00:15:30] We're about to upgrade you. You need to be excited about this. Listen for that phone call or that email or whatever. And so that's helped a lot. But ultimately when we're finished with that area and that fiber's done, if they didn't make the transition and then make room for us, we'll end up cutting them and when they don't have services, they'll end up calling us. So it's a bit of a challenge. It's been much better than the first initial ones. We've had a lot fewer of those situations since we've developed a [00:16:00] more cohesive way of doing it. And what Amanda was talking about was put splitters in the system into the huts, and when the customer, we schedule their services to be cut over, say it's a street of 20 houses on that cable, we'll go in. And when all 20 of those are done, then we tell fiber, they're tied in, they're hooked into the splitter. Now you go cut from the splitter back to the main fiber [00:16:30] and you transition over and then the customer goes down for a split second, they're back up
Christopher Mitchell (16:34):
Just enough to unplug the port and plug it back in. That's it.
Christy Batts (16:37):
Yeah.
Christopher Mitchell (16:38):
I was curious. One of the things I've heard from folks was before XGS-PON, which you're moving to was GON and GON kind of locked you more into a vendor I think, than XGS-PON does. Was that a part of your consideration was that as a passive optical networking has kind of been less locked in that you feel more free to move to it or?
Christy Batts (16:59):
I think what really sold [00:17:00] us on the XGS-PON is back to what I said earlier,
Christopher Mitchell (17:03):
37 locations. Yes,
Christy Batts (17:06):
Condensing that down. And then also the ability to be able to maintain that symmetrical speed. And while GPON can do that, it's for me, especially since we're very heavy enterprise level business, we wanted to make sure that we had what we could deliver. We've talked before about our services that we provide our school system. There's [00:17:30] 47 different buildings within our school system to include schools and admin and everything else. And we provide each one of those with a 10 gig connection, and then we pump a full 40 gigs symmetrical into their main office and it filters out from there. So that scalability and that flexibility was what really finally sold us on XGS. Makes sense. Past active V, if you want to get out of that active V and that heavy fiber [00:18:00] maintenance, plant maintenance. Right.
Christopher Mitchell (18:03):
And I'm curious about, we've talked before about how originally we mentioned at the beginning of the show even a little bit of the challenges that were faced early on. I feel like you overcame it all. Your cashflow positive, you're paying off debt and you were like, oh, what if we just had a massive expense of switching people over? How has that changed your finances?
Christy Batts (18:25):
We're so good. Yeah, I still have money. We're not to the point of, as [00:18:30] my engineering team used to say, holding it together with spit and bubble gum, I don't tell 'em no anymore. But it is a challenge. It is a resource drain. It's a financial drain. But long-term, it's definitely going to deliver for us in maintaining the system and giving the livelihood of the system and cutting back on other costs. Team player here, yes, it saves more money on the electric side of the house where they own the fiber, but I hope that [00:19:00] eventually equates into lower rental rates too.
Christopher Mitchell (19:02):
Sure. And then the last question is what's the split that you're doing? How many people per fiber or customers per fiber? 32. You're doing 32. I'm so glad to hear that. I always cringe a little bit when someone's like sixty four, a hundred twenty eight. I'm like, it's too many people.
Christy Batts (19:18):
And we talked about as low as 16 at one point, but the 32 worked fine. We tested it out, it worked great. So we're fine with 32.
Christopher Mitchell (19:26):
So from there, I [00:19:30] just wanted to ask about going underground because just before you came up, I was talking with some people when we were talking about the storms. You got hit really hard by a series of tornadoes a few years ago. And I'm curious, so much aerial plant, what is the plan moving forward?
Christy Batts (19:46):
Well, definitely all of our new construction in Clarksville is mandated by ordinance. Anything new constructed has to be underground. And so that's been a huge benefit for us because we are a heavy new construction market as well. You'd be surprised. [00:20:00] I mean, we talk about some of our challenges on day to day. In the past year alone, we have pre-wired 6,000 doors for apartment complexes. That's a lot of work that goes into doing that. So taking that plant underground saves us in the long run. We did recently have a tornado in December of this year too that knocked out a significant part of our community, both electric and fiber plant. [00:20:30] I mean, it was completely just gone. I mean like nothing there.
Christopher Mitchell (20:33):
I mean, there's hundreds of tornadoes every year, but there's a few that are massively devastating,
Christy Batts (20:38):
Pretty devastating. And we laugh a little bit with our counterparts on the electric side because on social media it's like power's out because of a tornado and then everything's destroyed. And it's like, oh, lineman, thank you so much for working through the storms and getting our power back. We really appreciate you. Please be safe out there and two minutes [00:21:00] after their power's back on where the heck's my Internet.
