People don't choose a broadband provider on price alone. They search for the fastest network in their neighborhood, read what customers say about the service, and, increasingly, turn to AI to decide which brand they can trust.
For Community Fibre, a London broadband provider with more than 450,000 customers, that shift is already showing up in the numbers. About half of its sales now come from digital channels, and a 4.7 Trustpilot score helps it stand out in a market where customer experience is often a pain point.
But Chris Williams and his team found that being visible takes more than a strong rating. By pairing local landing pages, personalization, reviews, and help and support content, Community Fibre turned neighborhood-level searches into a growth engine.
In this episode of The Intelligence Brief, Chris Brownlee (SVP of Product, Yext) sits down with Chris Williams (CIO, Community Fiber) live from Envision in New York to discuss how the company is adapting to the way customers find and evaluate brands.
During their conversation, Chris shares how Community Fibre has optimized for AI search since the early days of its Yext partnership, why helpful content is often a prospect's first touchpoint with the brand, and how his team is applying AI across the business — from procurement to customer service.
This episode breaks down:
How customers are shifting from traditional search to AI search to find and vet local providers
Why reviews are becoming a core part of how AI engines evaluate and surface a brand
How local landing pages and personalization help a London-based brand compete with national players, borough by borough
Why help and support content doubles as a brand awareness channel
How Community Fiber is using AI to work more efficiently, and what its leadership expects the next 12 months to look like
If you're a marketing or digital leader managing a multi-location business, or competing for customers in a crowded local market, this episode offers a real-world look at how reviews, local content, and AI-ready experiences work together to drive visibility and growth.
Episode Links
Transcript
00:01:04] Chris (Host): So Chris, welcome. Thanks for joining us here in New York and Envision. Give us a little overview of your role, your organization, and how do you help customers find your business?00:01:14 Chris Williams (Community Fiber): Yeah, Im Chris Williams from Community Fiber. Im the CIO, and I work for a broadband company in London. We have a network of about 1.4 million properties past. Weve got a customer base of over 450,000 customers. Were a B2B, B2C, and a wholesale company. We wholesale partner with people like Vodafone and TalkTalk, who are the bigger brands in the UK. And we are growing incredibly quickly. I joined the company around about five years ago — we were 30,000 customers at the time. So that growth has been incredible for us, and we can only really grow if people can find us.Saleswise, we have three main channels for our consumer business. Thats door-to-door — literally sending out people around the streets of London knocking on doors and getting customers to sign up. We have tele-sales, where people would normally only call if theyve researched us and understand a little bit about us. And the biggest channel for us is digital. About half our sales would be digital sales.00:02:55 Chris (Host): That sounds like quite a spread of audiences and consumers — a lot of people you need to satisfy, a lot of needs. So whats the single biggest shift youve seen in how customers actually find and engage with businesses like yours over the last few years? And do you have some of the numbers behind it?00:03:08 Chris Williams (Community Fiber): When I started 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 didnt have a huge marketing budget to push our brand through every channel in London — and Londons a big place to cover from a marketing perspective, with lots of different types of communities.But our brand is sufficiently established now, and we really see a difference in how customers are finding brands. We see that customers are using much more search, but predominantly starting to flip to AI search as well — using AI not only to find a brand but to really qualify what the quality of that brand is like, what a customers experience has been. Were super proud that we are 4.7 on Trustpilot. For us thats a really big deal because it stands us out from some of the big competition. People dont necessarily have a great experience with telco in the UK across the board, and that service differentiator — that high score with 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 theyre doing AI searches.00:05:04 Chris (Host): Thats an admirable score. And interesting to hear how much you lean into it. Ill talk to people across many different verticals, but in telco quite often Ill hear comments like, Were just not going to manage it — kind of a head in the sand strategy. But you get the results when you lean in and tend to it as a communication channel. You touched on how those review scores are also helping you in AI. One thing thats really starting to happen is all of these channels arent working as individual projects anymore — AI bundles it all up into one message about your business. Has that changed any of your approaches to how your business gets represented online through AI?00:06:03 Chris Williams (Community Fiber): Yes, definitely. Content for us has been really interesting. We started our journey around four years ago with