BRANDING AND VIEWER LOYALTY

Broadcasters understand the importance of branding. User brand loyalty dictates revenue potential in the form of ratings, subscriptions, and ad revenue. A viewer’s experience can positively or negatively impact an organization’s brand. Visual and audio impairments, missing captions, incorrectly segmented media and a host of other issues can adversely impact the viewer’s experience. If the underlining issues are not resolved, this can lead to the issues being associated with the brand.

TRUST AND EXPECTATIONS

As a broadcaster, it is paramount to ensure backend operations do not adversely impact your brand. As a broadcast service provider, the task is doubled as you are responsible for your clients brand along with your own.

Encompass Digital Media, Inc. (Encompass), a global leader in mission-critical media capture, management and distribution services, owns and operates broadcast facilities throughout Argentina (Buenos Aires), Asia (Singapore), U.K. (London) and U.S.A. (Atlanta, Los Angeles Metro, Minneapolis, New York Metro). Encompass is focused on supporting broadcasters (TV and radio), television networks, sports leagues and OTT platforms. Encompass designs, implements and operates reliable video solutions that capture, process and deliver their clients’ video and radio content from any source, in any format, to any destination in the most efficient manner possible.

So how does a leader in broadcast services with operations throughout EMEA, Latin America, Pacific Rim and the US ensure it places its client’s brand in the best light? By hiring the best talent and equipping them with innovative technology solutions that complement their teams and operations.

COMMUNICATION IS THE KEY

With a diverse client base with varying needs and requirements, Encompass knew success required forward thinking and the ability to streamline operations while increasing engagement. To accomplish this, operational and business information needed to be immediately available to teams so they can make informed decisions. The key factors would be centralization, standardization, accountability and continued process improvement.

With many options for tracking software available including in-house and off the shelf offerings, Encompass’ management determined that they needed a workflow solution and not just a software. And that solution needs to be adaptive to their dynamic needs and support broadcast specific workflows. Additionally, the desired solution had to flexible enough to replace existing applications used at different locations – consolidating operational data into a single source of truth.

Encompass selected Pikolo’s ITracker to streamline operations and ensure that performance goals are met. ITracker’s flexibility, distributed nature and ease of use and customization fit well for Encompass’ dynamic operational needs.

THE ITRACKER ADVANTAGE

Pikolo ITracker, a discrepancy reporting and operations management solution is designed specifically for broadcast operations. ITracker provides a proactive environment for broadcasters to capture, distribute and analyze operational data to ensure operational goals are being met. ITracker provides an intuitive interface with role-based access allowing organizations to limit access based on user rights even down to the available drop-down options.

ITracker boasts unmatched reporting and distribution features that provide target real-time alerts, scheduled and user-initiated report distribution. ITracker allows organizations to support multiple business units in a single portal while ensuring data accuracy, integrity and accessibility.

Encompass leveraged ITracker to manage and report service information to clients as well as monitoring and trending service quality.

Encompass was able to centralize and standardize all operational data capture for all locations. Teams are notified in real time of issues based on key performance metrics and filters thereby ensuring issues are quickly communicated to the appropriate staff regardless of location. Encompass’ ITracker implementation includes incident tracking, shift reporting, service and change management and ticketing.

“ITracker is a great solution for broadcast operations. But what separates ITracker and other options is the support Pikolo provides. Pikolo has worked with us to tailor the solutions to our needs – many times delivering business critical changes in days. Something that would take months or not even be possible with other solutions.”

- Phil Bell, Global Vice President of Operations at Encompass Digital Media, Inc.

Encompass leverages the ITracker modules for incident management, shift reporting, change management and client ticketing. Incidents (informational and service impacting) are all captured in ITracker for all of our services and are reported to our clients on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Encompass also leverages the service module of ITracker to globally manage change requests in accordance with ITIL, TPN and ISO 270001.

Pikolo tailored the service module to our specific needs for change management workflow automation and approval management. Additionally, incident reports were designed to mimic actual broadcast procedures including data validation procedures to ensure accurate data entry.

As a trusted service provider for a variety of global television broadcasters and OTT providers, Encompass wanted to provide transparency in its operations by giving clients real time access to their own channel activity. Encompass leveraged Pikolo’s ITracker Client, a client facing self-service portal which enabled clients to access, review incidents and raise tickets. Clients have a single source of truth for their incidents and tickets and an ability to easily communicate with Encompass’s teams in a continuous stream versus having to manage and monitor email threads.

“One of the greatest challenges that Pikolo helped us resolve was to implement business rules in our incidents creation process to improve incident quality. This greatly reduces incident rework and revisions and helps to ensure incident accuracy.”

- Lisa Hagin, SVP Operational Excellence at Encompass Digital Media, Inc.

ITracker’s change request management module helps organizations to manage change requests using an action-based workflow with integrated approval process. The change can be any event that may impact the business. ITracker change management module provides real time engagement for all parties including internal staff, vendors and clients.

The change request module was customized to support Encompass’ specific workflow requirements and is deployed worldwide. Working with EDM stakeholders, Pikolo implemented a solution that supports various real world situations that would not be available in an off the shelve solution.

“We are honored to have Encompass as a partner. The trust and collaboration between our teams have resulted in great solutions that facilitate and streamline Encompass’ day-to-day operations.”

- Vernon Omegah, Pikolo VP of Business Development

“Despite our extensive use of ITracker’s modules, there are many automation features within ITracker that we have not capitalized on yet. In the future, we look to incorporate the ITracker API thereby taking advantage of the value-added benefits of interpolation with our other systems.”

- Lisa Hagin, SVP Operational Excellence at Encompass Digital Media, Inc.

ITracker has been a welcomed complement to Encompass’ broadcast operations. By digitizing and standardizing business data capture, Encompass is better equipped to respond to client needs. Integrated alerts and process automation ensures that staff is engaged while providing detailed business insights for implementing process improvement initiatives. The overall result is the delivery of quality content and increase of client branding.

About Pikolo Systems, Inc.

Since 2001, Pikolo systems, an innovative software company, has provided client-centric workflow products and services to optimize broadcast operations. This includes broadcast operations centers (BOCs) and master control rooms (MCRs).

Pikolo solutions enable broadcast organizations to centralize and standardize their operational data capture. Which leads to increased efficiency and process improvement.

Pikolo’s ITracker is the #1 Rated Broadcast Operations workflow. For more information about Pikolo Systems and its solutions, please visit www.pikoloinc.com.

About Encompass Digital Media

Encompass is a global managed services provider focused on supporting television networks, broadcasters (TV and radio), sports leagues and OTT platforms with the delivery of their linear/nonlinear video content and radio across television, digital and radio platforms. Services include: channel playout, global distribution, streaming, live events, disaster recovery and radio. For more information, please visit www.encompass.tv.