In today’s world of instant gratification – where more and more customers are seeking to control their own product installation and manage accounts online - Comcast is making significant enhancements to how new customers connect to and access their Xfinity services. It’s called digital onboarding, and it will give customers instant access to more than 270,000 pieces of online TV and film content, plus greater control as soon as they’ve placed their order. I demonstrated some of these new features at the NCTA Cable Show today on my iPad.
When customers order service from us today, we ship them self-install kits with all of the necessary equipment, including modems and set-top-boxes. The equipment usually takes a few days to arrive, which means our customer could be without Internet or cable at home in the meantime.
But that’s changing. Later this year, we’re going to launch a new, faster way for customers to start enjoying Xfinity TV and Internet services as soon as they’ve ordered them.
Through our digital onboarding experience, we’ll now provide customers with their account information immediately so they can use an Internet-connected tablet or PC to log-on and instantly start watching hundreds of thousands of TV shows and movies online at Xfinity TV, set-up email, access Xfinity WiFi Hotspots, and manage account preferences like parental controls. Customers can even download and log-in to Xfinity apps all before their TV and internet services are installed in their homes.
Our engineers in Comcast Labs also are working on future digital onboarding enhancements we hope to make available next year, including one that builds on the same "augmented reality" technology first used for military, industrial and medical applications to blend information and rich media with what we see in the real world. We hope to use this "instant fix" technology to scan mobile phone or tablet images on the back of a customer’s set-top-box and "diagnose" what may have gone wrong in the installation process, plus recommend practical solutions. Comcast’s digital onboarding process is just one part of our overall goal to deliver an exceptional experience to our customers. We’ve invested more than $2 billion over the last few years to implement new systems and technology and improve training - and we won’t stop there - as we continue seeking new technologies and innovative features that will change the way customers connect to and control their Xfinity services.