Solucionando Problemas En Telecomunicaciones

The Trouble With Troubleshooting

The five common breakdowns in customer service and repair and the five consequences that result

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The trouble with troubleshooting is, one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing. It is ironic that in the telecommunications industry, communications service providers (CSPs) often suffer from a failure to communicate within their ownorganizations. As a result, detecting, validating, escalating, testing, repairing, resolving and reporting on customer problems are all usually disconnected processes. Often manual. Routinely repetitive. And regularly reactive. This paper explores the common troubles with troubleshooting processes, the impact of those troubles, the typical best practices that CSPs aspire to reach, and an overviewof ReachView AIR,™ ReachView Technologies’ end-to-end solution for automating, integrating and resolving customer support and service repair processes in the telecommunications industry.

Five Breakdowns: Why is troubleshooting so much trouble?
A failure to communicate
Help Desks and Customer Service organizations within CSPs rely on countless disconnected systems and business processes thatcross telephony, IT, network and human resources. What’s more, many organizations have multiple business units or geographic locations operating redundant equipment. Meanwhile, technology continually evolves—introducing new tools, new connections and new services to support and repair. Telephony and computing technology evolved on different paths, making integration difficult, time-consuming andexpensive. Protocols, tools and software have traditionally emphasized one over the other, forcing organizations to choose strong telephony support systems with limited IT integration, or vice versa. Similarly, technical expertise in both is rare, with support staff and engineering often falling into one or the other area of competence. Separate paths also emerged for operational, business andservice disciplines within an organization. In telecommunications in particular, support technicians rarely know what the network operations center (NOC) is working on, and the operations staff is not notified of patterns emerging in trouble tickets until after three levels of support have been engaged. Business issues that may trigger service calls usually fall through the cracks, with servicedisconnections that result from delinquent payment not immediately evident to the representatives in the service center. So, why is the trouble ticketing process so much trouble? It comes down to, literally and figuratively, a failure to communicate.

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Technology by hand
Because telephony and IT technology communicate and integrate poorly, manual business processes were built around them tocomplete the connections in order to validate, test, escalate, resolve and report on customer service and repair issues. Usually, Level Two and sometimes Level Three technicians repeat the manual operating procedures initiated by the Level One technician. This repetitive, hand-to-hand troubleshooting results in frustrated customers, longer mean-time-to-repair and higher operating costs.

Equipmentfailures overwhelm call centers
Equipment failures can flood the support center with a wave of trouble tickets that overwhelm manual testing procedures. Dozens of incidents may be logged and worked before Level One technicians are notified of a network outage. For example, one down T3 line can result in 50 calls for help. The obvious cost of working repetitive tickets is compounded by two criticalcustomer service errors. First, technicians will tend to make inappropriate decisions on which tickets to work, resulting in unacceptable customer waits and premature ticket closings. And secondly, other customers will experience further delays in addressing their issues. Updating IVR systems to notify callers of equipment failures is delayed and often so general that customers feel compelled...