CETS Announces Winners of 2023 Best in Class Marketing Awards
Calix wins Call Center Award; MTA wins Alternate Channels Award at the CETS 2023 Annual Meeting held in Austin, TX on April 18, 2023.
AUSTIN, Texas, April 28, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The Customer Experience & Telco Sales Association (CETS) recently announced the winners of the CETS 2023 Best in Class Awards. "Each year, CETS (http://www.cets.org) recognizes teams and companies that demonstrate innovation and excellence related to customer experience and telco sales,'' said Ellis Hill, President of ResearchFirst, Inc., CETS's management firm.
This year's awards went to one service provider, MTA, and one vendor company, Calix, each of which executed best-in-class practices over the last year."
The winners are:
1. Calix (http://www.calix.com) "Calix Support Cloud" Calix Support Cloud is an industry-leading, purpose-built application that provides customer support teams with unmatched end-to-end visibility into the subscriber experience. With Support Cloud, teams can proactively address and resolve subscriber issues while simplifying support operations to increase efficiency.
In November 2022, Support Cloud became the only solution delivering insights to enable customer support across the industry's most extensive portfolio of managed services.
Calix introduced its 11th managed service empowering broadband service providers (BSPs) to provide greater value to the communities they serve and improve lives. Support Cloud provides one support solution across all managed services, dramatically simplifying support operations and improving cost efficiency; for instance, lowering truck rolls, trouble tickets, and mean time to repair.
Furthermore, Support Cloud enables BSP support teams with increased visibility into the complete subscriber experience and troubleshooting tools to deliver an exceptional customer experience and boost subscriber satisfaction.
Product enhancements to this support solution for managed services continue to make life easier for BSP support teams of any size with more operational efficiency and ease of integration into existing support workflows. "Customer support teams play a pivotal role in delivering a differentiated subscriber experience as BSPs launch sticky managed services and grow new market segments," said Shane Eleniak, chief product officer at Calix.
"We continually innovate for Calix Support Cloud so even the smallest support teams can deliver world-class support that contributes to exceptional subscriber experiences. Support teams benefit tremendously from the simplicity of one support solution across all Calix managed services, streamlining workflows and making it possible to grow their businesses built on new subscriber experiences, and not just speed alone."
Calix embraces innovation with its end-to-end solution strategy that leverages the automation, behavioral analytics, and predictive intelligence of the Calix Cloud.
This strategy ensures that marketing, customer support, and network operations teams gain a unified, holistic view of the subscriber experience—spanning a BSPs entire subscriber-facing network from the access edge to the subscriber premises. Support Cloud is one of the lead products in a robust portfolio, which has been developed over 11 years; Calix has invested more than $1 billion to produce the broadband industry's most innovative end-to-end platforms. Support Cloud has dedicated cross-functional teams that develop, test, productize, communicate, and deploy the solution, ensuring a future-proof solution with integrity focused on enabling success for our customers.
2. MTA (http://www.mtasolutions.com) "Rep Revenue Retention" In early 2021, MTA transitioned an existing Sales Representative to a newly created Clerk position to handle non-revenue generating orders, primarily so the remaining Sales Reps could focus solely on sales.
Sales Reps were trained to submit Clerk requests via a Smartsheet form intended to track changes to any accounts that were not classified as revenue-generating. In 2022, MTA added a secondary Clerk position, which increased Sales Rep efficiency, with 39% of non-revenue generating orders being handled by the Clerks.
MTA continues to utilize the Clerk positions to further improve Rep revenue focus.
Their objective in adding the Clerk positions was to maintain timely customer service for administrative tasks and ensure department goals were met while keeping the Sales Reps focused on generating revenue. In 2022, the two Clerks handled 7,809 requests that would have previously been performed by Sales Reps, totaling 1,952 hours of work, or over 49 weeks. In addition to the improved productivity, the Clerk positions reduced labor costs for these required tasks and allowed MTA to retain an employee who was not thriving in a Sales position, moving them to a new role. They also provided staff who are readily available for special projects such as vetting lists for the sales teams, regulatory customer outreach, and specialty campaigns.
The two Clerks are also their primary point-of-contact for any Lifeline or ACP-related issues.
"The entire MTA team is honored to be recognized by CETS for work that too often stays behind-the-scenes. This transition our sales team undertook not only streamlined our operations but also improved customer service and ultimately, led to increased revene. We're proud of the innovation and strategic thinking displayed by our sales team, and look forward to much more success on this front in 2023 and beyond," said Michael Burke, CEO of MTA.
About CETS
The Customer Experience & Telco Sales Association (CETS) brings together professionals from the service provider and vendor communities within the Telecom industry responsible for direct and indirect sales channels, customer care and the customer experience. Members share channel best practices and industry trends in these areas with respect to all products and services sold by Telco providers.
Please see our website at http://www.CETS.org for more information or to apply for membership.
Executive Director: ResearchFirst, Inc. (http://www.researchfirst.com) Tags / Keywords: CETS, telecom, telco sales, internet telco, service provider, best in class, retail, call center, alternate channels, MTA, Calix
Media Contact
Ellis Hill, ResearchFirst, 1 205-995-8866, [email protected]
SOURCE ResearchFirst

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