Challenger brands biting off more of the broadband market

“The sustained growth of smaller broadband providers shows that there is continued demand from consumers for innovative and competitive services,” says commissioner Anna Brakey of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

“Retailers are acquiring more network capacity per service from NBN Co in order to meet consumer demand during the busy hours of 7 to 11pm.”

The need for speed

Australian broadband customers who place a premium on speed, performance, low latency and quality customer service are no longer a niche market segment, says Paul Tyler, CEO of Superloop, one of Australia’s most successful broadband challenger brands.

Across the country, 71 per cent of the NBN footprint can now access gigabit speeds, and Superloop has a 26 per cent market share of premises that have upgraded to gigabit plans. Along with faster speeds, they also value the improved reliability of fibre connections over copper.

Superloop’s overall market share has more than doubled in the last two years and is set to be further boosted by a new six-year wholesale contract with Origin Energy. With revenues growing 30 per cent year on year, the telco also earned recognition in this year’s Australian Financial Review Fast 100 list.

While challenger brands have done well to stake their claim in Australia’s broadband market, Tyler says there is still significant untapped potential when it comes to winning away more market share from the incumbents.

“The challengers certainly have claimed a solid share to date, but there’s still a long way to go,” he says.

“When you consider those predictions of reaching 35 per cent market share, there’s still another $1.5 billion worth of annualised revenue that’s going to shift from the traditional big players to the challengers such as ourselves.”

The success of Australia’s challenger brands also comes through improved customer experience. While their legacy system challenges aren’t as great as those of the incumbents, challenger brands are still able to invest in modernising their systems and processes to deliver better customer support, self-service capabilities and overall customer satisfaction.

Superior IT stacks with better integrations between customer relationship management (CRM) systems and ticketing systems, along with better trained customer support staff, are among the advantages that Australia’s nimble challengers have over the incumbents, according to Tyler.

How AI is helping meet customer expectations

Superloop can be aggressive on price and still make a profit, thanks to ensuring its cost base is the lowest in the industry. Its ability to keep costs down is driven by basing half its staff overseas and deploying artificial intelligence (AI) throughout the business.

While there is debate around the merits of onshore versus offshore call centres, Tyler says customers only care about whether an operator will answer their call in a reasonable period, understand their issue and resolve the problem.

While a great call centre experience is important, Superloop’s ambition is to ensure that customers don’t need to call.

“We take a two-pronged approach: firstly, we’re taking advantage of increased backend investments, including artificial intelligence, to proactively address issues that would impact customers,” Tyler says.

“And secondly, when issues do arise, we’re strengthening our self-service capabilities to ensure those issues can be effectively resolved using our portals, apps, chatbots and web page – so customers don’t need to pick up the phone to get satisfaction.”

Superloop’s strong focus on automation and AI has delivered significant efficiencies, such as handling 50 per cent of customer chat-based queries without impacting its Net Promoter Score.

Behind the scenes, AI integrations reduce the need for manually processes for staff to “swivel-chair between systems”, Tyler adds. Rather than reducing headcount, AI’s benefits allow Superloop’s people to focus their efforts on more complex issues worthy of their attention.

“We plan to ramp up our AI initiatives around self-diagnosing and self-correcting problems, so it can proactively improve customer experience,” he says.

“The ideal is that customers won’t need to contact us when something is wrong, because technologies like AI will help address problems before customers are impacted.”

To learn more, visit https://www.superloop.com/