The situation
A year of activity had not produced a decision-quality view of progress.
The Scientific Atlanta set-top-box migration had been underway for approximately a year. The devices were approaching a technology deadline that could make them inoperable, but the business did not have a reliable answer to three basic questions: which customers remained exposed, which devices had actually been replaced, and what counted as completion.
The risk was not limited to hardware. A forced transition could create service disruption, churn, call spikes, truck-roll demand, regulatory exposure, and customer resistance—particularly for households with legacy DVR capabilities or customer-owned equipment.
Do not accelerate outreach against an unreliable baseline. Audit the population, KPI logic, and operating model first.
The reset
Replace the reporting fiction with one governed source of truth.
Kennith reviewed the impact assessment, prior activity, and program-health reporting and found that the definition of a completed swap was inaccurate. He partnered with Data Analytics to reconcile customer, device, infrastructure, and plant information into a governed population.
The new measurement framework separated shipment from installation, physical replacement from account status, and remaining exposure from completed activity. That gave leadership a credible view of progress and gave operating teams a common population to act against.
Competing populations, an unreliable completion KPI, and no shared definition of remaining exposure.
AfterOne governed population with measures for shipment, swap, installation, customer contact, churn, call demand, and truck rolls.
The operating strategy
Different customers needed different migration motions.
The program could not depend on one message, one channel, or universal technician support. Kennith segmented the base by device count, technical complexity, customer risk, installation behavior, and market constraints, then matched each cohort to a workable motion.
Passive replacement
Equip frontline teams to identify and replace affected devices during normal customer interactions.
Direct shipment
Move eligible cohorts through bulk shipment and self-installation without creating unnecessary truck rolls.
Targeted outreach
Escalate from postcards and email to SMS, IVR, on-screen messaging, outbound calls, and urgent notices.
Technician support
Reserve scarce field capacity for complex households and customers least able to self-install.
Hard-stop governance
Define deprecation milestones, exception handling, and post-event monitoring before the external deadline.
The communications journey intensified over time: frontline prompts and passive swaps, bulk shipments, postcards, email, SMS, IVR, on-screen messaging, outbound engagement, and urgent final notices. Behind the customer experience sat inventory planning, Care and Retention paths, technician processes, legal review, executive escalation, and weekly progress governance.
The results
The transition finished without the operational shock leaders feared.
of the affected population swapped equipment or received a replacement shipment.
better resolution than prior company migration experience.
call volume and truck-roll demand through the deprecation period.
measurement and governance practices that informed later migration programs.
The program distributed approximately 300,000 replacement devices, delivered approximately $70 million in savings, and maintained East-market churn at approximately 0.78%—slightly below normal video churn. The business moved from a stalled program with questionable reporting to a controlled transition with credible exit criteria and post-deprecation monitoring.
What leaders can use
Five lessons for any high-stakes legacy transition.
- Audit the denominator.A migration percentage is meaningless when the underlying customer and device population is wrong.
- Measure customer movement, not internal activity.Shipments, messages, and meetings are inputs; activation, continuity, churn, and remaining exposure are outcomes.
- Segment the migration motion.Self-install, direct ship, Care, Retention, Field, and hard-stop tactics belong to different cohorts.
- Plan for operational capacity.A strategy that assumes unlimited technicians, inventory, or support capacity is not executable.
- Define the finish before the deadline.Exit criteria, exception handling, and post-event monitoring must exist before deprecation begins.