Cradlepoint CMO makes the link between CX and connectivity
The next time you’re out in public, look at a person sitting near you, staring down at their phone or laptop. If their expression suddenly changes, you probably don’t need them to tell you how their customer experience (CX) has gone wrong.
It might start with an eyeroll, then a grimace, maybe followed by a frustrated sigh or muttering under their breath. More than likely, they are experiencing a connectivity issue – the kind of CX fail that Donna Johnson and her team at Cradlepoint are helping brands to avoid.
Based in Boise, Idaho and acquired by Ericsson in late 2020, Cradlepoint makes wireless edge networking equipment designed to bring increased reliability to everything from point of sale (POS) systems at restaurants and stores to digital signage and Wi-Fi services. For brands promising CX based on always-on, real-time digital experiences, Cradlepoint helps them deliver on it.
Johnson said the ongoing digital transformation across nearly every industry has heightened the importance of connectivity among consumers. She shared a personal story about visiting a relative in hospital, where she not only expected to get a Wi-Fi signal but for all the relevant medical records to be available online.
Another example is the restaurant sector, where an outage or downtime can not only mean customers can’t place an online order, but that the restaurant can’t operate its POS.
“It’s almost like a double hit on the business,” Johnson told 360 Magazine. “Particularly when you’re a large organization, you’re potentially going to have some outage somewhere, at some location, at least once a week. And the more the more carriers you have (as part of our network services), the more likely it could happen.”
The failover fix
One of Cradlepoint’s value propositions is being able to help its clients respond to an outage by failing over to cellular. Its technology can also help companies expand their operations by opening new branches or offices without waiting on cable installations, or even serve them on the road.
One of Cradlepoint’s recent customer wins, for instance, includes Coach Atlantic Maritime Bus, the largest motorcoach transportation provider in Atlantic Canada. Cradlepoint is helping deliver Internet connectivity onboard its fleet of more than 250 vehicles across Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and other regions in North America.
Johnson said transportation firms typically start out by looking for connectivity to support monitoring systems for their fleet operations, including security cameras and GPS equipment, as well as ticketing and digital signage. Providing Wi-Fi to passengers follows close behind, however, given that they are increasingly dependent on having access to the Internet and their apps as part of the experience on a bus or other journey. Investing in multiple connections can safeguard both CX and the employee experience.
“If they have an outage on one (link), they’ve always got a second connection,” Johnson said. “Our primary business, almost from our inception, has been supporting that second link and allowing that separate link to be cellular. It’s more reliable to have one wired link and one cellular link because you’re less likely for both to go out due to a single incident.”
Doubling down on human customer support
While it may ensure brands’ experiences have the connectivity they need, Johnson said Cradlepoint has to be just as thoughtful about its own approach to CX. Key to that is recognizing that CX doesn’t begin when a contract is signed, but when they are first investigating a connectivity partner.
Cradlepoint meets those customers at that point in the journey by offering a hosted demo site. There, prospective customers can trial its solutions without running it on their own hardware. A Cradlepoint app also offers a complete walkthrough of common installation steps and the ability to share test results. This reflects the fact that an IT leader might make the initial purchase, but deployment and management is handled by those without a lot of technical expertise.
“We try and give them a lot of hands-on experience with the product so that when they do purchase, they’re very familiar what they got,” she said. “They don’t get a sense of bait and switch, and they don’t get shipped something and then not know what to do with it.”
Unlike many brands, Johnson also noted that Cradlepoint is offering 24/7 support run by human agents based in the U.S., not artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
AI is making its way into Cradlepoint’s products, however. Earlier this year the company announced its AI-based NetCloud Assistant (ANA), which uses natural language processing to assist customers of its NetCloud 5G wireless edge working solution with everyday queries about the operation of their network.
The company says ANA can provide recommendations on cellular endpoints for specific use cases, which improved the process of troubleshooting network performance issues.
“What we find is our customers are super smart – they’re running big networks. They’re not coming to us with basic questions,” she said. “So for any basic question that they do have, we want to give them the tools to be able to manage that. For the questions they bring to our support team, I don’t think yet that AI could manage these types of questions. I don’t think that we’re a point where we could replace that.”
