Dennis Mathew: Thanks, Jessica. It’s been an incredible year. We’ve — as I look at the accomplishments, the #1 objective — my #1 objective was to transform the culture. And to transform the culture, we needed the right team in place, and we have 50-plus new Vice Presidents and above that are driving this business forward. Folks from all over the industry in every part of the organization, from sales to marketing, to field, to care, to finance, to program management, the list goes on, procurement, et cetera. And we still have some more work to do. And so as we close out the year and get ready for next year, we really need to make sure that we have all the right people on the bus, and they’re all on the right seats. And so that is still my top priority because that is what is going to enable us to continue to drive this business and this transformation.
And as I look at quality and value, we’re going to continue to lean into quality. There’s still more work to be done, and we’re going to lean into driving our quality programs, whether it’s on the network, whether it’s on the product, whether it’s on the service, making sure we have the right business partners and that they’re delivering the right level of quality and holding folks to SLAs and really making sure across every part of this business, we are firing on all cylinders when it comes to quality and first time right. We’re also going to lean into digital and continuing to drive that journey. As I think about programs like self-install, we’ve improved that by 71%, and we have more room to go, and we need to lean more into self-install, particularly as we think about video and other solutions.
Other priorities though, that I’m excited about from a growth perspective is B2B. We have built a brand-new B2B team in terms of sales, in terms of product, and we’re excited to build out that product portfolio. We’re excited to drive execution everything from sales — everything from funnel management to driving sales and quota to installation. And so a lot of work to do. And that’s why — but it’s a lot of fun, and we’re — we’ve got the right team to do it. As I think about video, the model is broken. I just have to say, for the last 10 years, the consumers have made it clear that there is a significant shift from linear to streaming and yet the cost for linear have just continued to rise. And us as distributors need to find a way to work with our programming partners to put the customer at the center.
We need to give them great value. We need to give them the right content. As we look at these programming deals, we’re bundling in content that basically nobody wants to watch along with the content that consumers actually want to watch. They want more access and availability to direct-to-consumer products. They want simplicity. We are hearing from our customers. It’s challenging to have so many different apps and log-ins and billing relationships. And so those will be part of our conversations as we go forward that we need to put the customer at the center, and there needs to be a business model that’s a win-win, the customer wins and we as distributors and programmers win. And so that will be part of the discussion as we go forward.
Operator: And our next question comes from Brett Feldman with Goldman Sachs.
Brett Feldman: Two, if you don’t mind. The first one is, if we just take a step back and think about the path to getting your broadband business back to growth, I’m talking about broadband revenues. And you look at the sum total of the things you’ve done and anticipated benefits of that, ultimately, what does that path look like? Meaning, do you anticipate that you could begin to see a tailwind reemerge in your broadband ARPU? Or is this really all about driving growth in subscribers and as the subscriber base grows, you’re inevitably going to return to broadband revenue growth. So any help in terms of thinking about the mix there, if you get everything right would be helpful. And then the second is it’s great to see that you’re still converting about 60% of customers into paid lines when they come to the end of the promotional period.
What have you learned about the 40% that aren’t? How good are you getting at predicting that? And do you see an opportunity to either tweak the offer or tweak the upselling to kind of get to a higher pay rate on that?
Dennis Mathew: Yes, let me jump in — Brett, let me jump in on the mobile, and then I’ll hand it off to Marc to talk a little bit about broadband ARPUs. But on the mobile side, we’re excited that we were able to sell — convert the 60%, and we were able to proactively reach out to customers make them aware, have great conversations. It’s a testament really to great products, great service, they see the value in the converged bundle. We offered them an Optimum Complete offer, and that really brought that value together. Quite frankly, for the 40% that received it when I think about the approach last year, there was some opportunity in terms of really making sure the folks that were taking the product, understood what they were getting, why they were getting it.
When we look at the usage rates, things like that, there was definitely opportunity in terms of how we were going to market last year with that free offer. And so we have those learnings. I mean, we team — everyone I brought in comes in with those learnings so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. And going forward, it’s about selling the value, selling mobile and really making sure that we’re selling solutions that our customers want and need. And we’ve transformed the retail environment as well. We’ve transformed it from a service center to a sales experience. And that’s going to allow us to make sure that we’re properly solution selling going forward with mobile. Marc?
Marc Sirota: As it regards to broadband revenue, it will be a balance between subscribers and rate. And so you see we’re starting to chunk into some of the subscriber losses, and we like the trend that we have there. But more importantly, on the rate side, you’ve seen that we’ve stabilized the broadband ARPU rates. And in fact, the past 2 quarters, we’ve actually grown the rates, and we’re improving that year-over-year $0.22, which is fantastic. And so you’ll see that we’ll continue to strike the right balance between rate and volume to ultimately drive top line growth. In addition, we’re very optimistic around what fiber actually brings to the table. We see when customers migrate on to the network from an HFC platform. We’re seeing uplift in those customers.
We’re also seeing from just a gross adds perspective on pricing. Customers want the highest value, and they’re willing to pay for 1 gig symmetrical speeds and beyond. And so they’re paying us over $10 versus an HFC connect. And so we think that there is a path for both rate and volume to drive sustainable broadband revenue. And that’s how we’ll think about it and continue to kind of monitor it. On the other side, on the back book as well, we’re being very disciplined. We’ve introduced a lot of AI functionality into the business, and we’re just beginning to scale that. And so we’re going to take a very disciplined customer-specific approach to managing the back book, and we’re optimistic about what some of those early trials are yielding. And so I think we’ll continue to be disciplined on the front book as well as the back book to ultimately drive broadband growth.
Operator: Our next question comes from Craig Moffett with MoffettNathanson.
Craig Moffett: Yes. I’m going to stay with the same topic of the new rate card guys. Just to make sure I understand. So what you were just describing, should we read that as you’re going to try to opportunistically raise in rates at the low end of the customer base, while you’re presumably cutting some prices for customers that are at the very higher end of your range and sort of try to bring everybody into the middle. And does that mean that your — any customer losses that you see are more likely to be concentrated in lower ARPU types of customers? And then I have one separate question, and that’s just as I think about the growth rate of the footprint where you had been growing in the 2% plus range. Is that — should we expect that to continue to decelerate as it did a bit in the quarter as you sort of refocus your capital budget to potentially a slower path of rural edge outs and the like.
