Joseph Natale
Analyst · Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Thanks, Paul, and good morning, everyone. I'd like to cover 3 topics in my remarks. One, I'll start by talking briefly about our second quarter results, which Tony will expand upon and provide additional detail; two, I will also make a few remarks on our priorities during the quarter as we adjusted our business operations during this anomalous period; and three, finally, I'll share how we're thinking about the business as the economy starts to open up and the critical role our industry and our world-class networks play in Canada's recovery.
Firstly, as we fully expected, our second quarter results reflected 3 full months of the COVID-19 economy. We saw notable impacts across all of our businesses as sales and new business activity essentially ground to a halt.
But as we said last quarter, these metrics are COVID-19 specific and do not reflect our underlying fundamentals nor do they diminish our long-term growth prospects. Importantly, as you would expect, we took full advantage of the short-term extreme environment to reexamine each key aspect of how we run our business. We wanted to make sure the decisions we're making would set us up to power out of this difficult period. COVID-19 did not change our plans nor the course we were on. Instead, it greatly accelerated the pace of change. We are doing things today that we thought would take many months or quarters to accomplish, and the business will be stronger as these changes become permanent modes of operating.
All business units were impacted in Q2. In Wireless, all metrics reflect the impacts of the economic shutdown as customers isolated and stores remain closed. We estimate that industry sales volumes were down by 80% to 90% in the quarter. Customers shifted from Wireless usage to home Internet usage. While metrics like churn were down to a record 0.77% and Phone subsidies were down about 45% on a year-over-year basis, most other impacts put short-term pressure on our results.
With roaming, for example, travel simply stopped and roaming revenues were down approximately 95% from a year ago. As we have discussed during the past year, we knew overage fees were coming down as we proactively transitioned to unlimited plans. We saw additional overage declines during this lower usage period. The lock of new activations, as many of our stores remain closed, further impacted service revenue.
With roaming, for example, travel simply stopped and roaming revenues were down approximately 95% from a year ago. As we have discussed during the past year, we knew overage fees were coming down as we proactively transitioned to unlimited plans. We saw additional overage declines during this lower usage period. The lock of new activations as many of our stores remain closed, further impacted service revenue.
While we anticipate most of the COVID-19-related impacts will recover as the economy opens up, there were several positives in the quarter that point to the underlying strength of our business. First, subscription revenue is holding up very well and is flat year-over-year. While there were some customers affected by the economic impact of COVID-19, the number of customers moving to smaller plans has been in line with our expectations. Secondly, and supporting this view, the shift to our unlimited plans continues to be strong. We are now at over 1.9 million unlimited subscribers and have the most customers who are not paying overage fees of any carrier in Canada. This is an important accomplishment as Canadians look for value in the current environment as we head into a 5G world.
Finally, we started to see some volumes slowly come back as storage began to open up. At the beginning of the quarter, 90% of our stores were closed. Today, nearly 90% of our stores have reopened with modifications to protect the health of our employees and customers. In fact, there were a couple of days in June and late June, reminiscent of some of the stronger promotional periods we typically see in the back half of the year.
It is still early days, and we'll see how customer confidence responds to the economy opening up, but these are encouraging early signs.
In Cable, our business was stable but felt some impact as we continued to provide free content and additional support to help our customers through the period. Additionally, our strong presence in the new condo, new home and Airbnb markets, which slowed during the second quarter, impacted our business.
On the positive side, our Cable subscription business remains healthy. We're also seeing reduced promotions and discounting in our Connected Home business. Overall, we expect gradual improvements in these markets in the second half of the year.
While representing less than 15% of our revenue and less than 3% of our total adjusted EBITDA, our Sports and Media business saw the most pressure in Q2. The material loss of advertising revenue, with the suspension of live sports affected the entire industry, including Sportsnet, the lock of game-day revenue and in-stadium promotions from delayed Blue Jays Baseball also contributed to a tough quarter.
Similar to Wireless and Cable, we're seeing some positive signs, with live sports scheduled to come back, advertisers are calling eager to participate in the return of live sports. Our sports and broadcasting resources are an incredibly valuable set of assets, and their contributions to our business will recover gradually with this pent-up demand for sports entertainment. Live sports, above all other types of content, drives a loyal and permanent appetite by fans and audiences.
This quarter, in particular, during the global pandemic, our focus was on 3 things: one, keeping our employees safe; two, keeping our customers connected; and three, driving the right priorities and investments for the recovery and the future. To say that COVID-19 has permanently changed how we operate is an understatement. We pivoted in the moment to ensure Canadians can continue to rely on our services, fast-tracking service offerings that we planned and launched in record time. We did this while most of our workforce worked from home. 22,000 of our 25,000 people successfully shifted to a work-from-home model in the second quarter, including all of our Customer Care agents. It was an important quarter for our Customer Care agents. We move to a permanent work-from-home model for our agents in Ottawa after seeing positive customer and employee feedback. We'll be applying these lessons learned to other Customer Care sites. We also crossed a very proud moment this quarter with the transition of the remaining Customer Service positions to Canada. Today, all of our customer service teams across our brands are based in Canada. Our Canadian-based team members are experts in our products and services. And as members of their communities, they can relate to the needs of our customers, do a great job of serving them and better support our lifetime value metrics.
