VNET Fiber
Protecting 30 Years of Trust
For close to 30 years, VNET Fiber has been Erie County’s hometown Internet company - the local alternative to cable, where the person who answers the phone lives down the road.
6 months ago, VNET implemented Sonar Retain, powered by QueSee.
We sat down with COO Brad Wiertel to hear what changed - and it kept coming back to one line: don’t give them a reason to leave.
What changed in the first 6 months
Reactive to Proactive with Experience Data Analytics
Interactions reviewed
0%
Every call and ticket scored against VNET's standards, up from the handful a manager could spot-check by hand.
Reactive to proactive
Same-day callback
At-risk customers get a callback the same day, before they decide to leave.
Simplified review process
0 Query
A read on every rep's strengths and gaps, without listening call by call.
Competitor mentions
Logged Automatically
A customer naming a rival's offer used to slip by. Now it surfaces.
Customer history
Unified CRM & Experience Data
Sonar Retain writes its notes into the Sonar ticket, so the next rep sees the story before they answer.
The team
Same size, higher output.
Same team, same network - what changed is how much of the business they can see.
At a glance
VNET Fiber
Erie’s hometown fiber provider, built and run by Velocity Network.
- Service area
- Erie County and northwest Pennsylvania
- Subscribers
- Over 8,000 and growing
- Network
- Locally built fiber, multi-gig
- Runs on
- Sonar OSS/BSS: billing, provisioning, ticketing
- CX & retention
- Sonar Retain, powered by QueSee
- Sonar Retain live since
- December 2025
VNET's promise is that the person who answers the phone treats you like you are the only customer we have.
Julie Wagner has been there since the beginning: she signed up subscriber number one. Today VNET is over 8,000, and Julie still runs the team that looks after every one of them - a handful of customer-experience reps who wear every hat at once, from signups to support to the upgrade call. She coaches them, rewards the good calls, and picks up the hard ones herself. She is the person this story keeps coming back to: nearly everything that changed at VNET over the last six months ran through her first.
The company built its own fiber and won people over the way a local company does: by being the hometown option, by being fiber instead of cable, by not being the big incumbent everyone wanted to leave.
That kind of growth is a good problem to have. It is also a hard one. The close, personal feel that wins people over in the first place gets harder to hold onto as the numbers climb.
We’re local, we’re hometown, we’re fiber, we’re not the incumbent. As we have expanded, word was getting out about our fast, friendly, local service and signups came rapidly.
What worried Brad was never the growth itself. It was making sure customer number 8,000 still got treated like customer number one.
At a thousand subscribers, you can keep an ear on quality yourself. At 8,000, you cannot.
Like every growing operator, VNET did quality assurance the only way a small team can: by hand, a few calls at a time. A manager would check one here and there and coach from it. But a handful out of thousands is a thin sample. The interactions that needed a second look - the frustrated customer, the promise that slipped - mostly went unnoticed, and the team assumed things were fine because nothing told them otherwise.
That was never a VNET failing. It is simply what quality assurance looks like when a small team is growing fast and the phones will not stop ringing. You cannot spot-check your way to consistent service at 8,000 subscribers the way you could at a thousand.
When you have a small team and you’re growing, the hard part is staying on top of things.
Now every call is scored the moment it ends, and the ones that signal trouble get flagged.
Getting started was easy. VNET had run its business on Sonar OSS/BSS for years - billing, tickets, and the subscriber record all in one place. So when Sonar Retain - Sonar's native QueSee integration - launched, turning it on was a small step, not a migration: the same account, now extending Sonar's capabilities into Customer Experience and Retention, too. It came ready for how an ISP actually works, so the team was reading real call insights in days, not building scorecards from scratch.
What changed was the floor. Sonar Retain catches the little things that used to slip past - a mention of a competitor’s price, a customer who sounds quietly fed up, a call that ends without anything really being settled. The moment one surfaces, it reaches Julie. She hands it to a senior rep, who picks up the phone and calls the customer back. More often than not, the customer cannot believe anyone noticed.
