Startup Uses AI to Help Operators Accelerate Sales and ARPU
In an article for Light Reading, Senior Editor Jeff Baumgartner explores the challenges facing cable and telco businesses as they strive to re-accelerate broadband subscriber growth and drive up Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). Jeff covers how Actifai, a two-year-old startup, is addressing these challenges with its AI-backed platform, which currently aims to improve the effectiveness of sales handled by live customer service reps, and is developing products to extend this capability to electronic and other sales channels.
Actifai’s AI-powered platform streamlines the process of considering a wide range of speeds, packages, and add-on offers, like pay-TV packages. It then presents an ideal, recommended offer and package that should be most appealing, to a specific customer, based on Actifai’s proprietary data and customer background, sourced in real-time, and fed into its platform. According to Jeff Vogt, Actifai’s Executive Vice President and General Manager, Actifai’s “magic is around what we call the offer and acceptance pairs,” – which is further explained as Actifai’s ability to optimize offer recommendations based on the data they collect, not just on past accepted offers, but all offers and subsequent outcomes presented to customers.
actifai's software-as-a-service model
Actifai’s technology is delivered in a software-as-a-service model, whereby Actifai handles the data gathering and AI modeling, and provides a web-based interface and APIs that can conform with a customer’s internal systems. Actifai is seeing ARPU gains in the range of 10-15% across its current slate of customers and has gained early traction with a handful of cable operators and telcos, including Hargray (now part of Cable One), Breezeline (formerly Atlantic Broadband), Cincinnati Bell (recently rebranded as altafiber) and Canada’s Cogeco Communications.
Speaking with Baumgartner, Vogt sets the stage for the remainder of 2022, describing how Actifai’s main priority for the year is to grow, flesh out its roadmap, and add new functionality that furthers providers’ growth.
Jeff Baumgartner
Senior Editor, Light Reading
03.09.2022
