What if your Wi-Fi customer self-install success rate improved dramatically? How much time and money could you save due to technician service calls, customer service inquiries, device breakage, and more? RouteThis believes they have the answer.
Last week, RouteThis introduced their artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Wi-Fi product RouteThis Self-Install. Yesterday, Telecompetitor spoke with RouteThis CEO Jason Moore to learn more about how the technology works.
Moore said RouteThis has studied the Wi-Fi installation process for years. In doing so, they saw a surprising trend: “The rate at which customers had enough mesh to cover their entire home increased rapidly. But, at the same time, you were seeing coverage issues increase rapidly. The first time we saw this graph, we were like, ‘This doesn’t make any sense.’”
They discovered the biggest barrier to a successful installation is customer education. Customers often push back against technicians on where Wi-Fi routers should be placed and frequently move them wherever they want — with little to no understanding of how it affects their signal. Meanwhile, homes are full of Wi-Fi blockers that further degrade performance.
Moore mentioned “the knowledge gap that exists between a field tech and an end consumer,” and said that new AI reasoning models in the past year have helped bridge that gap. This enables AI to offer a Wi-Fi self-install experience that has a far greater success rate than previous self-install models.
“We always knew self-install was an opportunity — we knew there was lots of need in the market. But the challenge was you had to get end subscribers to get things right that, to some extent, field technicians weren’t even getting right.”
Cracking the Wi-Fi Self-Install Problem
While technicians understand the purpose of various cables and what good placement of a router means, customers typically have no idea. “And that’s one example of the 27 different things that can go wrong during a self-install,” Moore said.
To counter these Wi-Fi setup potential pitfalls, RouteThis Self-Install combines AI features with augmented reality. Customers use the camera on their phone to look at the equipment sent by the provider. The AI technology scans the router and various wires and tells the customer how to wire it, identifying any missteps along the way.
Similarly, the customer’s camera is used for router placement. A customer puts the router where they want it. If, for example, the customer mounts the router on a Wi-Fi blocking concrete wall, AI can scan the image and know it’s a concrete wall.
“We can look at the network properties in our system, and we can look at the visual data to see how [the router is] mounted and then correct the customer or tell them to back up their camera — and we’ll help show them the right placement of these devices,” Moore said.
Vast Improvements in Wi-Fi Self-Install Success
Moore said that, even a year ago, AI was not ready to make Wi-Fi self-install a reality, but advancements in AI and the right training models have made RouteThis Self-Install possible. “We seem to be in a very different moment right now, which is super exciting.”
Providers used to be happy with a self-install success rate of 60% to 80%, he said. Even at 80%, though, 20% of customers are having a bad experience, and providers spend time and money receiving unhappy customer phone calls and sending out technicians, in addition to the money wasted in shipping equipment and, in some cases, replacing broken equipment.
Moore believes a better Wi-Fi self-install experience is a “home run play,” improving customer service while benefiting providers. “I believe every ISP wants to invest and deliver unbelievable customer experience. But, at the same time, they’re running a business, so they need to do it profitably.”
“We have seen our beta environments completely flipping the script on success,” Moore said, “meaning all of a sudden failure rates are halving. And seeing that on the first version of the [Self-Install] product — which is usually the basis from which we innovate — is really exciting stuff.”