QueSee forces us to go: hey, that caller, there may be a churn risk, you might want to follow up. We’ve had customers go, “Wait a sec, you’re calling me back?”
And all of these things - frustrated clients, promises, follow-ups - don't have to live in one person’s memory. Sonar Retain writes what it found straight into the Sonar customer record - the churn risk, the mood of the call, a short summary of what was said. So the next rep who picks up already knows this customer was frustrated yesterday, and treats the call with care. As Brad puts it, it is not a feeling anymore. It is written down, where the whole team can see it.
What is Sonar Retain - and will it work with your stack?
First, the two names. Sonar is the OSS/BSS platform VNET runs its business on - billing, provisioning, ticketing, the subscriber system of record. Sonar Retain is QueSee’s Customer Experience and Retention Intelligence platform, offered as an integration inside Sonar, so any Sonar operator can switch it on with their existing account. It reads what happens across customer interactions and turns it into something the team can act on: who is at risk, where the upsell openings are, and where a rep could use coaching.
Here is how it works:
It connects to your phone system
Every customer call comes in - 100% of them, no sampling, no picking which ones to review.
It scores each call against your standards
The moment a call ends, it is scored against your own SOPs. The QA you used to do on a handful, now on all of them.
It surfaces what matters, in real time
At-risk customers, upsell openings, competitor mentions, and coaching moments - flagged as they happen, not weeks later.
It writes it back into Sonar
The insight, the sentiment, and a short summary land in the subscriber's Sonar record, so the next rep sees the story before they say hello.
Not on Sonar? You can still get QueSee.
QueSee works with any phone system and other OSS/BSS platforms, so on another stack you run the same platform directly.
Try it yourself
Can you save the customers?
This is what Sonar Retain (powered by QueSee) does on every call VNET takes. Out of the thousands of conversations that come in each month, it flags the few that signal a customer slipping away - a competitor’s offer, a repeat problem, a call that ended wrong - and routes them to a rep before the customer decides to leave.
Drag the lens, find the ones who need a callback, and save them.
Catch churn before the cancel call.
VNET's churn is low. Keeping it there, against a cable incumbent with deeper pockets, is the daily job.
This is the reason VNET rolled out Sonar Retain. VNET’s customers are loyal: annual churn runs lower than industry average, and their NPS is over 85 - a score that is almost unheard of in broadband, an industry that usually lands near the bottom of every customer-satisfaction ranking. But the cable companies are getting sharper. They call VNET’s customers directly, with promotions built to win them back, and even a loyal base starts to slip as the offers pile up. Every competitor mention Sonar Retain catches is a warning the team would not have had before.
The cable companies are throwing really good promotions, trying to get our customers back. We can’t give them a reason to leave. QueSee helps us make sure we don’t.
Sonar, as VNET’s system of record, already held the subscriber account and - for about the same six months - a disconnect reason logged whenever someone leaves. That told them who left and the reason a rep wrote down. What it could never tell them was whether the team had truly done everything it could on the call that led there.
That is the gap Sonar Retain closes. Powered by QueSee, it analyzes customer experience across calls, service tickets, and the Sonar CRM in real time - reading the interaction behind every disconnect and every at-risk flag, and writing the verdict into the Sonar record.
So a “lost to competitor pricing” tag stops being the end of the story. Sonar Retain shows whether a retention offer was actually made, whether the rep caught the warning signs, and what might have kept the customer. Brad gets a straight answer instead of a hunch - and the next at-risk account gets handled before it ever becomes a disconnect.
We mark that disconnect as competitor pricing. But then QueSee analyzes the call to make sure we did everything in our power to save that subscriber.
Sonar Retain, powered by QueSee
How VNET closes the loop on every save.
Sonar keeps the record - accounts, tickets, and why someone cancelled. Sonar Retain analyzes every interaction behind the Customer Experience - call recordings, tickets, CRM and network data - and writes what it finds back into Sonar, where the next rep will see it.
