There is no success story without viewer satisfaction

The Role of Customer Care in OTT

Customer care is an integral part of the user journey

Customer Care mitigates churn

How important is Customer Care for OTT viewers?

Self-care: Proactive vs reactive support

When customer service fails

Live video vs SVOD customer care specifics

Customer caCustomer care becomes a key competitive differentiator

NPS and user satisfaction as the key customer care KPIs

NPS for Pay TV and OTT providers

NPS for technology service providers

What about general user satisfaction?

Cleeng NPS and satisfaction numbers

Other KPIs

Client’s case study: Tennis Channel

Quality of Customer Care gives you that love edge

About Cleeng

Table of content:

3

3

4

4

5

6

77

7

7

8

9

10

10

111

12

13

2

With direct-to-consumer (D2C) streaming services, broadcasters have to closely track and improve all stages

of the user journey. One of the most underappreciated yet most important links in this chain is customer care

since this directly affects user satisfaction with the service.

HavingHaving to worry about audience - or consumer-focus is something new for many media companies, but this is

an urgent task if they want to succeed in the D2C world. After all, acquiring a new subscriber is five to 25 times

more expensive than retaining an existing one [according to research by Fred Reichheld, the inventor of the

Net Promoter Score].

It makes sense: you don’t have to spend time and resources going out and finding a new client — you just have

to keep the one you have happy.

Keeping subscribers happy and knowing how to keep them loyal is key to the long-term success of OTT

initiatives.

So, what makes them unhappy? Among pay TV services in recent times it has been rising, unaffordable fees

closely followed by a poor user experience and substandard customer support which are the red alert

warnings for subscriber satisfaction.

Customer care is an integral part of the user journey

3

CUSTOMER CARE MITIGATES CHURN

WHY DO YOU FEEL YOU’RE NOT GETTING ENOUGH VALUE FROM YOUR PROVIDER?(Choose all that apply)

But churn does not challenge pay TV operators alone. While there are plenty of consumers willing to sign up

for the freedom, flexibility, and convenience of OTT, the competition is fierce and more often than not,

subscriber churn rates for streaming services are through the roof.

LookingLooking at the above chart from an OTT service perspective, it’s clear that quality standards need to be

raised significantly across the board. Churn can become hard to control, as it can happen at any point during

the customer journey, due to various reasons like payment failure, a thin content catalogue, low engagement

levels, bad viewing experience and a lack of customer support.

Ultimately, churn can be fatal. It isn’t unusual among the prospects that reach out to us to see churn rates ranging

from 20% to 40%. Improving these metrics is essential to reach a positive ROI and continue to grow your

subscriber base year-on-year.

Read more on tackling churn in our latest Q&A for Digital TV Europe.

The third of these dimensions - Customer Care - can be one of the toughest jobs in the world of live streaming

video but a business model focused on the end-user will pay dividends.

A D2C business model implies direct to consumer care. Subscribers will expect information considered from

all angles and timely help when needed. They will appreciate a service that offers a reliable and even

personalised guide to the service they pay for.

AA user-focused service embedded into all customer communications and transactions will mitigate churn and

drive propensity to secure new subscriptions. These values will become part of the brand, as a differentiator

against less savvy competition and fuelling positive word-of-mouth.

Customer support can be proactive or reactive, the main difference between them being that proactive

support saves a broadcaster lots of time and resources. By creating the right content, guidelines and processes,

users can serve themselves.

SELF-CARE METHODS INCLUDE:

HOW IMPORTANT IS CUSTOMER CARE FOR OTT VIEWERS?

SELF-CARE: PROACTIVE VS REACTIVE SUPPORT

4

When a support system or team is overwhelmed, problems and glitches arise.

The Customer Care management has to take into account:

· Scalability of support processes and team and investments in HR;

· Flexibility in handling sudden peaks (typical for live streamed events, see graph below).

Unfortunately, incidents of customer frustration are not rare and particularly afflict live streamed sports.

When the provider fails to place customers first, the issues surrounding the incident are exacerbated.

This is what happened during the live stream of a global pay per view event in 2017. Unable to handle the peak

in traffic to the site in the moments leading up to the event, many potential subscribers were forced to turn to

illegal sites, while others who had successfully paid found themselves denied service or experiencing severe

delays.