Yext. The original reason for us to work with Yext was that customers were struggling to get questions answered. At the time, we didnt have a My Account portal, so there was nowhere for people to log in and get answers to their questions. So we were very reliant on web QA, and having a really intelligent AI-powered search engine got us through that period until we could start building My Account.Seeing the benefits of AI-powered search over the last four years, its not something we take away. Every day its still helping our customers greatly and really allows us to personalize the experience. We moved on from help and support into trying to personalize the experience and journey when customers were searching for us. We could see lots of customers using search terms like Whats the best broadband in Richmond? or Whats the fastest fiber network in Lewisham or Hammersmith or Westminster? And we were able then to have pages with personalization. Were a London-based broadband company, so we really should know these areas intimately and be able to provide something that the big national players certainly couldnt. Thats our story with Yext — thats how we started.00:08:09 Chris (Host): Awesome. Most local search is about finding the nearest service or the nearest store. Your business is different — customers arent finding a store, theyre finding out if your service is even available to them. So how do you manage that discovery challenge?00:08:25 Chris Williams (Community Fiber): The search, the landing pages, and the personalization around that are pretty critical to us, as are the reviews in the areas, which are definitely building up to form part of the criteria that the engines use to serve content about Community Fiber. But weve also had to think about what content is available. Weve pushed out way more content than previously.The help and support piece actually augments what weve got out there as well. Quite often people with a problem — sometimes with another brand — will end up looking at our help and support content. How do I split my SSID? How do I improve the connection to the router? How do I improve the quality of my Wi-Fi at home? Quite often thatll be the first interaction they have with Community Fiber. And it doesnt matter to us that were serving that to a prospect rather than a customer, because it does help us with brand awareness.Weve had to work hard across the board in terms of our content — pushing out much more around our locations, our products, the services we provide to try and improve that awareness. I think were still learning as well. I think everybody in the industry honestly is still learning. The algorithms seem to be changing. Theres no consistency across the major AI search engines either. Everyones got their own take on the algorithms theyre using. And so we continue to try and learn and make sure weve got the right things out there to get recognized in our very crowded and tough market.00:10:30 Chris (Host): You touched on something I heard yesterday from someone at Pizza Hut — the point being, were really just trying to help answer questions. How can we just be helpful? And that really resonated strongly. Even in the ways that Google or others are saying how you best show up in AI — it is deliver helpful content that has a unique point of view, something people cant find anywhere else. It really does come back to speaking to the customer first. If you use that as your north star and guiding light, all of the AI stuff and all of the technicalities will follow. So youre competing for customers borough by borough, street by street in some cases. How do you manage visibility at that local level without needing a dedicated person for every area youre serving?00:11:28 Chris Williams (Community Fiber): Were using pages really effectively to be able to do that online. It is a battleground out there. Were competing against different brands in different locations, which is always quite interesting. The amalgamated data that we have makes a big difference in terms of how we approach sales and marketing in each of those areas.We have the capability to do what we call premise-level pricing — to really understand the property, whos in it, what services that property would benefit from, and then be able to have the right types of offers for those customers. Landing with personalization is a huge part of that and trying to get the right message to that customer. Even if at that stage we dont necessarily know who they are, from the moment we try and engage were trying to get a level of personalization that wed grow over the period of our engagement with that customer.00:12:52 Chris (Host): AI is a marketing tool — weve been talking a lot about that here at Envision — but AI is also very much an efficiency tool for how to do your job. How has Community Fiber been leaning into AI as a tool just to help better do your job?00:13:12 Chris Williams (Community Fiber): Were using AI in a large number of use cases now, and the adoption is brilliant in the organization. Theres a real pull from the organization to use these services. We started in an unusual place — we actually started with procurement, which isnt necessarily the most natural place to start. But AI is fantastically good at reading contracts and reading them in great detail, maybe more detail than humans would. Being able to compare contracts, pick out clauses — if we needed to look across all of our contracts at what the force majeure clause is in every contract, we can do