Interview with George Hughes, Head of value Consulting.

The main objective of value consulting is like a traditional consulting role to help our customers achieve what they're trying to move forward with. The difference with what I do versus a traditional consultant is we're focusing on maximizing value. How can you leverage technology and software assets to drive your company's objectives? Whether that objective is improving customer service, reducing cost, speeding deployment, improving overall quality of that customer experience. My role is specifically to help customers look at what part of their operations or deployment they need in order to service their customers better and maximize the overall value of their technology assets. A lot of the questions that I am asked is whenever it comes to investment is what changes within the organization need to be made in order to achieve it. How difficult is the conversion? A lot of the customers have existing geospatial systems or just systems of record for their fiber assets, their copper assets. They have a difficulty understanding how they're going to convert that so that they can then leverage it for an advantage. Most customers just don't want to go from one system to another system. The whole intent of making that change is what exactly are they going to be able to achieve above and beyond what they're out there. So it's not just going from system A to system B. They're looking at what can I do? Do I have a total solution? Can it help me in multiple ways in order to justify that business case? Otherwise, many customers are just, you know, it doesn't matter if I have bad data. You know, I'm just going to continue to live with bad data because I know what that pain is. However, many are coming and saying, I see some advantages. I see how you're leveraging AI. I see how you're leveraging technology to make improvements. So let's go ahead and make this change. Let's go ahead and go through that conversion activity because I see so many advantages in order to make the most improvements within my organization. I think what happens is over the years, the they don't really estimate what that total true impact of that bad data within their existing systems or how inefficient. Because a lot of the activities are at the very front end. Right. Right. I have to plan where my fiber is going to go. And then it takes time to get permits and it takes time to go ahead and go through the designs, get the construction completed. So they're used to seeing that level of performance of the existing systems, not realizing that they can be doing it at twice as fast or actually in sometimes four times as fast because of there's automation out there. There's AI, there's technology tools that enable that. And so a lot of customers are, you know, the process is the process. That's how long it takes. I've been living with it for years so that they don't have that urgent need to make that change right away until they realize that there are better tools that are out there. I think what our customers that come to IQgeo is that they have, they realize that that bad data that they have in their existing systems, it's not only affecting them from a performance perspective, it's affecting their customers. The true value is in delivering that fiber and giving a great network experience to that customer. And what they're not, they're coming to the realization now that having that delighted customer experience is something that they can achieve, but they can't achieve it with their current systems. Bad data kind of manifests itself in longer engineering times, but it also impacts the customer. The customer impacts that you see are in the area of, well, I show up to do a install and I find out that the records were bad, so I can't do the install that day. Or even worse is that there's absolutely no light and I find it at the very end of the install. So I've got to notify the customer that I've got to research it. Then what happens? It results in a missed next appointment because now you're spending more time. So now you've upset two customers because that customer was, you know, ready for that fiber, was ready to meet you for that install. So you're actually affecting multiple customers and multiple studies have showed within the industry, as soon as you have that bad customer experience to start off, you're 60 to 70% likely to have that customer churn. And then, you know, once you start getting, you know, more of those churns, then suddenly your penetration rate starts to dive. So all of this comes back to that bad quality of data that you have within your systems. I think the one piece of advice that I would give our customers is that they need to take a look at a complete solution in this space as opposed to just point solutions. You don't want to string together 10 different systems in order to solve this particular issue. The problem with that is you still have an underlying core data and you need high quality. Multiple systems in there cause additional issues above and beyond what the conversion that you're looking at. And once you have that, all these tools that are coming out associated with AI and automation, you can't leverage it. AI is going to look at the data and if you've got bad data, it's going to have a bad decision. So you need good quality of data. A lot of the providers are looking at what are ways that they can move kind of up in the autonomous network space. And you can't move up if the quality of your data is bad. So applying some of the tools that we have at IQGeo, it allows you to get that data converted into the systems, but then improve the data over time. So as the quality of your data is improving, it allows you to do more automation, allows you to leverage AI to improve your overall operations.