(21:04):
So it's a challenge for us, and taking that stuff underground is important for us to be able to continue to do. And one of the things that we have as a part of our long range strategic plan for the entire organization is to begin building out that underground plant throughout our more mature parts of the market that's been there for years. And so that's a plan that I hope that they'll be able to start on in the next couple of budget years. [00:21:30] And then it'll take us a really long time, but eventually we'll have it all underground.
Christopher Mitchell (21:34):
Do you hear other municipal electrics thinking about that also and executing on? I
Christy Batts (21:38):
Think so. I think most of them are really taking a hard look at that. I know our Kentucky systems have really, those to the north of us have really been hit quite a bit. We provide some Internet backup for them, and we've been their only source of Internet in some respects because the other providers have been damaged. So I know that a lot of them are looking at trying to take more of their plant [00:22:00] underground as well.
Christopher Mitchell (22:01):
Alright. And then we wanted to talk about training and in particular, because everyone's talking about ai, we're going to talk about AI too and cool things that are going on with ai. But let me start by asking Amanda, one of the things that I've been doing lately, just asking all of the people that you work with, did they fall into telecom work by accident or did they deliberately try to get into telecom?
Amanda Cherry (22:24):
For me and my staffing right now, I think that they were going to [00:22:30] work in a call center and they happened upon the rest of it. Yeah,
Christopher Mitchell (22:34):
I find that it's true for outside plant people. It's true for almost everyone. I feel like there's no one that, and we're trying to change this, but I feel like no one turns 18 and they're thinking about their future and they're like, you know what? Telecom,
Amanda Cherry (22:46):
Well now I will say with Austin P being so close, it's literally two blocks up from our network operations. We do, I have three right now that are technical support representatives, but they're also in school for networking. [00:23:00] So they hope to be employees long-term in another department, but they're starting out with me to get their feet in the door. Yeah.
Christopher Mitchell (23:06):
Yeah. I mean, this is where I feel like whether no matter what department you're in, aside from some of the supervisory and whatnot, there's a lot of on-the-job training, some of us that supervise also feel like that's on the job training, I guess. But it feels like this line of work working utility is a lot of on-the-job training.
Amanda Cherry (23:25):
A hundred percent. Well, Christy can attest to that with me. I came from marketing, so [00:23:30] she can absolutely attest to how she got me, and that's a lot of on job training. So yes, absolutely.
Christopher Mitchell (23:35):
So how are you doing training now with artificial intelligence?
Amanda Cherry (23:40):
Well, I can tell you where we're at now is we are starting to look at it for models that will be used in real time. So whereas now if one of my newer representatives has a situation come up that they've not had a lot of exposure to, they're going to have to turn around and go find a more senior representative [00:24:00] to help them with that. So where we're hoping we're heading and where we're laying the groundwork for right now is where there's going to be an AI model on their computer that they can type those questions into, and it'll be as if a senior is sitting right next to them and answering those questions along with them. We're in the early stages of that. And Chrissy's laying a lot of the work as well to get us there.
Christy Batts (24:20):
Well, yeah, I mean certainly it's a lot of building that information base. I mean, we've got it and we have it. A lot of our training ends up being [00:24:30] printouts and folders and notebooks and that person standing in front of 'em and saying, if this happens, do this, or if that happens. But you can only train for, and you only have the time to train for what happens 99% of the time. It's the other one to 2% of the time. That doesn't normally happen with a customer. That's difficult. And if you've got that non-senior or seasoned TSR on the phone at nine o'clock at night, then your response [00:25:00] time for that customer is delayed because they're going to put that customer on hold and call the on-call lead and ask them, Hey, what do I do with this? And then it's going to be, so you don't want to do that. You want to be able that first call resolution, get it done as fast as possible. And so that's what we're building. We're taking that knowledge base of those senior level people that are seasoned and know every aspect of everything and building that into that AI database so that these less seasoned [00:25:30] folks have that resource to 'em. And it's not a phone call, but it's a type of question in,
Christopher Mitchell (25:35):
Are you working with a contractor that does this sort of thing? Are you figuring it out yourself as you go along? We
Christy Batts (25:40):
Actually have an in-house person who has just embraced the AI technology. He's our database analyst, but he also loves the whole concept behind the AI technology. So he's actually working with us to build all of those models so we feel pretty safe and secure that our person's watching what we need to do, and it's not going out [00:26:00] there doing this global search of things. It's building our own models there. And so that feels good for us because AI can be a little scary if you're getting into it. Yeah,
Christopher Mitchell (26:11):
Very much so. Especially because, Amanda, you could tell me if I'm wrong, but I assume as you rely on it more and more, it's like, oh, we got 90 out of a hundred. Right? Well, that means 10 potential bad reviews, that's horrific. It really has to be right on.
