It’s some­times hard wait­ing for some­thing that you want.

And so Flow has made it eas­i­er for cus­tomers hop­ing to get broad­band and tele­phone ac­cess.

“On av­er­age cus­tomers have com­plained about wait­ing for tech­ni­cians for quite some time to get ser­vices, so now you can get it soon­er rather than lat­er,” Pru­dence Williams-La Bor­de Flow’s man­ag­er, per­for­mance op­ti­mi­sa­tion told the Busi­ness Guardian.

En­ter the self-in­stal­la­tion ini­tia­tive by Flow, which is said to get cus­tomers up and run­ning in ten min­utes or less.

“One of our core strate­gies un­der Lib­er­ty Latin Amer­i­ca is re­al­ly val­ue cre­ation through in­no­va­tion and trans­for­ma­tion to im­prove and sim­pli­fy the lives of our key stake­hold­ers which are our cus­tomers,” Williams-La Bor­de said.

“Self-in­stal­la­tion which we are coin­ing lo­cal­ly as In­stall It Your­self helps to de­liv­er on that promise, she said.

“So in a nut­shell should a cus­tomer be el­i­gi­ble for self in­stal­la­tion we are em­pow­er­ing our cus­tomers to get the ser­vice and set it up them­selves,” she said.

Williams-La Bor­de said that apart from time, the new ini­tia­tive is al­so aimed at sav­ing cus­tomers mon­ey.

“With con­ven­tion­al in­stal­la­tion with the tech­ni­cian do­ing every­thing ver­sus self-in­stal­la­tion it is ac­tu­al­ly 50 per cent cheap­er for the cus­tomer,” she said.

But don’t think that Flow is leav­ing you just to fend for your­self Williams-La Bor­de said.

“When the cus­tomer re­ceives their kits there are a lot of guides, FAQs, trou­ble shoot­ing steps print­ed and placed in the kit,” she said,

“There is al­so a self-help por­tal where there are videos and be­cause we are re­al­ly fo­cused on con­tin­u­ous­ly im­prov­ing the cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence we are con­stant­ly re­view­ing and re­fresh­ing that site based on cus­tomer feed­back to add more el­e­ments,” Williams -La Bor­de said.

Cus­tomers will need to be met cer­tain el­i­gi­bil­i­ty re­quire­ments to be able to get the self-in­stal­la­tion, She said.

“As we are quite an in­no­v­a­tive com­pa­ny self-in­stall is go­ing to ex­pand through most of our prod­ucts but at this point in time we are fo­cused on broad­band and a cus­tomer be­comes el­i­gi­ble for self-in­stall through three ar­eas,” Williams-La Bor­de said.

The first is area ser­vice­abil­i­ty.

“What does that mean their area say for ex­am­ple San Fer­nan­do and Ch­agua­nas it al­ready has Flow ser­vices, it is ready for Flow ser­vices,” she said.

The sec­ond is home readi­ness.

“And how is a home ready for self-in­stall? The home would have pre­vi­ous­ly had flow ser­vices so we al­ready have the ter­mi­nal box on the out­side and the cus­tomer still has in­ter­nal wiring,” Williams-La Bor­de said.

The third pre­req­ui­site is that the cus­tomer has a good cred­it rat­ing.

Williams-La Bor­de said the self-in­stal­la­tion ini­tia­tive came about in re­sponse to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

She said Flow is de­liv­er­ing a touch­less so­lu­tion that al­lows new and ex­ist­ing cus­tomers to in­stall in­ter­net and phone ser­vices in the sim­plest way with­out or with re­duced hu­man in­ter­ac­tion.

“You could still get ser­vice once you qual­i­fy you don’t have to wait for a tech­ni­cian to come to you, you can come to store you, sign up and you leave with your kit or we have some­one drop it off for you so it re­al­ly em­pow­ers the cus­tomers what­ev­er is hap­pen­ing, she said.

Williams-La Bor­de added that the self-in­stal­la­tion would not ad­verse­ly af­fect staff.

“As a com­pa­ny we re­al­ly want to en­sure that the qual­i­ty of our ser­vice is the key dif­fer­en­tia­tor, so when we have these op­por­tu­ni­ties to em­pow­er cus­tomers to do self-ser­vice types of ac­tiv­i­ties it al­lows us to re­fo­cus our ef­forts on how we can im­prove and op­ti­mise the ser­vice we are de­liv­er­ing to our cus­tomers,” she said.

“So it is not a mat­ter of los­ing jobs it is about in­creas­ing and im­prov­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties in­ter­nal­ly so that we could then im­prove the qual­i­ty of life and the qual­i­ty ser­vice for our cus­tomers,” she said.

Williams-La Bor­de said the ini­tia­tive is be­ing in­tro­duced across the re­gion.

“This is some­thing that is hap­pen­ing across the re­gion across all the Ca­ble & Wire­less mar­kets across the re­gion and Latin Amer­i­ca,” she said.

“We are quite in­no­v­a­tive so we are al­ways look­ing at ways we can make life eas­i­er for our cus­tomers,” Williams-La Bor­de said.

She said self-in­stal­la­tion will con­tin­ue to ex­pand.

CLICK FOR MORE NEWS