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Adan Pope, Chief Strategy Officer, Telcordia You can invest in an advanced network (see Plan-to-Provision) and you can acquire customers (see Order-to-Cash), but if you fail to delight those customers, you will lose them. Excellence in managing the Trouble-to-Resolution process is a requirement to thrive in today’s marketplace. As we examined in the related business processes, success can be measured by key metrics, such as mean-time-to-repair (MTTR), which tells us how much time and cost can be driven out of the process. But while the goal of those other processes is to successfully increase volumes (e.g. more capacity, more customers, more orders, etc), the overarching goal of trouble-to-resolution is to reduce the volume of troubles by systemically preventing them based on past experiences. This approach yields not only happier customers, but unblocks revenue and reduces resolution costs. The Pressure to Perform Now more than ever, customers demand an outstanding experience. With true competitive alternatives for every service from mobile data to voice to video, no service provider can afford to disappoint customers. At the same time, providing excellent service has become more complex. Any given service is provided on multiple networks and diverse technologies. Furthermore, a typical customer judges the service provider based on each element of their service bundle, and failure to please with one component can mean the loss of the entire package. The very definition of trouble has evolved with services and technology. Service providers have decades of experience solving network outages. They are the most obvious troubles and generally the easiest to pinpoint and repair. However, as technologies became more complex and varied, performance issues (lag, jitter, etc.) became more prevalent. In today’s world, application failures (e.g., the inability to use advanced services, such as mobile data apps) are added to the list. These sorts of troubles however, often have subtle causes, and are thus more difficult to detect and correct. For instance, a protocol mismatch between a device and a network element or application server could cause a service to fail, but each component might show no faults according to traditional standards. Of course, the customer still experiences the failure. And many customers will give up trying to use a (revenue-producing) service or feature after just two failed attempts. Meanwhile, the time and cost to resolve troubles only tends to increase. Service providers retain large workforces of customer service reps and field technicians, with large associated costs. Any efforts to take reduce the number of troubles, or to hasten their diagnosis and repair, can be leveraged across this large expense, producing significant savings. At one time trouble-to-resolution was treated as a “break/fix” process, where troubles were expected to inevitably occur and service providers strove to resolve them ever more efficiently, through means such as call screening and routing, employee training, customer self-help, and so on. Worse, if diagnostic tools and training were not up to par, the default answer was to dispatch a truck to determine the cause, often leading to double dispatches and wasted effort when the root cause could not be located or was incorrectly determined. The Path to (More Nearly) Perfect A more proactive approach is needed for handling troubles. Rather than wait for troubles to happen, service providers can take steps to predict and prevent troubles. For instance, rather than rely on equipment-focused fault and performance systems alone, service providers would be wise to adopt a more service-oriented approach to finding and resolving troubles. This approach calls for a holistic, end-to-end view of each service. By examining the service as a whole, hard-to-detect troubles can be identified. The benefits of trouble prevention are great, but when troubles do occur, the next most powerful tool is rapid and accurate diagnosis of the root cause of the trouble. Expert testing tools that work across network elements and which codify proven testing protocols can provide significant benefits in finding the problem quickly and selecting the appropriate remedy the first time. Even better, intelligent systems that monitor the health of the network can sometimes resolve a trouble before the customer is even aware of it. This is especially impactful at the edge of the network (handsets, wireless routers, PC’s) where complexity has grown immensely. Experience suggests that improvements such as automated root-cause analysis, flow-through testing, and improved trouble ticket management can lead to savings in the range of 20 to 50%. Of course, no approach will prevent all troubles. When the trucks must roll, it is vital to use those costly resources as efficiently as possible. Best practices in the resolution end of the process dictate automated and dynamic scheduling of technicians, based on job priority, technician skills, available materials and so on. The ability to adjust schedules intra-day in response to new troubles, absent customers, and the like greatly enhances efficiency, as does optimized street level routing which drives savings in both time and fuel. These improved dispatch techniques have been seen to yield cost improvements of 10 to 35%. Likewise, in the call center, tools such as self-service portals, expanded use of IVR, and remote home network management can, in our experience, lead to savings of 20-30% for a typical service provider. Throughout the resolution process, it is crucial to understand the impact on customers, in order to prioritize resolution activities. By analyzing usage records, in addition to service-level monitoring, service providers can identify not only how many customers are affected by a trouble, but also when high-value customers are experiencing an issue. Service providers can even use this information proactively to communicate with customers, letting them know that the trouble is being resolved and when to expect restoration. The Last Word The good news is that with the right discipline and tools, service providers can solve many troubles, even subtle ones, systemically. The trick is often not in the solution, which could be a relatively simple fix, but in detecting and determining the root cause of the troubles. Once systemically solved, the fix provides an ongoing annuity of avoided resolution costs and loyal customers. |
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