The purpose of this CXTech Week 1 2021 newsletter is to highlight, with commentary, some of the news stories in CXTech this week. What is CXTech?  The C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because the focus is enablers.

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Best wishes for 2021!

MIT Article on Design Thinking

We’ve covered Design Thinking at TADSummit since 2017 thanks to Philippe Vayssac, CIO, Groupama. This not a new MIT article, written in 2017, it is however a great summary of Design Thinking. I find myself using this process every couple of months in my projects. I just wanted to highlight this process and recommend you test out in 2021, if you’ve not already done so previously.

TSA Travel Stats, 7 day moving average is about 44% of 2020

Below is a plot from the TSA check point travel numbers. It’s a mix of personal and business travel, my rule of thumb is 50:50 on average, with holiday peaks being 80:20 personal:business.

I’m seeing more people travelling given my discussions with those running parking garages around Newark, people finally admitting to business trips, some of my neighbours have been travelling for business since Q3 2020. I think the travel mix is not too far off the average, as personal travel is as equally impacted as business. Some of my neighbors have disappeared from sight, only their holiday decorations showed they’re still alive. While others were in their driveway enjoying a socially distanced drink during the mild Thanksgiving weather (we saw 65F that day).

On the 3rd January 2021 we were at 55% of 2020 levels, a 7 day moving average is closer to 44%. Lockdowns did not start until March 2020, and over the period shown below the virus wasn’t discussed in public. It was mid January before it became a news topic, I was travelling until early March.

Claims we’ll only see 50% of business travel after the pandemic are likely wrong, we’re getting close to that already. As Spring arrives and the vaccine rolls-out (hopefully the US can get its act together), we’ll see the current crazy high infection rates drop, see below. This will spur people’s willingness to travel. By Q3 we could be at 60-70% of 2019 travel, and 70-80% by Q4. I’m certainly planning business travel and a vacation by the end of the year, COVID travel rules dependent. Beware over-weighting the current unusual situation when assessing what will happen by Q3/Q4 2021, things are and will continue to change.

UK broadband usage doubles in 2020

This is a common data point around the world. UK broadband usage more than doubled in 2020 with 50,000 Petabytes (PB) of data being consumed across the country, compared to around 22,000 in 2019, according to Openreach.

During 2020, the daily record for broadband use was broken 15 times, and the average property connected to Openreach’s fibre networks used around 3,000 Gigabytes (GB) of data, or around 9GB per day, equivalent to between two and three HD movies being streamed in every house in the country, every day.

The busiest day for the UK’s broadband was Boxing Day, Saturday December 26, when a record 210 Petabytes (PB) was consumed across Openreach’s networks.

On that day, a mix of video calls to get in touch with family and friends, TV streaming, and gaming downloads drove usage.

Other tidbits include:

• The 2nd and 3rd busiest days were Monday 14 November (209PB) and Saturday 15 August (195.9PB) 2020.
• The average property connected to the Openreach network used around 3,000GB of data in 2020, or around 9GB per day. To put this into perspective, it’s the same as between two and three HD movies being streamed in every house in the country, every day.
• The busiest months in 2020 were December (4722PB), August (4,894PB) and October (4,850PB.)
• Christmas day was nearly double that of last year: Christmas day 2019 = 96PB versus Christmas day 2020 =181PB.
• During the first lockdown (March 2020), we very quickly saw about a 30 per cent increase in daytime broadband use compared to pre-Coronavirus times, mainly due to a huge increase in home-working and, particularly during the first lockdown, home-schooling.
• Online gaming continues to have a big impact on the UK’s broadband consumption, with many of the major data spikes focussed around updates to popular PlayStation, PC and Xbox games – including Call of Duty and Fortnite.
• The busiest day on the Openreach network tends to be a Saturday or a Sunday – as it was pre-Coronavirus. The busiest time of day on the network tends to be between 7pm and 10pm.

Churn Analysis: the Ultimate Guide to Understanding Customer Attrition

This is an excellent piece on churn analysis. A dry topic, but important for any service provider to understand.

Churn analysis is a review of a company’s former customers that reveals their composition and trends. It looks for correlations between customers who became inactive during a period of time and variables such as tenure, product holding, service calls, seasonality, and demographics.

This is a master class by Tanya Zyabkina with some great ‘how-tos’ in gathering, slicing, dicing the data; and the many mistakes to avoid.

TelcoSwitch Raised £4m in growth capital funding.

We covered TelcoSwitch buying Ziron last year in CXTech Week 3 2020. Its now raised £4m for M&A, with three acquisitions underway, to broaden the technology portfolio and increase its customer base.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Congratulations to Ross Garrett who is now Head of Product at Volkswagen Automotive Cloud. I’ve known Ross for over a decade, since his Aepona days.

Neeraj Sharma is now Chief Operating Officer at Auvenir. I’ve known Neeraj since delivery.com. Once of the early telecom API pioneers. You can see the weblog I wrote about them here.

Dave Evans is now CTO at Cyance.

Reto Schlegel is now Leiter Produktmanagement KEP und Mail national at Swiss Post.

Alexander Berry, joined Oyster a few months ago, I missed the move. He’s Head of Sales and Channel Partnerships (Global). Oyster is the HR platform for globally-distributed companies, founded by Tony Jamous, and some of his old Nexmo team are joining him.

Luca Blasi is now Senior Account Executive at Microsoft

Pierre Hunter is now Sales Director APAC at SmartLabs

 Michael Taylor is now Co-Founder, Business Development at Glidr Inc.

Well done Elisja van Niekerk and an amazing 2020 set of achievements:

• Feb judged and presented at the #bidatahack
• March addressing the attendees at the #ITWebBI2020 about data democratisation and data literacy.
• March received the #simcon 2020 “Leading by example” award.
• March received the Woman of Stature “Woman in Technology” 2020 award.
• April spoke on 91.3FM about Covid and the push into the 4th industrial revolution
• May spoke on Pretoria FM about “Zoombombing”.
• Hosted many #codingmamas virtual events including it’s 2nd annual MoMx in August.
• Spoke at the International Experts Gathering with Orbrix
• October organised and hosted MTN #tadhackza again with over 300 participants but this time virtually due to covid (thanks Elisja!)
• November “Inspiring Fifty South Africa 2020 Winner.”
• Judged at a Geekulcha hackaton, the Motus data science hackathon.
• December the #CodingMamas partnered with Further and #uksatechhub

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