China Broadnet Strengthens Market Position through Digitalization

China Broadnet is the newcomer in China market, but an aggressive campaign over the past year to accelerate digital transformation and enhance customer experience helped the carrier grow in stature. Thanks to a series of digital initiatives with its partner Huawei, China Broadnet says it has reached several significant milestones.

Among them is a tenfold customer base increase to 25 million from 2.5 million. China Broadnet also cut operating costs by $10 million while maintaining 4 million sites with 1 percent of the staff of traditional carriers. At the same time, the number of complaints transferred from the customer service center to the network department has decreased by nearly 10% and MTTR by 50%.

China Broadnet launched 5G services in 2022, as a provider of broadband, cable TV and mobile services. It partnered with China Mobile to run a MOCN (Multi-Operator Core Network) infrastructure for 4G and 5G connectivity. The partnership succeeded in helping to drive down customer fees and expand coverage, but China Broadnet quickly realized it had some significant challenges to overcome. 

As a newly minted carrier, the company experienced multiple issues in daily operations caused by immature processes, gaps in network satisfaction, and inexperienced personnel. To address the challenges, China Broadnet partnered with Huawei to implement a DevOps framework that would enable various digitization strategies. China Broadnet says it is now a much more efficient operation with a growing base of satisfied customers.

Digital Transformation Drives Results

Central to China Broadnet’s digitization initiatives was the creation of the DevOps framework. It leveraged a digital platform to strengthen operational processes and shift the maintenance approach from “passive management to proactive prevention.” Low-code capabilities facilitated development and deployment of more than 100 service models that enabled intelligent O&M and digital marketing, enhancing customer service, China Broadnet says.

Employing those models, China Broadnet improved the efficiency of issue identification and handling, impacting 4 million sites across 31 subnets. If left unresolved, the issues would have continued to impede company growth. They included inadequate sharing sites, limited bandwidth, parameter problems, and lack of O&M experience. The carrier also lacked wireless configuration and performance data, making it difficult for engineers to conduct wireless optimization.

To drive service improvements, China Broadnet started proactively monitoring customer experience data to detect poor-experience cells. Big data and AI models delivered an accuracy rate of 95% in pinpointing issues. Over the course of eight months, China Broadnet says it identified 149,000 “poor-experienced cells” and then took action to optimize them and avert user complaints.

The carrier also implemented an automatic operation process that detects and demarcates poor-experience cells. Intelligent demarcation is possible by blending expert rules and AI judgments to identify customer experience issues. This approach delivers an accuracy rate of over 85% in handling suggestions and has lowered MTTR by half, China Broadnet says.

“Lists of problematic cells with handling suggestions are automatically forwarded to wireless engineers via work orders. Once issues are resolved, the platform conducts quality checks and closes the work order automatically,” the company says.

In another initiative, China Broadnet worked with China Mobile to build a more efficient troubleshooting mechanism for wireless problems. The previous troubleshooting process was time-consuming and difficult to optimize. “In eight months, 10 types of parameter problems, such as shared sites configuration and multi-vendor handover parameters, have been detected, and more than 120,000 sites have been optimized,” according to China Broadnet.

Enhancing the Customer Experience

Leveraging Huawei’s LLM (Large Language Model), China Broadnet implemented an intelligent system to handle complaints. The move alleviated O&M engineer workloads by reducing handling time from 10 to 5 minutes and enabled a 30% increase in complaint interception rates at the call center. The intelligent complaint model extracts key information such as complain time, location and symptoms of customer complaints to provide response suggestions. Intelligent complaint handling has contributed significantly to customer experience improvements.

Other enhancements resulting from the joint work with Huawei include the development of models for troubleshooting and discovery of issues at shared sites. To tackle shared site issues, 20 AI and big data models were developed to pinpoint problems such as unshared sites, master/slave PLMN issues, resource parameter issues, and multi-vendor parameters issues. These models enable the identification and optimization of poor-experience cell issues. Since the beginning of the year, the ability to intercept those issues ensured customer experience for about 800,000 users, the company says.

On the digital marketing front, China Broadnet integrates OSS and BSS datasets and uses low-code capability to develop, deploy and update models nationwide for various campaigns, including device replacement, subscription upgrades, 5G switch-on, and other promotions. China Broadnet says the promotions reached 1.2 million target users and converted 180,000. Digital marketing initiatives also boosted 5G users from 53% to 64% of the customer base.