SBC won't repeat DSL goofs in Project Lightspeed, exec says

SBC Communications will not repeat the mistakes it made in deploying DSL as it rolls out Project LightSpeed and IPTV, executive vice president of operations Zeke Robertson told an Austin, Texas, audience of global service providers Monday.

Speaking at Motivation 2005, Motive’s annual customer conference, Robertson acknowledged that problems in the early days of DSL stemmed from SBC’s failure to recognize it needed to manage the collision of customer expectations with unprepared network plant in advance of marketing the service. That won’t happen this time around, he promised.

“When we first rolled out DSL, we had a technology that worked and a network that was never intended to provide that service,” Robertson said. “We learned a lot from that. Whether it’s things that we don’t want to say or things we do, it’s better to say it up front.”

This time around, SBC is “going out in advance and conditioning the plant to make sure we can offer the service” before selling it, he said. In addition, incoming calls will be identified by area so customer service reps will know whether a caller lives in an area served by Project Lightspeed or not.

“We are concentrating on our reps’ ability to tell you, on the phone, whether you can get the service--we didn’t do that last time round,” Robertson said.

In addition, SBC is working to integrate its customer support so that “we take care of all the problems on a single call, as opposed to sending a customer to multiple numbers, a customer care hell,” he said.

SBC is now putting the customer’s perspective first, Robertson added, versus the once highly regarded internal metrics that looked at the network in segments. It was possible to do well on those individual metrics even as customers were having a bad experience, he said.

“We have been very vulnerable to patting ourselves on the back, saying we are doing a good job on one part or another, when the only real metric that matters is how the customer sees it,” Robertson said. “We now know to combine all the various metrics, to combine all the metrics we were once required, either by regulatory fiat or management fiat, to maintain separately. We’re no longer stopping the clock on weekends and holidays, like we used to. We are no longer interested in how long individual components of the broadband service take to deploy but in the overall interval, and that interval is getting shorter.”

SBC management is getting paid based on customer satisfaction, he added, “and when they start messing with your paycheck, you know it’s serious.”