BDCOM Online Limited had acquired Smile Broadband in 2009 to expand into retail broadband customers. By the time I joined in September 2019 as Brand and Digital Communication Manager, the service covered 18 districts, including Dhaka, but active home broadband customers stood at just 4.5K.
My role, on paper, was straightforward: manage brand image and communication across channels. But the internal CRM dashboard told a more urgent story. Each month, new subscriber growth was running about 7% behind the number of customers leaving. For a base of just 4.5K customers, that meant the business was shrinking.
Ask the service department why, and the answer was that churn was simply normal in the ISP industry, sales needed to bring in more new subscriptions. Ask the sales team, and the answer flipped: service quality was driving old customers away, which was why new ones weren’t sticking either. Two departments, two explanations, both partially defensible, neither one solving anything.
Each explanation put the cause in someone else’s area, which made it impossible to test from the inside.
Starting Where I Was Asked To
Our Managing Director wanted social media promotions started immediately, to bring in new leads faster. With our in-house designer and content team, I posted a generic organic Facebook update, mainly to see how the page performed before building anything larger.
The page had just over 5,000 followers. Within a day, the post had organically reached more than 8,000 people, with over 200 engagements. Clearly, reach wasn’t the constraint. People were seeing the brand and responding to it.
Following the Post Into the Inbox
BDCOM ran a 24/7 helpdesk handling calls, messages, and emails across every service segment. I checked the Smile Broadband Facebook inbox to see whether the post had actually generated broadband connection requests.
It had, but something was off. Most replies were delayed, and instead of answering a customer’s actual question, the response was almost always a generic subscription form link. Most conversations stopped right there. Some customers had gone further, leaving their phone number and address directly in the inbox, expecting a follow-up.
I checked the CRM for those numbers. There was no record of them at all.
What This Meant
Customers were reaching out, engaging, even handing over contact details, and getting nothing back. To the outside market, that reads as a brand that doesn’t respond. It needed fixing quickly, but fixing it required knowing exactly where in the funnel it was breaking, not just that it was.
Designing a Controlled Test
I asked the Managing Director for a 7-day window to run an isolated test inside my own department, tracking the full funnel from lead generation to final onboarding, to find precisely where and why leads were being lost.
With approval, my team launched a paid social campaign offering a free connection, limited specifically to the Dhanmondi area, directing traffic to a Google Form we built and controlled ourselves. For the duration of the test, we paused the helpdesk team’s access to the Facebook inbox, so every incoming query during the test came through my department only. That removed the one thing I couldn’t otherwise control: what happened to a lead after it arrived.
Running the Funnel Ourselves
Leads came in fast, through both the inbox and the form. Interest came from across Dhaka, but within 3 days, more than 30 leads had come specifically from Dhanmondi, the exact area we needed for a clean test.
My team called each prospect directly, listened to their expectations, addressed concerns, and manually entered every qualified lead into the CRM ourselves, then tracked each one through to a final onboarding decision.
Of the 30 leads, 7 scheduled connections for the following month. The rest declined, citing delayed communication from the service delivery team, pricing, limited package benefits, or simply wanting to wait.
Turning the Test Into a Case
That was enough to build a full picture: where leads came from, how many converted, and specifically why the rest didn’t. I put together a 12-page report, printed multiple copies, and built a presentation, then called a meeting with the Managing Director, CXOs, and every relevant department head. With every department in the room, the findings couldn’t be read as a complaint about any one of them.
The presentation reframed the original argument entirely. This wasn’t a sales failure or a service failure in isolation, it was a system that had no clear ownership at the handoff points between departments.
What Changed
Following the meeting, top management moved all digital communication under my department, introduced a new SOP for the helpdesk and service delivery teams, and gave my team monitoring authority over the entire broadband sales and conversion process. For the first time, one team owned the space between sales and service.
Departments blaming each other were both partly right, and that was exactly the problem: no one owned the space between them.
Digital Marketing & Growth Strategist