InIn cases when the customer service communications are unable or unwilling to respond effectively, customers

are turning to social media taking the reaction out of the rights holder’s control.

WHEN CUSTOMER SERVICE FAILS

5

Figure 2: The sudden peak of Cleeng pay-per-view transactions for the Money Fight

Several recent high profile sports OTT launches including F1 TV, and Eurosport’s debut of

Bundesliga matches in Germany and Austria have suffered from service buffering and even

outages. On both occasions, though, the rights holder or service provider was quick to react and

message customers that they would be reimbursed a portion of their subscription.

As we have seen, live video is an inherently risky scenario for the OTT provider. While pay TV providers benefit

from a predictable infrastructure (by owning the network end to end including delivery to the set-top boxes),

with OTT the quality of service over infrastructure the operator does not own is not directly under their control.

Viewers might be watching content on a connected TV or desktop PC, their smartphone, via apps or the web,

all with varying quality and all impacting the customer experience.

ConsequentlConsequently, time is of the essence in responding to customer queries. It is likely that more human resource

will be needed, especially around likely high demand events. Personalised answers that address the customer’s

issue directly, rather than cut and paste chatbot responses, will score highly on customer satisfaction.

On-demand content provision should be less challenging given that the time-critical element is largely missing.

However, a vigilant customer focussed OTT provider should make it a priority to find permanent fixes given

the additional time to set up and test service components.

6

LIVE VIDEO VS SVOD CUSTOMER CARE SPECIFICS

There are many metrics within the industry that can help you assess the quality of provided customer

support. Those numbers can help a vendor stand out from the competition.

The standard metric used to measure the quality of online products and services is the Net Promoter Score

(NPS). This is typically used to measure your customer’s overall loyalty to your brand based on the percentage

of a company's true advocates (‘9’ and ‘10’ on a 10-point recommendation scale) minus its detractors (‘0’ through

‘6’ on this same scale). And yes, you can have a negative NPS score.

Responses to an NPS survey or question belong to three groups (via Zendesk):

· · Detractors are customers who gave a score of 0 to 6, indicating a dissatisfaction with your company.

· Passives are customers who gave a score of either 7 or 8, indicating that they are not really eager to recommend your company to others.

· Promoters are customers who gave a score of 9 or 10, and they are likely to actively recommend your company to others.

CompaniesCompanies can use the calculated score to indicate its potential for real, sustainable growth through customer

retention and word-of-mouth referrals.

Customer care becomes a key competitive differentiator

7

NPS AND USER SATISFACTION AS THE KEY CUSTOMER CARE KPIs

It’s increasingly clear that traditional pay TV providers are unable to provide the level of service or value for

money that online-based, D2C services can – and unless these businesses make clear efforts to adapt they face

extinction.

NPS FOR PAY TV AND OTT PROVIDERS

Figure 3: SVOD services convincingly beat Pay TV in NPS N=3000, Q3 2017, Source: Ampre Consumer

NPS is directly correlated to customers’ willingness to spend more with technology providers, try their new

products and services, forgive them after a bad experience, and act as a reference for them with prospective

clients.

That’s why doing your utmost best in pleasing your customers in order to become brand advocates. Improving

the NPS should be a priority for each company looking for success.

8

If we compare the NPS for technology service providers rated by clients in the media and broadcasting

space the news is not great.

The average NPS for tech vendors decreased by more than eight points from last year, down from 29.9 to 21.4,

per the 2017 report from Research and Markets. The report found that NPS ranges from +43 to -22, from a

sample of 58 technology vendors.

As a technology provider in the media and broadcasting space, Cleeng reached an NPS average of 43.91

during 2017.

great servicegreat customer servicegreat priceseasy usegreat qualityfast delivery

>

>

>

>

>

>

>

>

>

>

>

>

poor customer servicewaste timedoesn’t worktime consumingdon’t know youdifficult to us

Top Promoter Phrases Top Detractor Phrases

The overall analysis shows that NPS is correlated to customers’ willingness to spend more with tech vendors, try

their new products and services, forgive them after a bad experience, and act as a reference for them with

prospective clients.