that really, really quickly. That was our starting point.We then moved on to other use cases. Security was probably the second one. But weve got a strategic vision for what we want to get to from an AI perspective, and were slowly building towards that. Customer services has been our major focus over the last few months — whether thats empowering people 24/7 to get support through voice bots and chat bots, or whether thats helping our agents have some superpowers to answer customer queries better, or from an efficiency perspective in terms of summarization of calls and understanding what that call is about and trying to learn from that to understand the intents better as customers are calling us.What were finding as well is the content of the calls is super rich for things we werent universally capturing before. For example, there may be indications in a call that a customer has a particular vulnerability. If a customer says, I cant really see clearly the lights on the front of the router, maybe thats something we dont need to ask the customer again, or maybe theres a digital way for us to understand that. So we want to try and use it to help and benefit the customer in every circumstance we possibly can.00:15:51 Chris (Host): Youve been joining us here at Envision. Has there been any takeaways or aha moments that have come from being here?00:16:00 Chris Williams (Community Fiber): Theres been several big things, but the two that really stick with me most — firstly, in terms of the Scout product, the enhancements youre making to complete the journey, to be able to make all of that data and intelligence we have on every area were working in, and turn that into something we can use and follow through right to the end in marketing to those customers. I think thats a massive step forward and it gives us the opportunity to adopt that and hopefully get more personalization, better understanding of an area, and be able to deliver fantastic offers through an entire ecosystem of elements that are going to make things much more efficient for us.The second one for me is that this technology — AI in particular — is running at such a fast rate. We have to make choices about what we do. But critically for me, I think I need to spend even more time stepping back, understanding whats going on in the market, trying to anticipate whats happening next, and what our organization and business need to do to stay up with that. The things we were doing two years ago obviously dont work today. But that sequence and pace of change is narrowing and decreasing all the time. And I think we need partners like Yext that are much closer to some of the major players, the big AI engines, to help us and advise us on what our operating models need to look like. Thats been a real light bulb moment for me.00:18:26 Chris (Host): Amazing. The change thats happening — even as a product developer — it feels very akin to going from on-premise software to web 2.0 to now a whole new way to experience software products. The whole playbook is just different. And like you said, what was standard two years ago just doesnt work anymore.00:19:10 Chris Williams (Community Fiber): Absolutely. And also the volume were doing as well — just the sheer number of changes that even us, a fairly small business, is pushing through. Were doing maybe 20 to 30 changes a week now across our system of state. That pace is just getting quicker.00:19:40 Chris (Host): Last one. A year from now, what does winning look like for your team in this space?00:19:44 Chris Williams (Community Fiber): For us, theres several things happening with our business at the moment. The first is were going to start to build more network again. Weve publicly said that were going to try and get to 2 million properties in London past. And therefore the next 12 months for us is making sure that customers are aware that were building in their area — that as soon as those properties are built we can sell them and get really good penetration on those properties really quickly. We know the customers are going to benefit from our services. Fast, reliable broadband with great security products, TV products, voice and mobile products — customers want these things. So really for us its being able to get that information out to customers really quickly.But then more broadly, where will we be with our AI services in 12 months? My bet is that we will have three, four, or five times the amount weve got today. The pace of change is just increasing so much, and I think well be looking at AI solutions right across our business — anything that we can make more efficient where a machine is more reliable than a human to produce output. Theres a bit more to do on controlling token spend and doing it efficiently. But the capabilities are there and the software is there to build those capabilities really quickly. Im just looking forward to seeing what we can achieve.Its changing markets, right? Markets that have had specific leaders for years and years — all of a sudden you can as a smaller business go and tackle the untouchable. So Im just looking at what else can we do with it in terms of product, marketing, and efficiency. Its really going to be a challenging but fun 12 months.00:22:28 Chris (Host): Yeah, absolutely. Same exact sentiment on this side of things. Chris, thanks for joining us. Thanks for coming to New York and joining us at Envision. Great to have you.00:22:47 Chris Williams (Community Fiber): Yeah, its been a fabulous few days. Thank you.
