DALLAS--The general session at the TelcoTV conference here offered attendees a glimpse of some of the challenges that small carriers are likely to encounter when they venture into the TV realm. The panel featured executives from two independent service providers that have launched IPTV discussing how they handled issues like sales training, customer service and the back office.

Keith Galitz, president of Oregon’s Canby Telcom, said one of his company’s biggest challenges was preparing employees for a very different kind of service environment.

“It is different culturally, and you have to get the employee body ready for that cultural change,” Galitz said. “Training is probably the most important thing you can do when you’re getting ready to launch.”

Salespeople had to become much more proactive to push TV service, so Canby adjusted compensation as incentives, Galitz said. How customers are responding to Canby as a TV provider and the issues they have also are different, he added.

“This is a lot more sensitive to customer reaction than telephone service,” Galitz said. “If your customers miss Tiger Woods’ putt on the eighteenth green, you’re going to be getting a lot of phone calls.”

Some of Canby’s customers also require extra assistance with the remote control--especially those over the age of 50, Galitz said. “At the three day call-back there’s a small percent we need to go out and retrain,” he said.

Mike Knoll, chief technology officer for Indiana’s Hancock Telecom, said the back office requirements for delivering TV service is dramatically different and required staffing and training changes.

“This is fundamentally different from anything we’ve done,” Knoll said. “IT people and telephony people are fundamentally different. Even though they’re talking about the same things, they approach them differently. There’s been a lot of education.”

Knoll was blunt about the difficulty of deploying IPTV. “Video is hard,” he said. “I don’t know how else to say it. It’s hard, and it will shake out problems in your network.”