Web Development

SITUATION

Time Warner Cable serves more than 14 million customers throughout the U.S. in 28 states and dozens of local markets. Because each market has unique attributes, the company has approximately 100 different remote control devices in use throughout its footprint.

The tremendous variety of remote devices made it difficult – even frustrating – for TWC customers to find the right instructions for programming their remote controls. This issue generated a high level of telephone support calls, each of which comes at an operational expense to the company.

Company executives were determined to make it easier for customers to find instructions for their specific devices through a new Program Your Remote initiative.  Time Warner Cable asked Digital Foundry, its long-term development partner, to design and implement a data-driven solution that would customize the consumer experience by linking local customer groups to the remote control devices they would most likely be using.

SOLUTION

Digital Foundry designed and implemented a data ingestion engine that aligned instructions from four different manufacturers—widely differing sets of complex data in a variety of formats—with one standard data structure.  The ingestion engine allowed TWC to receive ongoing data feeds from all their vendors with the specific information and images needed to provide easy-to-follow programming instructions. What’s more, this data ingestion engine would automatically upload all the necessary information directly into the application – eliminating the time-consuming chore of normalizing and entering this data manually.

Once the engine was designed and implemented, Digital Foundry and TWC worked to create a subscription model for the company’s administrative system that allowed local area managers to choose a specific set of remotes to display to their customers, streamlining market level administrative processes and increasing efficiency.

After the application was deployed, Time Warner Cable customers could easily find the right instructions on the company’s website via a user friendly interface, which dramatically reduced the number of support calls for remote control questions.

RESULTS

By designing a data ingestion engine to meet the objectives of the Program Your Remote initiative, we helped Time Warner Cable:

• Deliver a friendly, less frustrating experience for customers looking for remote control instructions.
• Dramatically reduce expensive support calls for remote control questions by providing all the necessary information on the website.
• Standardize data from four different remote control manufacturers so that it could be automatically updated whenever necessary without manual data entry.