- Charter Communications uses artificial intelligence to listen to customer phone calls and make recommendations
- Earlier this summer, Charter laid off about 1,000 call center workers
- Charter’s CEO also talked about the company’s rural broadband build strategy
Is artificial intelligence (AI) stealing people's jobs? Perhaps you should ask the 1,000 call center workers Charter Communications laid off earlier this year. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference yesterday, CEO Chris Winfrey said, “AI is very much a reality” for the company and detailed how it is using the tech to improve customer service.
Charter — similar to other broadband providers — is using AI in customer service to help its agents made better recommendations. But Winfrey said that increasingly the agents don’t even have to make the recommendations “because the machine is actually listening to the conversation, to a real voice-to-text translation, putting that into a machine learning model.”
He said Charter has millions of customer service transactions. But there aren’t 10 different ways to best solve a problem. There’s usually one best way. And Charter’s AI provides that to the agent “in a way that allows them to get to a better answer faster and actually show more empathy along the way.”
He said AI also helps save the company costs, and it’s already seeing the benefits of that. This summer, Charter announced that it was laying off call center employees in California, Minnesota, Ohio and Texas.
The Goldman Sachs analyst Jim Schneider pressed for more detail on the timing of the cost savings. And Winfrey said, “I think it's already starting to happen, but I think there will be some bigger dramatic steps that come along the way."
Edge compute
Discussions about edge compute were popular a few years ago but have since fallen out of favor. However, Winfrey addressed the topic at the conference.
He said Charter’s network is well-distributed and has fiber powering the connections between the head-ends. “We actually have low latency, high compute capabilities at a local level through all the hubs and head-ends that we have,” he said. “These hubs and head-ends are much more localized than other competitive networks.”
He added that Charter has more room now at its hubs and headends for edge computing because it’s transitioning from big racks of CMTS hardware to a software-based CMTS. And that’s freeing up a lot of space.
Rural roadmap
The Goldman Sachs analyst also quizzed Winfrey about Charter’s rural strategy, given the company has announced $7.7 billion of capital investment over the next few years to reach about 1.8 million rural passings.
Winfrey said, “The returns model for rural build is actually pretty straightforward.” There's the constructions cost and the penetration of the product over a period time to calculate the profit margin.
“So, the returns are very good, he said. “The penetration rates are higher than what we had originally planned.”
He said the average revenue per user (ARPU) is pretty good because people are attaching extras such as Spectrum Mobile and video and even wireline phone. “We think these rural markets, they've been out-charged for phone service for years and years. And so, there's still a wireline phone market that's there," said Winfrey.
He added that some of these rural markets may currently pass only 10 homes per mile today, but they’re growing and have the potential in future years to pass many more homes with the capital that Charter is spending now.
“It's how cable was built in the 1980s,” he said. “I think well after the capital deployment has actually occurred, the fruit of what we've done and the ability to go service additional communities and passings will continue to grow at a very low incremental cost, and it can provide a boost of growth for many years to come.”