The global cable network industry, feeling the heat from Internet streaming services and satellite television providers, has turned to quality assurance programs to defend market shares and improve customer retention rates.

In Switzerland, Finecom Telecommunications has joined the fight by partnering with Agama Technologies, a video service quality assurance company. Agama will provide its digital television (DTV) solution for TV service quality monitoring, assurance and analytics to Finecom, which is the second largest cable network provider in Switzerland.

The goal is to manage service quality and raise customer satisfaction — two key factors in customer retention — while at the same time lowering OPEX (News - Alert) and quality-induced churn.

“Increased competition means TV service providers need to deliver better quality services and improve customer service experiences in order to differentiate themselves,” explained John Moulding, editor of Videonet. “And with early adopting Pay TV subscribers signed up long ago, everyone has to work harder today to keep their customer base growing, which leads naturally to an increasing focus on holding on to existing customers and also churn reduction efforts.”

The Agama DTV monitoring solution reportedly was developed to support TV operators’ business processes with actionable insights that help to proactively manage service quality and customer satisfaction, while lowering OPEX and improving customer retention.

“To  support  this  proactive  work, QA  solutions  need  to  provide  advanced  performance  management  features  with  effective ways to find patterns and trends,” said Mikael  Dahlgren, Agama’s CEO in an interview with Videonet. “This has proven to save a lot of money in incident handling, and brings the operator closer to the final goal — having the most satisfied customers.”

Finecom operates a glass fiber network for 21 independent cable network operators. The company provides its Quickline multimedia product (Internet, fixed network, mobile telephony and TV service) to customers in more 300 municipalities.