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Ned Brody, the CEO of Actifai, believes his company has created a solution that can help small ISPs convert customers in an increasingly crowded broadband marketplace.
By: Brad Randall, Broadband Communities
The most important moment for an ISP, according to Ned Brody, the CEO of Actifai, is the provider’s first interaction with the customer.
“What they sell to that consumer has multiple years of life,” Brody recently told Broadband Communities. “If you misprice or you put the wrong product in front of them, you have to live with it for a long time.”
Now, Brody said his company’s industry-first, AI-driven software takes the guesswork away from customer service reps when they first speak to a customer.
Actifai’s program, which guides customer service reps to effectively personalize engagements with customers and potential customers, utilizes publicly available information, a databank of past customer interactions, and deep-learning AI processes to provide recommendations for every subscriber interaction through an interface, Brody explained.
According to numbers cited on Actifai’s website, the company’s software, called Actifai Engage, can help ISPs boost retention rates between six and 11 percent and can provide an up to a 30 percent boost in customer conversions.
The company also produces an e-commerce solution titled Actifai Digital.
Brody explained how Actifai Engage works.
“Let’s say that you got someone who is relatively price sensitive, maybe on a fixed income,” Brody said. “If you offer them your biggest package with every bell and whistle, the likelihood that they’re going to hang up the phone or leave the website is actually relatively high.”
To equip customer service reps, Actifai’s program prompts potential customers with behavioral questions if they express interest in services on an ISP’s website.
The questions seek information like if a potential customer works at home, or if they like to watch streaming media or game, Brody said.
“And then we position the product, the offering, and the key selling points to drive the highest yield for the company, and we do it on a fact-based model,” Brody said.
As the software gains in popularity, so too does Actifai’s brand.
Since being founded in 2019, Actifai’s platform now helps power over 20,000 weekly broadband sales, according to Actifai’s recent release celebrating a partnership with Sonar Software.
The partnership, announced during Fiber Connect 2024, revealed that Actifai’s platform will be embedded into Sonar’s billing and operations platform.
“With Sonar + Actifai, we are making AI accessible to hundreds of providers that may have viewed technology or resource requirements as preventative,” Brody said at the time. “One of the most rewarding aspects of this partnership is removing those blockers and working to make sure that no one is excluded from the subscriber and ARPU (average revenue per user) growth that AI has made possible.”
This month, Brody told Broadband Communities that Sonar’s program was easy to integrate into, as it was designed to be open.
“For us to be able to work with them and do this, it took us very little time to do the integration,” Brody said.
Actifai’s partnership with Sonar was just the latest in a busy calendar year for the company.
In January, after entering into a partnership with the National Content and Technology Cooperative (NCTC), the company’s vast rolodex of independent communications service providers were given access to the Actifai platform.
Both the platform’s database, composed of millions of broadband customer engagements, and its AI capabilities were described as a major technology advancement by Lou Borrelli, the NCTC’s CEO, back in January.
Borrelli said Actifai’s sales and support tools were “purpose-built for the broadband and cable industry.”
“They will help our membership quickly incorporate AI into their management of the consumer lifecycle in a way that is practical and innovative,” Borrelli previously said.
According to Brody, the more, small ISPs that find out about Actifai’s services, the better.
“I hope that small companies really realize that just because they haven’t had access to sophisticated technology in the past doesn’t mean it’s not available for them now,” he said. “No one wants to see a world where there are four companies in this industry, and they cover everyone from California to Maine.”
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