How Community Fibre Wins Local Search in the Age of AI

That sounds like quite a spread of audiences and consumers and just a lot of people that you need to satisfy a lot of needs for.

That sounds like quite the job.

So what's the single biggest shift you've seen in how customers actually find and engage with businesses like yours over the last two?

I mean, when I started four years ago, four and a half years ago, door to door by far was our biggest channel.

We had to be out door to door just to establish our brand to some extent.

We didn't have a huge marketing budget where we could push our brand through every channel in London.

London's a big place to cover as well from a marketing perspective, lots of different types, communities.

And also the generic brand awareness for at the time probably wouldn't have necessarily worked because we were in specific communities delivering fibre.

So for us, door to door is a great way to start.

But our brand is sufficiently established now.

And I think we really see a difference in terms of how customers generally are finding brands.

We see that customers are using much more search, but predominantly actually starting to flip to AI search as well.

And using AI to not only find a brand, but really qualify what the quality of that brand is like.

What a customer's experience has been with the brand.

We're super proud that we are 4.7 on Trustpilot.

For us, that's a really big deal because it stands us out from some of the big competition.

People don't necessarily have a great experience with Telco in the UK across the board.

And to us, that service differentiator, that high score for Trustpilot, having thousands of reviews makes such a difference for

us.

And obviously AI is making those reviews far more accessible and very much part of what the customer is reading when they're doing these AI searches.

That's an admirable, admirable score.

And interesting to hear how you lean into it so much.

I'll talk to people across many different verticals, but in telco quite often, I'll hear comments like, well, we're just not going to manage it.

We kind of put our head in the sand kind of strategy, but you get the results when you lean into it of if you manage that, if you tend that as a communication channel with your customers, and boy, to get to scores like that is really quite something.

You touched on how those review scores are also helping you in AI.