Cal.net
Local Care You Can Measure
Cal.net competes on service. Checking that service used to mean a weekly meeting and a random handful of tickets, read a week or two after the fact.
In January, Cal.net started scoring every call with QueSee. Seven months later, the quality score is up from just over 50% to 77% and still rising. The end-of-day ticket queue is down from over 100 to under 20. And a call that misses the standard reaches the CEO the same day.
What changed in seven months
Every call, scored against Cal.net's own standard
Overall quality score
January to July 2026, on a scorecard nobody adjusted. Still climbing.
Calls flagged for attention
Four out of five calls now pass with no alert.
End-of-day ticket queue
"I would celebrate when we got down to 50. Now we're disappointed when we have more than 10."
Call coverage
Every Call
1,200 to 2,000 calls a month, all of them scored. Before: a random weekly sample.
Manual QA time
None
It used to take about 30% of Kaili's working day.
Meeting to live
<0 months
Saw QueSee at WISPAPALOOZA in October 2025. Live on January 1, 2026.
At a glance
Cal.net
An independent operator running down the middle of California, competing on the one thing the national carriers cannot outspend.
- Service area
- Central California, Red Bluff to Bakersfield
- Also serves
- Coastal hills toward San Luis Obispo, Sonora, Placerville
- Customers
- Residential and business, business side growing
- QueSee live since
- January 1, 2026
- Running across
- Customer support, billing, inside sales
- Also scored
- The third-party provider handling overflow calls
Cal.net is an independent ISP in central California that competes with national carriers on local customer service.
Cal.net serves homes and businesses down the middle of California, and the business side is growing.
We’re not AT&T, we’re not T-Mobile, we’re not Verizon. We’re Cal.net and we’re local. We have local customer support people and local salespeople, and we go out and see our customers. That’s our differentiation.
Kaili Nawahine, who runs operations, says the same thing from the subscriber’s side. “We’re never going to be AT&T. But we can be Cal.net. Where we can outdo them is on the customer service side.”
Plenty of operators say that. Cal.net set out to prove it.
Before QueSee, Cal.net checked support quality by reading random tickets for a weekly meeting.
Kaili built the system himself. A spreadsheet. A standard set of steps for every support call, so anything sent on to engineering or a truck roll had the basics covered. And a weekly meeting to check the steps were followed.
The meeting had one question to answer.
Are we handling our subscribers the way we said we would?
To prepare, Kaili pulled closed tickets at random and read them. Nobody can read every ticket or listen to every recording, so he took a sample and hoped it matched the rest.
I had to do sampling randomly because I couldn’t look at every ticket.
Prep took most of two days before each meeting. Craig puts the cost at about 30% of Kaili’s working day, most of it in spreadsheets, about calls that were already over. “You can’t listen to every single recording,” Craig says.
The delay made it worse. A bad call on Monday came up on Friday, if it came up at all. The subscriber was still waiting.
It’s bad enough I got a problem and I’ve got to call you. But then I call you and I get nowhere, I get bounced around, or my thing just lingers on forever. That’s a bigger problem. You go from “hey, problem solved” to having a lot more difficult discussions about why we lost a customer.
Meanwhile, Cal.net ended most days with more than 100 open tickets. On a good day the team closed 50 or 60. Some mornings started at 120.
Craig Stein chose QueSee at WISPAPALOOZA 2025 to set one quality standard for every support call.
Craig first saw QueSee at WISPAPALOOZA in October 2025. It’s the annual Las Vegas show of the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA), where independent operators compare notes with people who have the same problems.
QueSee won WISPA’s Emerging Tech Showcase that year, but the award isn’t what sold Craig. An operator speaking at the show was already running QueSee. Craig asked him what it was like, took a demo, and decided.
I didn’t feel that we had the tools to effectively set a bar for our customer support folks. I wanted a toolset for us to be able to set a bar, manage them, and provide a better level of customer service.
He also wanted to hear the third-party provider that takes Cal.net’s overflow calls. Those calls carry Cal.net’s name, so they have to meet the same standard.
“We can hear recordings of our third-party contractor now,” he says. “We couldn’t do that before.”
Kaili’s day, before and after
How Kaili handled Cal.net’s ticket queue before QueSee and with QueSee
Before, Kaili read tickets by hand while the queue grew faster than one person could clear it. With QueSee, every call is scored as it ends, and only the ones that need him reach his screen.
An illustration of the workflow, not the product. Cal.net’s end-of-day queue: 100+ before QueSee, under 20 now. Clock times are illustrative.
Cal.net scores every call with QueSee against its own standard and gets same-day alerts on misses.
Cal.net went live less than three months after the show.
It did get implemented fairly rapidly.
QueSee works alongside the phone system, CRM and ticketing Cal.net already had. Nothing was replaced. It scores every call against Cal.net’s own standard, sends an alert the same day when a call misses, and rolls each month into one overall quality score.
The real work is deciding what a good call looks like. Cal.net had a head start: Craig knew where he wanted the bar, and Kaili already had the steps written down.
