QUICK STATS: WHY IN-BROWSER MAINTENANCE ALERTS ARE SO SUCCESSFUL

To broadband subscribers, it’s a simple but much appreciated courtesy:  the maintenance alert.  Virtually all ISPs establish brief time windows, usually in the early hours of the morning, during which maintenance is performed to keep networks humming and up to date.  But for all those night people, an unexplained interruption in Internet service can be more than annoying. 

 Thus, the maintenance alert has become a gesture of good will among ISPs wishing to maintain a smooth customer experience, and has given rise to one of the most popular uses-cases for PerfTech’s in-browser messaging system.Some ISPs deliver maintenance alerts well ahead of time both to give ample warning and convey their continuous commitment to investing in their networks and improving the subscriber experience;others prefer to deliver alerts just an hour or two before the event so that only those customers most likely to be impacted receive the message.Note that PerfTech’s in-browser messages have configurable start-end schedules, so all alerts are terminated once the maintenance window begins, a feature that precludes receiving messages that are no longer relevant, unlike email notices. Read more …

QUICK STATS: DMCA NOTICES ELICIT HIGH RESPONSE RATES

ISPs have many reasons to reach and convey information quickly to a targeted subscriber.  Among those reasons, notice of copyright infringement is one of the more pressing.  Organizations who represent copyright holders and who monitor and identify offending streaming data according to the guidelines of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) alert the respective ISP regarding the pirating source.  The ISP in turn must pass on the notification to the infringing subscriber.  Because of the ease of reaching subscribers online, PerfTech’s in-browser messaging system has become a highly effective vehicle for delivering DMCA notices. And importantly, because the PerfTech system logs and time-stamps all message deliveries along with the subscriber’s respective responses, the ISP can verify that it has fulfilled its obligation to notify if called upon.

In order to analyze response rates, we looked at DMCA message statistics generated by one large ISP-customer over a time span of nearly 22 months from January 2017 through late October 2018. Results follow: Read more …

QUICK STATS: CAMPAIGN SHOWS 75% OF MESSAGE RECIPIENTS AFFIRM AS ACCOUNT-HOLDERS

PerfTech’s ISP customers purchase Bulletin System, the company’s in-browser messaging platform, to reach their subscribers with personalized service and account information. One of the top three most popular use cases for message campaigns relates to late-bill-pay. Because messages may render on any device associated with the subscriber’s account, ISPs frequently ask how often the messages are received by the significant account-holder, a statistic that is not readily available. While PerfTech provides templates and frequently helps ISPs customize their message content, the ISP ultimately determines the verbiage for the campaign.

So, one large ISP customer has decided just to ask! For the past six months, this customer has delivered to overdue subscribers an early pay reminder that first asks if the message recipient is the account-holder. If the recipient responds “no,” the message is closed and redelivered to the same subscriber account at a later time. If the response is “yes,” the message box expands to address the issue. From April through September 2018, the results show:

Total message deliveries: 713,171
“No” responses: 177,217 or 24.8%
“Yes” responses: 535,954 or 75.2%

PERFTECH ENDS Q3 WITH REGIONAL GAINS

New business for PerfTech’s Q3 includes two items: one new customer and one customer license expansion. The new customer is a regional telco provider who operates in primarily a Northwestern state. The license-expansion order comes from a mid-tier provider who operates in areas of ten mostly Western states. Both providers plan to or currently deliver in-browser message campaigns relating to a full scope of use cases, including broadband usage, late-bill pay, modem upgrades, and maintenance alerts.

C3P AUTHORIZES PERFTECH TO OFFER CLEANFEED TO ISPS WORLDWIDE

For the first time, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P) has authorized PerfTech to offer a solution that includes C3P’s CleanFeed database in association with PerfTech’s Website Sentry application. CleanFeed is a proven, dynamic list that contains URLs to content that has been determined by international law enforcement agencies to illegally exploit children. Website Sentry is an application that compares Internet requests by broadband subscribers against such a database of URLs and when a match occurs, results in a pre-defined action—in this case, blocking the request. Importantly, the CleanFeed database is transmitted, maintained, updated, and executed upon only under encryption. Deployed for years in select Canadian ISP customers, the solution is now available outside of Canada, enabling ISPs worldwide to more rigorously maintain networks free of illegal content relating to child exploitation.