By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
This week home broadband services and Wi-Fi optimisation pioneer Plume significantly expanded its services portfolio by acquiring Ireland-based ‘digital customer care’ platform Sweepr. The acquisition will boost Plume’s ability to transform vast amounts of home broadband data and analytics – always a Plume stronghold – into the actions needed for ISPs to serve customers better. The goal is to help ISPs build unshakeable ‘subscriber confidence’, says Plume President & CEO, Dan Herscovici.
Wi-Fi optimisation and home broadband services pioneer Plume has been going through a major corporate transformation during the past year, revamping strategies and acquiring new talent for its leadership team. This week the company took significant action to bolster its solution portfolio, this time by announcing the acquisition of digital customer care company Sweepr. Plume President & CEO Dan Herscovici says Sweepr constitutes a perfect compliment to Plume’s existing portfolio and exactly what is needed for Plume’s ISP customers to build what he calls subscriber confidence.
“It is becoming harder and harder for ISPs to compete on speed and price alone. What is needed is the ability for ISPs to deliver end-to-end great experiences resulting in the creation of subscriber confidence. ISPs need the tools and services to build and maintain a loyal subscriber base that is not tempted to leave simply for promises of lower prices and faster speeds elsewhere. Sweepr impressed us because it is exactly such a platform,” says Dan Herscovici.
In practical terms, Sweepr orchestrates all interactions between ISP and subscribers including onboarding, tech support, and billing, Plume says. An important aspect of the platform will be converting Plume’s voluminous data stream and analytical insights from nearly half a billion connected devices within homes all over the world into customer care actions. This includes carefully orchestrated customer journeys, Plume says.
“The Sweepr platform for example solves connectivity issues within the home through the use of thousands of combinations of AI-derived customer care workflows. These are executed through multiple channels, depending on what is deemed to be the fastest and most convenient path for the subscriber. This can be via a customer care app, online chats in various forms, via an agent, and more. The result is that Sweepr delivers both cost efficiency and excellent subscriber QoE,” he says.
Sweepr was founded in Dublin, Ireland in 2018 and is still headquartered in the Irish capital. Over the years the company has evolved and scaled its platform to deliver high quality digital customer care journeys by the millions including – in the case of one tier-1 customer – more than 100,000 completed transactions per month.
“Sweepr’s results have been remarkable. In the case of one ISP customer, 70% of support calls were resolved without the use of human agents. This resulted in close to 20% fewer truck rolls and as a consequence, accumulated savings of tens of millions of dollars, all the while making sure that subscribers are taken care of so that they know, they’re in good hands,” Dan Herscovici says.
As part of the acquisition, tier-one ISPs Telus of Canada and eir of Ireland will become Plume customers. Also as part of the deal, Sweepr founder Alan Coleman will join Plume as Chief Product Officer while Sweepr CTO Jim Hannon joins Plume as Chief Architect.
For more about the acquisition also see this press release.
/Claus.