From finding problems to fixing them
What Kaili didn’t expect was how much his own job would change. Before, if something felt wrong, the team went looking, guessed at the cause, and acted on it. Sometimes the thing they fixed wasn’t the problem.
Now every call comes back scored and summarized, and the patterns across calls show where to look.
We’re out of the CSI or detective work. Now we’re in doctor mode. How do I solve this problem? How do I treat this patient?
He can see what’s coming and which problems matter most, and spend his time fixing them instead of finding them.
Quality score: just over 50% to 77% on an unchanged scorecard
In January, Kaili set himself a goal: get the overall quality score to 65% by the third quarter, maybe 70%. He didn’t think 70 was possible.
Overall quality is sort of like the subtotal line. That weighs and measures everything. Quality of the call. Did you solve the problem or not.
In January it sat just over 50%.
The scorecard didn’t change after that. What changed was who saw the misses, and how fast. Any call that doesn’t pass now goes to Kaili and to Craig the same day. Not many CEOs ask to be on that list.
By July the score was 77%, and still climbing. Flagged calls fell from the 40s to 19%, so four out of five calls now pass with no alert. Kaili hasn’t changed the scorecard once since January.
I’ve not changed anything. I’ve not dialed anything back. In fact, I thought about changing one or two things and I went, nope. Because if the numbers just start artificially improving... The baseline is the baseline, and we just continue to improve.
The ticket queue dropped too, from more than 100 open tickets at the end of most days to under 20. “I would celebrate when we got down to 50 tickets,” Kaili says. “Now we’re disappointed when we have more than 10,” Craig says.
We’re able to do a lot more, in essence, with less than what we had before.
Put a standard under every call.
QueSee shows Cal.net its repeat callers and the overflow provider's mistakes, which it couldn't see before.
The morning of our interview, Craig opened a QueSee alert and recognized a name. He sent it to Kaili with one question: how many tickets does this person have? A lot. QueSee’s summary had already noted that this subscriber had called many times and was unhappy about it.
So now we’ll treat them differently. We never would have even known that before.
The overflow provider improved too. When one of their calls goes wrong, Kaili shows them exactly what happened, and they fix it or retrain. “It’s indirectly or directly improved them,” he says, “without them purchasing the tool.”
Behind all of it is one aim: nobody who calls Cal.net should have to explain their history twice.
Ain’t nothing worse than having somebody relive all their previous outages or times they called in. You’re not having a good day when you’re calling us, off the bat. We just want to make sure we’re really effective with their time, and they walk away feeling like we solved their problem.
Cal.net also scores billing and sales calls, and its CEO recommends QueSee to other ISP owners.
Craig is candid that sales is earlier along. “I don’t think we’ve truly set the bar the way we’ve set it for customer support, which was our primary focus. But we’ll be using it more and more on the sales side.”
Ask him whether another ISP owner should do this, and he does not hedge.
I would tell them yes. It’s made a huge difference in our churn, and allowed us to manage our customer support organization and our sales and billing organization better. It’s a great tool that lets you see what’s going on in real time.
Kaili agrees.
Without it, you’re flying a lot more blind. You’re a lot more in the fog. You may think you can see a long distance, but this gives you a longer range.
Cal.net's quality score is still rising past its Q3 goal, and business customers are the next focus.
The scorecard stays as it is, and the number keeps going up.
The bigger picture is business accounts. They are a growing share of Cal.net, they are the harder customers to keep, and Craig is under no illusions about what they expect.
We have to provide perfect customer support for our businesses.
QueSee was built for operators like this one. Not the national carriers with a thousand seats on the floor, but the local companies where the person answering the phone lives in the same county as the person calling. They compete on service because it is the one thing the incumbents cannot outspend them on. We are proud to help them prove it.
Results with QueSee
Cal.net’s results with QueSee:
before and after, January to July 2026
0/6
Problems
solved
| Before QueSee | With QueSee |
|---|---|
| Before QueSee Quality score just over 50%, with a Q3 goal of 65-70% | With QueSee 77% by July. Goal beaten. |
| Before QueSee A random sample of tickets, reviewed once a week | With QueSee Every call scored, 1,200 to 2,000 a month |
| Before QueSee Bad calls found days later, if at all | With QueSee Misses reach Kaili and Craig the same day |
| Before QueSee 100+ open tickets at the end of the day | With QueSee Under 20 open tickets |
| Before QueSee Manual QA took about 30% of Kaili's day | With QueSee Zero manual QA |
| Before QueSee The overflow provider's calls went unheard | With QueSee Scored on the same standard |
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About Cal.net
Cal.net is an independent internet service provider serving communities down the middle of California, from Red Bluff to Bakersfield, along the coastal hills toward San Luis Obispo, and into the Sierra foothills around Sonora and Placerville. It serves both residential subscribers and business accounts, with local support and local sales teams. Cal.net has been running QueSee since January 2026 across customer support, billing and inside sales.
About QueSee
QueSee scores 100% of an operator's customer calls against their own standard operating procedure, flags the conversations that need attention, predicts which subscribers are at risk of leaving, and rolls the patterns into reports the team can act on. No sampling, no waiting for the weekly review.