Interview

With Connected Britain just around the corner, Total Telecom caught up with Aprecomm Founder & CEO Pramod Gummaraj to discuss why now is the perfect time to expand into the UK and beyond

Aprecomm was founded in India by ex-Qualcomm employees back in 2016. At that time, the company was focused entirely on the enterprise segment, providing solutions to help service providers and businesses better understand the end-user experience on their networks. This included developing self-healing and self-organising tech to make networks more autonomous and easier to monitor.

“We saw consistent growth in the enterprise market,” said Pramod. “These were customers who really understood the value of having a more intelligent network, in terms of delivering a better user experience”.

But the scope of the company’s ambitions was set to change dramatically with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

“During the pandemic, almost every home also became a small office,” explained Pramod, noting that customers were now intimately aware of their network quality, especially with YouTube videos perpetually buffering and Zoom calls lagging.

“Consumers began holding CSPs to a higher standard,” said Pramod. “Making the shift to the residential side was natural for us and also crucial.”

Since then, the company’s client base has grown enormously, with Aprecomm’s customer experience (CX) suite managing 7+ million locations (homes and businesses combined) globally through more than 45 service providers. The company also partners with over 50 customer premise equipment (CPE) makers and over 180 individual CPE models have been integrated and certified for use with Aprecomm’s CX suite.

Quality of service as a differentiator

Explaining this rapid growth, Pramod explained that network quality and reliability had rapidly become a key differentiator for CSPs in a competitive market.

“Subscriber experience is increasingly a key element and to ensure a quality experience we need networks that can adapt in real-time,” he said. “Customers are willing to pay that extra dollar to ensure that they have a reliable connection.”

“India is a very cost-sensitive market. There are 2,000 to 3,000 Tier 2 CSPs in India, and it’s a similar story in Brazil where there are about 20,000. In these fracture markets, the only way they can compete is on customer service,” he continued.

Indeed, a customer study conducted by the company showed that using their end-to-end Wi-Fi QoE solution could massively decrease network issues for end users, with considerable benefits for the CSP as a result. The study, which examined a CSP with 400,000 customers over one year, saw a 62% truck roll reduction, a 35% improvement in first-call resolution, and a 30% reduction in call resolution time when the Aprecomm suite was used.

Even more crucially, this improved service significantly reduced churn by 20% in the first two months.

“The most important threat in all these markets is churn. There is a customer acquisition cost to gaining a customer, which takes months of revenue to recoup. So, it’s very expensive to lose customers, even if you’re replacing them with new ones. That’s what CSPs are worried about,” said Pramod.

The road to zero-touch

As AI, machine learning, and automation improve, there has long been a discussion about the journey towards zero-touch networks – networks that are entirely autonomous, able to optimise their services for customers and react to issues without human intervention.

For Pramod, the end is in sight.

“The biggest missing piece was understanding the customer experience on a technical level. Once you have that, teaching everything else becomes easier. We now can consider more network parameters on a more granular level, and that makes it easier to automate effectively,” he explained. “Physical damage to the networks will always need a physical response, but I think we’re pretty close to achieving zero-touch networks – a couple of years.”

Expansion plans

Having scaled considerably in India, plans are already in motion for Aprecomm to expand into the UK, the USA, and Latin America. All these markets feature many regional Tier 2 players fighting hard to attract and retain customers, where quality of service would be a key factor.

“The smaller players make up a significant portion of the addressable market, but they’re also a segment that’s been somewhat ignored,” said Aprecomm’s Head of Marketing Communications, Mark Goodburn. “Everyone tends to chase the big players and leave the smaller service providers largely untouched.”

This expansion process has already begun. Earlier this year, the company struck a partnership with Brazilian network solution provider OpenGlobe which is reselling Aprecomm’s CX suite in its territory. The partners hope to target the top 300 CSPs in Brazil.

This week, Aprecomm is turning its attention to the UK market at Connected Britain. The UK market is currently home to around 100 altnets, all of whom are facing a challenging economic environment and growing pressure from giants like Openreach and Virgin Media O2.

“We’ve got the scale and maturity now to expand into these new markets, at a time when there is more focus on customer experience by CSPs and chipset companies than ever,” said Pramod. “Lots of factors are coming together at the right time for us and we’re very excited to be looking at these new markets.”

Want to hear more from Pramod about in-home connectivity and the evolution of customer service? Join Aprecomm on stand #167 at Connected Britain on 11–12 September! Get your ticket today.