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Another impediment worth mentioning – particularly relevant when discussing remote monitoring – is the trust barrier between the support provider and their customer, the service provider. Support automation addresses the sometimes “sticky situation” of when customers demand full visibility and control. True support automation solutions enable vendors to deliver transparency and ensures that service providers are in control – practices that are unmatched by reactive support methods.
Lastly, automating preventive maintenance is not a high enough priority for several IT vendors. In addition to the obvious benefits, automating preventive maintenance ensures higher systems performance, less issues to deal with over time, and lower TCO, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and by extension, customer retention, in addition to protecting service maintenance revenue and increasing profit margins.
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"In essence, subscriber-centric fulfillment extends this enhanced awareness to the operations and engineering side of the house... " |
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Comverse, a unit of Comverse Technology, Inc., developed a proactive support solution to provide its customers with maximum system availability and service. This proactive approach to monitoring, maintenance and self-healing has allowed Comverse to better address the complex needs of its telecom operator clients, increasing customer satisfaction and efficiency while reducing service and support costs. For the certain systems in which Comverse leverages remote monitoring and proactive support, they have improved their service and support by 25%, quarter over quarter, as well as substantially increased uptime.
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Q: Is there ever a situation where investment in proactive support distracts from other areas of service?
A: I don't think that ‘distracts’ is the right word, as it implies a slightly negative connotation. With Support Automation, there is a noticeable shift in where an organization spends its capital. While implementing a new support infrastructure will occupy funds previously spent elsewhere, the resulting increased customer experience and optimization of manpower more than makes up for the required investment.
Q: Can you point to any successful, current implementations, and highlight any resulting ROI?
A: There are several forward-thinking organizations that are using remote monitoring and proactive support today. From healthcare to finance, telecom, executives agree that the customer is king (that sentiment was a very large theme at this year’s TelecomNEXT). In fact, recent research suggests that a 1% increase in customer satisfaction results in a 2.75% increase in shareholder value. As such, network uptime, reliable, prompt and effective technical support have never mattered more.
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Another example of an organization implementing successful support automation is airwide solutions. To further differentiate itself in this competitive market, airwide concluded it must provide its customers with an end-to-end managed service support solution that featured 24x7 monitoring, configuration management and maintenance. By providing such a service, airwide realized it could relieve customers' management burden as well as offer higher increased system availability.
The solution that airwide implemented proactively and continuously monitors all its application units and performs scheduled preventive maintenance to avert downtime. If service levels were to fall below preset parameters, advanced alerts and self-healing allow it to prevent problems from impacting service – even before customers identify initial symptoms. In addition, the solution’s proactive approach ensures that problem resolution is initiated at a much earlier stage in the problem cycle, resulting in dramatically lower mean time to repair (MTTR) and maximum system availability.
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