Just as our team stretches across Canada, so too does our extensive physical distribution advantage. And while more of our over 2,500 store locations in Canada are now open, we are advancing our digital first strategy, an important factor in our long-term growth. Digital sales adoption is up over 15% year-over-year. Over 90% of our 5 most common service transactions at Rogers are now conducted by customers online. Virtual assistants are helping more customers with routine requests. These conversations have grown by 130% year-over-year to over 1 million as AI technology continues to get smarter and better understand the customer intent. This digital enablement and our continued customer improvements are why we continue to see fewer calls into customer care, down 20% year-over-year.
We've also adapted and expanded a contactless Pro On-the-Go service, a key market differentiator for us. This service is now available to over 10 million Canadians in the Greater Toronto, Greater Vancouver, parts of Southwestern Ontario, Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton areas. We will expand to more markets this year. This personalized phone delivery and set up support service brings the store to a customer's front door at no extra cost.
In the early days of the pandemic, we also enhanced our TV and Internet self-installation service. This change represents a clear competitive advantage in our market. We already provide a 1 gig capability across our entire cable footprint to drive greater penetration, and this has significantly removed customer friction, including eliminating the need to schedule an installation appointment. Now we can drive greater efficiency through our enhanced self-install capabilities.
This quarter, we also introduced a new virtual assistance tool for our tech support teams. With that app, they can now solve many issues right away without needing to schedule a service appointment. We're on track to save our customers an estimated 400,000 hours of their time and save us approximately 100,000 service truck rolls this year.
These changes have been helpful to serve our customers during the pandemic, but they will continue as we move through and eventually out of it. They offer new service advantage to our customers and offer significant cost efficiencies across our businesses. We're proud of these advancements, and our team members are feeling it too. Our recent employee pulse survey shows employee pride is at 93%, an all-time high, an important marker for the strength and resilience of our 25,000 team members across the country.
Even during the most disruptive business environment we have seen in our lifetimes, I want to highlight how proud I am of our company and our team members and how they've responded to supporting the needs of our communities. During something as life-altering as COVID-19, our teams felt it was our responsibility to help the most vulnerable in society. We launched step up to the plate with the Jays Care Foundation to help fill 390,000 hampers of food at the Rogers Center to get as many as 8 million meals in the homes of Canadian families in support of Food Banks Canada. We raised over $1 million through the Hearts and Smiles campaign selling t-shirts and masks with all proceeds going in support of the frontline fund to help Canadian frontline health care workers. We connected vulnerable Canadians, including providing devices and free wireless plans in partnership with Women's Shelters of Canada, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada and Pflag to maintain vital social connections when people needed the most. We also recently launched The 60 Project. It's been 60 years since Ted bought his first radio station, CHFI, with an $85,000 loan. To mark this milestone, we evolved our 60th anniversary to focus on ways we are giving back to Canada and investing in others. Volunteerism is more important than ever, and a key pillar of The 60 Project is the 60,000 hours volunteer challenge. Rogers' employees and their families will donate 60,000 volunteer hours across Canada to have a meaningful impact in our local communities.
Looking ahead, we're optimistic about the future and the underlying strength of our business and asset mix. If I can recap, we are the largest wireless franchise in Canada, the biggest cable operator in the country. We own and operate our own national wireless network. We were the first to launch 5G in Canada and have the largest spectrum portfolio amongst our peers. We deliver the best network experience in Canada. Just last week, Umlaut, a global leader in mobile network testing and benchmarking, awarded Rogers the best wireless network in Canada. This follows J.D. Power, in April, ranking Rogers #1 in the West and Ontario in its Canada Wireless Network Quality Study. Our Media assets are focused on sports, and demand for the return of live sports is high. Pride is at an all-time high with our team members. And we have $5.4 billion in available liquidity and a strong balance sheet.
Overall, we have a formidable set of assets and incredible team activating them. We are very confident in the long-term prospects of our company and for Canada, as we work to power out of the COVID-19 period.
Just as our resilient networks provide the digital scaffolding during this health crisis, our country's technology infrastructure will underpin Canada's recovery. If connectivity was the lifeline during COVID-19, it will be the bottom line to Canada's recovery. Today, the digital economy is the economy, and our country's tech-driven recovery will require the right investment oriented regulatory environment. This is one of the most important lessons we can take from this moment.
We're part of an industry that has never been more critical to society and to our economy, from powering new stages of innovation on Canadian soil to ensuring more small and medium-sized businesses have a fighting chance with an online presence to receive and fulfill orders, strong networks are essential to Canada's economic recovery.
Thank you. And let me now turn the call to Tony, who will provide more detail on the quarter. Over to you.