BCE, Inc. 25th Annual CIBC Eastern Institutional Investor Conference

Yeah. Hi, Jen. Thanks for having me. Good morning, everyone. Appreciate the early time slot and that everyone attended.

Yeah. I think Harry is next door. Look, churn is the output, and I would say it is a bit of a lagging indicator, right? Ultimately, we are focused on happy customers, delivering customer experience, and meeting them where they want to. If they want to call, we will answer the phone. If they want to interact with us on a digital basis, our UI is much improved. Frankly, our fiber and wireless networks are great. So it is about delivering what they expect. This is what they expected on their bill. This is what we show them on the bill. Because the value that we provide is very good. Just provide what you said you were going to provide. If you said you were going to call them back in 30 minutes, you call them back within that time slot. So that is what we track.

We track a bunch of individual KPIs, but also what we call an easy index, which is ultimately, did the customer get a good experience, and are they happy at the end of the interaction with us? It leads to churn, but ultimately, happy customers.

No, you're absolutely right. A lot of the AI conversation is on AI fabric externally, but we're leveraging AI across the company. It's finance, it's in legal, it's in HR, but especially in our customer experience and customer service. So in the banking world, you know your customer and know what services they have, and how do you quickly pivot the conversation to, again, provide them service. They have a question, agents, whether it's robotics or human, how do you provide them with an answer that's clear, whether it's online or on the phone? So that they hang up the phone, and they go, "That makes sense. I understand. There's no confusion." I just think humans don't like uncertainty. They don't like questions that don't have a clear answer. So provide information, leverage AI to understand the specifics of their question.

Again, hang up the phone, click your mouse, and it's a happy customer. I honestly think the team's done a great job with that. As you've seen, basically 5 out of 6 quarters, our churn has improved, and it's both wireless and wireline. So it's not just one product service level is getting better, it's the overall customer experience. Which, again, is I think the right thing to focus on.

I'd say it's very constructive. Of the three promotional milestones, back to school, Black Friday, and Boxing Week. Back to school came and went. Prices are up year-over-year. Competitive intensity, it's a competitive environment. We are competitive in the marketplace. But the prices are certainly at a higher level, and the level of intensity of the competition is a little bit lower than it would've been last year. I think really good value for customers, but not to the detriment of our profitability.

I think absolutely yes. Service revenue's up a couple of points last couple of quarters, and ultimately, fiber keeps winning in the market. It's a bit of beating the same drum, but ultimately, fiber is a great technology, and it wins in a market. It wins in Canada, it wins in the U.S., it wins in other jurisdictions. Sorry about that if I'm all of a sudden yellow. Ultimately, look, 45,000, 50,000. We are driving net adds where we have fiber, and we're pulling along wireless at a 40% clip where we sell new fiber. The game plan is fairly straightforward. We have fiber, sell the fiber that we have, provide a great customer experience. Churn goes down, long-term value subs go up.

Yeah. Following on my last answer. Ultimately, I think the team in the U.S. has done a great job. Where they have fiber, they are selling fiber. And the penetration curves, they track it on a weekly basis, cohort by cohort. It's fairly similar. It's really similar. It's highly correlated. So the fiber that they built the week of May 3rd, penetration tracked week by week by week by week, very good job penetrating it. The next week, the next week, the next week, it all looks very similar. Where they have fiber, they are bringing new competition to market. We are entering into cable-only markets, and there's just pent-up demand for a fiber product. So really good job driving penetration. We took a bit of a half-step pause to make sure that we were choosing the right geographies to maximize long-term value.