Amanda Cherry (26:27):
And the security layer too of that is [00:26:30] how much of your network are you willing to put out on an AI platform? So we're happy to have somebody in-house to help us stay secure with what we're putting out there too.
Christopher Mitchell (26:39):
What do you think the timing is in terms of being able to start testing and deploying it? Is this something that you're going to be able to start rolling it out slowly and
Amanda Cherry (26:48):
Well? We are working on this, uploading our data right now into the AI model. So I would hope that we're within what, six months of hopefully early testing of it. Yeah.
Christopher Mitchell (26:57):
Do you have to do a whole lot of extra work to create the data [00:27:00] for the model then? A
Amanda Cherry (27:01):
Little bit? Yeah, you do. You have to take your training models. We're fortunate enough to, we have paper sometimes that we still use, so we took literally our paper binders, but then you have to strip that down and put that into the AI language. So there is a little bit of front end work to get that done.
Christopher Mitchell (27:18):
It's going to be interesting, and I hope that you're going to have a little internal list of hilarious responses.
Amanda Cherry (27:25):
We could screenshot those and share those later on. Absolutely.
Christopher Mitchell (27:30):
[00:27:30] What else do you do in terms of training? Because these are the people that are representing you to the public. Yes. So aside from ai, what do you do to train people and before you trust them to talk to your customers?
Amanda Cherry (27:43):
Yeah. Well, I'm very fortunate enough to have a trainer in the department that she's been with us now for, I want to say eight years, Jasmine. So she's our head trainer and she works with the new employee around six to eight weeks [00:28:00] before they ever see the floor where the phones are. And it's just different if you get somebody that's going to Austin P for networking, and they have a leg up on someone who thinks that they're coming into a call center. So it just depends on the person. And we try to keep our training classes very small so that the learning is tailored to them, but they have to first learn a whole network and then learn the call center's way of life. So it's a lot, but I have a great trainer, so [00:28:30] I've gotten lucky in that aspect.
Christopher Mitchell (28:34):
You can say no comment and giggle, but do you have a list of hilarious interactions with customers or things like that?
Amanda Cherry (28:41):
We could share stories.
Christy Batts (28:43):
Oh, we could definitely share stories, but my favorite is when we first launched chat, one of our technical support reps was chatting with the customer, everything was going great, and apparently the customer got a little testy and hit their comments back, and her response back to him [00:29:00] in a chat was, LOL, why you so rude? So we do still use that around the office sometimes with when we go, someone says something and testy in a meeting, we go LOL. Why are you so rude?
Christopher Mitchell (29:14):
Excellent. Anything else that we should touch on? I mean, I think it's a really great window into what it takes for just one side of this to keep the network working and people happy.
Christy Batts (29:24):
Yeah, I mean, that's the key. We set standards of what we want our TSRs [00:29:30] and our engineering teams to deliver. Amanda really pushes her folks to be first call resolution, so we try to resolve it without rolling a truck. If we roll a truck, we try to make sure that it's with the first visit, and then our engineering team, if a switch or a portion of the network happens to go down, we have standards with, we try to have that resolved within an hour. So we try to minimize that downtime, which in turn minimizes phone calls and helps with all the other aspects. [00:30:00] We've talked a lot about the XGS conversions, but at the same time that all of those same people are working, scheduling all those customers for those XGS conversions. They're also managing the influx of about 700 new customer connects a month on top of that, plus any service calls that may come in. And so there's a lot flowing through that office at any given
Christopher Mitchell (30:25):
Point. And we didn't really talk about this, but meanwhile, all of your people that have been there for all this time, [00:30:30] you're about to have a whole new system. Yes. So that's fun.
Christy Batts (30:34):
Yes. And they've embraced the technology. They've really done very well with it, but it's a bit of a challenge when you look at it and they're like, wait a minute. We don't do it that way anymore. We have to do it this way. And we've had a few hiccups with that, but that's dealing with people.
Christopher Mitchell (30:51):
That's right. Yeah. There was something that the travel broadband bootcamps, I think is where it came up several times, which the technology is easy. The [00:31:00] people are hard. Yes. Well, thank you so much, Christine, Amanda, I really appreciate it. Thank you. Oh, thank you
Christy Batts (31:06):
For having me. Thank you.
Ry Marcattilio (31:07):
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