Carousel Digital Signage Engages Customers at Tennessee Telco

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. – Carousel Digital Signage is changing the way that Highland Telephone Cooperative (HTC) communicates with customers visiting its four rural Tennessee facilities. The member-owned telecommunications company, which offers phone, high-speed internet and cable TV service, recently deployed a Carousel Cloud digital signage network to provide information on its product and service offerings. Customers can monitor the screens as they pay bills and consult with company representatives.

Headquartered in Sunbright, Tennessee, HTC employees have spent the last 14 months working from home. The company wanted to create an inviting atmosphere upon reopening that would entice customers to resume transactions and consultations in their local offices.

HTC Network Engineer Daniel Williams turned to digital signage as an efficient and engaging way to welcome returning customers with an energized lobby aesthetic. Each lobby includes a large-screen TV mounted to face the front entrance, and Williams configured Apple TVs as media players with help from Jamf, a Carousel Digital Signage partner that specializes in helping businesses optimize the Apple experience.

Williams is using Carousel Cloud’s user-friendly CMS to create and manage content for three channels. Content includes animated videos of HTC and subsidiary logos, dynamic product and service pricing, customer payment options, and third-party feeds including local up-to-date weather reports.

Williams says he was surprised at how easy the Carousel Cloud system was to set up and configure, noting that its secure and reliable software is an important benefit for any IT manager or technician concerned with adding digital signage to a company network.

“I had the entire system securely installed on the network and ready to go within hours, and the user interface was so intuitive that no training was required,” he said. “The software is flexible to the point that we can customize the appearance of screens and are not restricted to standard templates. Anyone who has used a web-based UI builder will have no problem whatsoever creating and managing content in Carousel Cloud.”

Carousel Digital Signage’s partnership with Jamf was a competitive differentiator for Williams, who had long been leveraging the company’s services to manage the HTC’s Apple devices. “We work with both Macs and PCs in our offices, and Jamf has made it easy to manage our entire Apple ecosystem in a mixed environment. Their ability to convert Apple TVs into media players reduces our equipment costs, and the Apple TV is a perfect complement for Carousel Cloud networks since they are essentially IT devices.”

HTC’s digital signage network remains in its early stages, but Williams hopes to expand into providing corporate communications content for company employees.

“We use static bulletin boards in the majority of our locations to disseminate information to employees,” he said. “We plan to use Carousel Cloud to distribute this information in a more streamlined manner in the near future. With such a user-friendly interface and IT-centric infrastructure, Carousel Cloud will make it very easy to scale the network and add new channels.”