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Zayo Harnesses Technology to Stay Relentlessly Customer-Focused

Blog

|November 22, 2024

“I’ve been in telecom since Alexander Graham Bell,” jokes Bryan Fleming, Chief Information Officer of Zayo Group. 

Fleming’s experience in the sector does indeed stretch back more than two decades. Yet he’s constantly looking forward, ensuring Zayo harnesses the latest technologies to stay ahead of its customers’ evolving needs. 

The telecom sector definitely has room for improvement when it comes to customer satisfaction. Telcos have the second highest churn rate and the lowest average Net Promoter Score of any industry. On the flip side, telcos that prioritize customer experience grow their revenues 4-8% faster than the market average. 

This blog will explore how Zayo leverages customer insights, our high-speed fiber network, and the latest technologies to redefine the industry standard for customer experience. 

Turning Direct Customer Feedback into Better Service

Zayo’s push for a seamless, exceptional customer experience begins with listening to our customers.

“We consistently leverage customer feedback to refine our infrastructure and enhance service delivery. Based on direct input from customers, we’ve significantly increased our network capabilities,” Fleming says. 

For example, he notes that Zayo has reduced service delivery timelines for cloud and connectivity services by at least 40% across popular data center locations by introducing pre-provisioned capacity.

“A lot of our customers have also given us feedback about consistency of delivery and how we communicate with them,” he adds. “So we’re investing in platforms like ServiceNow to drive really clear workflows, track every task, and give customers updates on a consistent basis.” 

Automation and Analytics 

While customer insights play an integral role in our ability to improve the customer experience, technology plays an equally critical part in our advancements. Fleming says data analytics is “deeply ingrained in everything Zayo does on a day-to-day basis.” 

To help boost its customers’ cost efficiency and operating margins, Zayo leverages data to boost operational efficiency and optimize network consumption. For the most accurate and relevant analytics results, Zayo transfers its historical data to data lakes, to make sure there are no gaps or anomalies present.

“We do that to make sure the data’s not only optimized but validated as good quality,” Fleming explains.

With this high-quality data at hand, Zayo uses automation and analytics to improve customer experience in several ways:

  • To ensure Zayo meets its customer SLA terms and charges its customers accurately (AI has been applied this way to over 234,000 customer contracts so far)
  • To quickly and accurately diagnose the causes of thousands of network infrastructure alarms, rule out false alarms, recommend the best action to take, and improve mean time to respond (MTTR)
  • To spot potential customer pain points and proactively engage with customers before friction occurs by using automation and predictive analytics

“Today, our customer churn is at the lowest level it’s ever been,” Fleming reveals. “We do anything we can do to get the right information in front of our teams at the right time, so they can make the best decision possible for the business or the customer.” 

Older telcos with significant legacy infrastructure may face challenges integrating automation into their operations. As a 17-year-old company that’s acquired dozens of young startups, however, Zayo encounters far fewer such speedbumps, according to Fleming. 

Securing Network Infrastructure 

New cybersecurity threats seem to emerge every day. Yet, Zayo isn’t just meeting those risks head-on; it’s adopting the latest tools and solutions to get in front of them, ensuring risks are mitigated before customers are affected by them. 

“We’re constantly making investments, not only in the network but in cybersecurity technology to improve our detection capabilities and constantly make sure we’re shutting down any threat as quickly as we can,” says Fleming. 

That investment has driven real results. A third-party cybersecurity assessment rated Zayo ahead of its peer group in cybersecurity maturity this year. Some of Zayo’s security tools and initiatives include: 

  • Meticulous vetting of any new platform, technology, or supplier Zayo considers adopting 
  • Collaboration between Zayo’s SOC team and network team to mitigate real-time cyber issues as quickly as possible 
  • Physical security cameras and alarms on all Zayo ILA (in-line amplification) huts 

Ensuring Uptime 

As businesses increasingly rely on digital technology to operate and serve customers, Zayo is acutely aware of its customers’ need for reliable, uninterrupted network services.

“The goal of ‘always-on’ service is what our team strives for on a daily basis. We consistently overbuild our network and constantly integrate redundant pathways to enhance fault tolerance, just to ensure we maximize uptime,” says Fleming. 

To ensure consistent uptime as customer needs evolve, Fleming says Zayo: 

  • Offers “advanced capacity deployment” if demand suddenly surges in a particular region, ensuring customers remain online no matter what 
  • Puts pre-provisioned capacity in place at top Zayo data centers that provide a significant amount of connectivity to anticipate customer needs, avoid service interruption, and allow faster scalability 
  • Makes sure its platform accommodates “the next level of capacity” so customers can easily upgrade to 800 gigabits per second as they grow their business and take on new technologies

Meeting Customers’ Bandwidth and Latency Needs, Now and in the Future

With mobile- and fixed-broadband traffic growing by 30% worldwide between 2019 and 2023, the demand for bandwidth (and low-latency applications) just keeps rising.  Zayo meets that demand rising demand for bandwidth by offering solutions from edge to core to cloud, including: 

  • A 91% 400G-enabled Wavelengths network, enabling our customers to meet growing bandwidth needs anywhere across our network 
  • A portfolio of Managed Edge solutions, giving customers market-leading edge solutions with expert design, deployment, and management from day zero that improve application performance by securely connecting users to the Cloud, regardless of location or technology
  • Zayo’s AIOps-enhanced zInsights Portal, offering real-time, holistic network visibility, and management capabilities from edge to core to cloud, across the customer’s entire network regardless of provider
  • CloudLink for private, secure, convenient on-ramps to the world’s leading cloud service providers bypassing the public Internet

“Zayo continues to evolve those products as we speak to ensure they’re easy to use, easy to set up, and as automated as possible,” says Fleming. 

Knowing its customers’ needs will continue to change, Zayo constantly invests in adding new capacity and adopting new technologies so its infrastructure is resilient, reliable, and secure enough for whatever demands the future brings. 

“Telecom infrastructure from a customer perspective is all about how frictionless that experience can be throughout the lifecycle of that service,” says Fleming. “Every year we look at how we can expand the network with new fiber and new technology – with everything we need to provide that frictionless customer experience.” 

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