SkyCreek Empowers Charter Communications: Customer Satisfaction Up

Summary

About the company:

Charter Communications, branded as “Spectrum” is an American Fortune 100 telecommunications and mass media company that provides mobile, cable TV, internet and landline services in the United States. It is the second-largest cable operator by subscribers, third-largest pay-TV operator and fifth-largest telephone provider (based on number of residential lines), serving over 30 million customers across 41 states.

Challenge:

Charter went through many significant and large acquisitions, which resulted in disrupted and inefficient customer service. These included many stovepiped solutions and a lack of standardization in its customer communications.

Solution:

SkyCreek implemented innovative solutions to improve Charter’s standardization and centralized management and reporting needs.

Benefits:

Charter is now able to deliver over 85 million consistent and effective communications monthly using SkyCreek’s solution.
Improved customer service, reporting and management.

Charter Communications has experienced incredible growth through the acquisition of several large companies. However, this has led to disparate and fragmented customer communication, an inability to have a centralized view of the communication and an inability to adequately handle the increasing volume of communication. Charter chose SkyCreek to help solve this critical problem, aiding in Charter’s growth and helping it launch a new mobile business in just 12 months.

The Challenges

Strong customer service is of utmost importance to Charter, who wants to ensure customers are receiving a seamless and a standardized experience. Successfully undergoing several large acquisitions increased its customer base by 500% in just one year and also meant acquiring new customer and field service operations. With these acquisitions, Charter was now working with over ten different organizations to support its customer communication needs, with limited success. These organizations were using disparate platforms that were unable to communicate with each other — effectively creating a stove-piped system — resulting in customers that were now having fragmented and frustrating experiences with Charter.
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Charter realized that this could not continue. In order to ensure that Charter was able to maintain the highest quality customer service while simultaneously continuing to innovate and expand, the company needed a communication partner that could rapidly cater to its growing demands.

Solution

SkyCreek was identified as best equipped to handle Charter’s large customer base and became the chosen vendor for all multichannel operational communications across all of Charter’s product lines. SkyCreek also helped launch and now manages the needs of Charter’s mobile business.
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SkyCreek delivered over 500 Charter campaigns. These included instant communications such as password recovery, appointment reminders, multichannel order confirmations, monthly statements, billing acknowledgements, customer satisfaction surveys and bulk campaigns for outage and service alerts. This often meant sending over 1 million emails, SMS messages and interactive voice recording (IVR) communications per hour!
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Charter, through leveraging SkyCreek’s tools, also designed and managed its own campaigns. SkyCreek enabled prebuilt and custom integrations into its billing, customer relationship management, preference management and workforce management systems. It established a series of quality assurance environments to allow for parallel testing and reduction in overall response times. SkyCreek’s active feedback loop provided Charter with a live feed of all customer communication happening within the SkyCreek reporting portal, helping Charter ensure that all customers are being provided with excellent service.
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The SkyCreek team worked tirelessly to support all of Charter’s operational units by providing a quick turnaround on new campaigns and rapid changes to existing ones. SkyCreek provided daily support and guidance to shepherd Charter through the campaign-development lifecycle. SkyCreek’s state-of-the-art centralized tools for IVR, email, and SMS services have helped standardize communication across Charter, improved customer experiences and made possible a singular governance and operational model to successfully manage notifications at Charter’s scale and size.

The Benefits

Choosing SkyCreek has allowed Charter to reduce costs — resulting in savings in the millions — by consolidating the use of over ten vendors to just one, building campaigns that help reduce variable costs (i.e., unnecessary appointments, calls into the call centers) and improving communication efficiency. SkyCreek:

Served as Charter’s one-stop shop for the entire customer journey.
Provided Charter campaign management tools to autonomously craft new and revise existing campaigns.
Provided Charter with a real-time view across all customer channels and merged entities to ameliorate customer service.
Handled over 85 million communications per month, with bursts of 1 million per hour.
Managed an average of 2.25 million outbound communications daily, with spikes up to 5 million per day during emergencies such as earthquakes, storms and hurricanes.