Zendesk’s top promoter and detractor phrases

NPS FOR TECHNOLOGY SERVICE PROVIDERS

9

By contrast, and by nearly every measure, customers of streaming providers such as Netflix, Sony PlayStation

Vue, and Amazon-owned Twitch said they are happier than those of cable, satellite and telco TV operators.

A stand out metric is call-center satisfaction: Among pay TV providers, the ACSI score averaged 63 —

considerably below the 75 average for video streamers. OTT also consistently outscored pay TV on ease of

understanding the bill; website satisfaction; and overall performance and reliability.

AsideAside from dissatisfaction with call centers, pay TV subscribers indicated that the ability to minimize service

disruptions and outages was poor.

WHAT ABOUT GENERAL USER SATISFACTION?

According to the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), video-streaming services

outperformed U.S pay TV operators by some margin. Indeed, the U.S. pay TV average fell 3% year-on-year to

an 11-year low in the 2018 report.

10

These numbers are a direct outcome of multiple recent efforts directed at optimizing Cleeng’s customer care.

After the establishment of a dedicated company branch in Manilla (Phi), definition of clear processes, along with

intensive cross-team and cross-branch trainings, we saw a steady rise in consumer and client satisfaction.

Figure 5: Cleeng Viewer and Broadcaster satisfaction rates in 2018

CLEENG SATISFACTION NUMBERS

Cleeng is tracking both B2B and B2C satisfaction levels since it provides a technology for broadcasters selling

direct to consumers.

These include:

Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Number of ‘one-touch’ resolutions to a customer query. With SVOD this gets more complicated, since all the metadata is needed per device, browser, screen size etc. For live content Cleeng has a 65% one-touch resolution rating.

Reopen ticket rate. Cleeng averages 20% indicating that users of Cleeng spend more time with customers to understand their issues.

Percentage of inquiries from paid transactions. Cleeng averages 5% of paid transactions.

Chargebacks and refunds rates.

OTHER KPIS THAT MATTER

11

Tennis Channel, the premier tennis

television and digital network in the U.S,

used Cleeng’s subscription and

customer care management technology

to power the network’s updated apps.

Tennis Channel finds great value in

Cleeng’s customer care systems and

staffing, backed up with a live chat module

for dedicated 24/7 user support and an

SLA of 60-second first response time.

Cleeng brings the user experience and flexibility we need to

integrate with our internal production platforms said Adam Ware, senior vice president, head of digital and business development, Tennis Channel.‘’ ‘’

Client’s case study: Tennis Channel

Seamless Customer Care is an integral part of the customer journey, particularly when you’re talking

direct-to-consumer. Methods such as informative videos, FAQs, section, macros (personalised templated

responses), live chat, multilingual and 24/7 support will help you build a significant level of trust, loyalty, and

comfortability.

TToday’s OTT hungry consumers are more empowered and perhaps more impatient than ever. To win on

today’s digital battlefield, keeping your customer care offerings conversational with the power of emerging

technologies such as machine learning-driven chat services as well as tried and tested live chat options, you

will be able to provide your consumers with swift answers to their questions, earning trust, loyalty and as a

result, valuable long-term custom.

OfOf course, OTT is largely about the content on offer, but without providing a seamless user experience and

exemplary standards of customer care, your audience is unlikely to stick around. Alternatively, keep your

customers happy throughout their journey and OTT success will be yours.

Conclusion: Quality of Customer Care gives you that love edge

12

About Cleeng

13

Cleeng helps Tier 1 broadcasters and operators to fully embrace the Direct-to-Consumer model and succeed with their OTT strategies. Cleeng's SVOD and Pay-Per-View solutions are used by market-leading brands like Foxtel, France Télévisions, Golden Boy Promotions, McFit, NHRA, and Sinclair Broadcast Group.

The Cleeng platform is built for scalability, interoperability and is deeply integrated with the leading streaming and front-end providers.

CustomerCustomer Care is an integral pillar in the Cleeng offering, along with Identity & Access Management (IAM), Commerce and Security.

Customer Care is an integral part of the Cleeng product offering as it represents one of the five pillars in the Cleeng Core. Additionally, broadcasters often plug in an extra Cleeng Hi5 add-on service to the Core when they need to handle massive demand. Contact us for more details.