- 01
Sonar (OSS/BSS)
The system of record
Every subscriber, ticket, and bill lives here - plus the disconnect reason a rep logs when someone cancels.
- 02
Sonar Retain
Reads the interactions
Powered by QueSee. In real time analyzes interactions - call recordings, tickets, CRM and network data - and surfaces at-risk customers, upsell openings, and coaching moments.
- 03
Sonar record
Sees the insight
The analysis writes back into the customer's Sonar record, so the next rep sees the story before they say hello, and knows exactly who's at-risk to leave, and what to do about it.
The loop closes. A “lost to competitor pricing” tag is no longer the end of the story - QueSee checks the real call behind it, so every disconnect becomes something the team can learn from.
The team's first reaction was worrying about getting called to the principal's office. It turned out to be the opposite.
Julie and Brad realized their team's potential reaction to a new AI tool, and rolled it out with care. Managers got Sonar Retain first, and tuned the scoring until it was fair to how VNET actually works. Only then did they open the dashboards to the reps. QueSee was a tool to help their team, not a verdict.
It rewards the good calls as much as it flags ones that need a follow-up. A great call becomes a “way to go” in the next team meeting, with the transcript to back it up. Reps started checking their own scores between calls, and when one came back low, they went to Julie and asked how to do better.
It’s really the only way employees can get better at their jobs - to see, hey, this is where I can grow.
The time it hands back is hard to overstate. The old way meant hours of listening just to get a sense of how someone was doing. Now it is a single question.
I can type in one query and know exactly what I need to talk to my team about - instead of pouring through data for hours and hours.
What started as an experiment is now just how VNET runs support.
Six months on, it is a habit, not a project. The team works the data every day, and each person pulls what they need from the same set of calls. Managers get coaching cues. Marketing and leadership see what competitors are dangling. The business finally sees why customers leave, and what might have kept them. And the customer on the other end of the line gets a call back before they have made up their mind to go.
The team is the same size it was. The network has not changed. What is different is how much of the business they can see now, and how fast they can act on it.
We’re being more proactive than reactive on our subscriber interactions. Our customers love the service and support that we provide, but you can’t take that for granted. Having the data at our fingertips to reach out has been the missing piece these past couple of years as we’ve grown.
Julie Wagner has run VNET’s customer-experience team since subscriber number one. Here is what six months with QueSee has meant for her team:
QueSee has been a valuable coaching and training tool for our CER team.
By reviewing customer interactions, we’re able to provide more targeted feedback, improve consistency, and support employee development.
The result is a stronger customer experience and a more confident, well-trained team.
What the first 6 months delivered
Six months in, VNET Fiber checks the quality of every customer call, not just the handful a manager could get to by hand - and acts on the ones that matter, while there is still time to.
The customer who was halfway out the door gets a call back before they decide to leave. Every competitor offer surfaces. The read on the team that used to take hours of listening now takes a single question.
The team is the same size. The network is the same. What changed is how much of the business VNET Fiber can see, and how fast they can act on it - because for a hometown company holding its ground against the cable giants, it still comes down to one thing: don’t give them a reason to leave.
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your team right now?
See QueSee on your own call data, on a quick call with our team.
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About VNET Fiber
VNET Fiber is the hometown fiber provider for Erie County and northwest Pennsylvania, built and run by Velocity Network. From its first subscriber to nearly 8,000, VNET Fiber has competed on local, personal service - the person who answers the phone lives in the same community as the customer calling.
About Sonar Retain (Powered by QueSee)
Sonar Retain is QueSee's Customer Experience and Retention Intelligence platform, offered as an integration inside Sonar - the OSS/BSS platform (billing, provisioning, ticketing) that ISPs run their business on. It analyzes customer interactions and surfaces at-risk customers, upsell opportunities, and proactive coaching moments, then writes them back into the Sonar subscriber record. Sonar customers switch it on with their existing account.